Episode 4 – Brent Stratton and Marcus Sprague: The California Association of Tactical Officers and The Doctrine of Tactical Science

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.

Walk up to The Debrief!

My guests today are the hosts of the very successful California Association of Tactical Officers podcasts, Brent Stratton and Marcus Sprague. Brent is the assistant chief at a Southern California agency and the president of CATO. Marcus is the vice president of CATO and a lieutenant at a northern California agency.

Guys, thank you for joining me today!

Marcus Sprague: Thanks for having us, Jon!

Brent Stratton: Thanks for allowing us to be here, Jon!

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with just kind of your personal stories? Marcus, why don't you lead us off with your personal story, how you became involved in CATO and your background?

Marcus Sprague: So I worked at one agency my whole career in northern California, but under 200 officers and found myself about mid pack on our SWAT team and was promoted to sergeant. And due to some other issues in the agency, I found myself in charge of SWAT and didn't really understand why we did a lot of the things we do, did, and felt the burden of leadership, knowing that if I didn't understand some of these tactical problems, I could make a bad decision and someone can get hurt.

So someone mentioned to me I should reach out and learn about tactical science. So I jumped on the field command website, left my email account. A couple months later, received a phone call on my personal phone from Tim Anderson inviting me to attend the course I attended the course. Had to take my own time. Sid and Tim and Odie were, for whatever reason, liked me, kept giving me opportunities. So I read every book they suggested, every chance they said, do you want to come see this or do this be a part of CATO? I did.

And quite honestly, I was embarrassed at some of the principles that I didn't understand until that late in my career. So that's kind of how I found myself here today to continue that, because I think there's a lot of people like me trying to find those answers, and our agencies and the state don't have the time or resources to teach all of that. And so I just kept saying, yes, those guys really changed my life and taught me a lot of stuff. And my goal is to just kind of continue their work with CATO.

Jon Becker: I love that. Brent, what about you?

Brent Stratton: A real similar story. Actually working at the department I've worked in early on in my career, I was fortunate enough to get picked up on our SWAT team, but it's a collateral assignment team. And I spent time working in our gang unit and in patrol and promoted to detective and was on the team. I enjoyed the work, but mediocre at best as a SWAT operator.

But as my career progressed, kind of real similar to what Marcus is describing, just the way the stars aligned within our organization. I became the only sergeant on the team and felt similarly a tremendous burden for the team and the decision making that needed to occur. And I felt ill equipped and ill prepared.

Our agency had not really done much of sending people outside of our walls for training, and so I began really doing a lot of research into what was out there and found there was so much that I really did not know. And CATO was the answer for me.

Similar to Marcus had to put myself through trainings and reading magazines and conferences to see and hear people speak, you know, Sid Heal, and to hear RK Miller and Ken Hubbs speak and Gene Ramirez. And then I would put myself through their classes and stay afterwards and ask them questions and bother them with emails and phone calls. And they were all kind enough and gracious enough to give me information to help really develop my thought process.

And the more I got into it, the more I really started to love and really appreciate the organization and the mission regarding the organization, what it can do for our officers throughout the state of California. When the strategic leadership program was announced, I applied and was accepted, and that really started to help develop additional areas for me. Kind of a critical thinking and from a leadership perspective.

And I got to be introduced to a variety of other instructors, including people like Mike Hillman and Tim Anderson and Odie Odenthal. And I got to be classmates with people like Marcus Fregg and Travis Norton and Toby Darby, Kenny Brayton, John Cabrera, people from all throughout the state, Mitch Brulette. Just to be able to start to learn and understand from each other. And it really changed the path of my career.

And then hearing Sid talk, his principles of leadership and tactical science principles, he helped me realize that these aren't just principles in a tactical environment. These are principles that translate into life, and it's something that helped make me a better husband and a better father and a better person, because the principles are the same whether you're in a tactical situation or just trying to be a better human. So I'm forever indebted to CATO.

So as the transition started to occur, and I, some of our heroes were stepping out of the organization, really took the opportunity, even though I didn't feel like I was the best person to be able to do it, I think I was one of the only people willing to do it, along with Marcus, was to kind of help move the organization forward and to volunteer to help lead CATO.

And we feel a tremendous burden that we volunteer a lot of our time. Kind of a labor of love to help keep the organization alive and running and moving forward. That way, we can serve officers who can go back and serve their departments better, who can then serve their communities and make their communities safer. That's the entire mission of what we do.

So it's been a great road, and I'm thankful for the opportunity. And I gotta mention throughout that way, I got to meet you and learn from you and speak with you along the way, and get to develop a friendship with you. And I've learned a lot from you as well. So there's been just led to me getting to meet a lot of really, really great people. One of the absolute pleasures and highlights of my career so far.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I think one of the things that's really interesting is CATO has gone through basically three generations. The first generation was Ken. Hubbs kind of is a one man show who all credit to Ken created CATO, ran it by himself for an extremely long time and built it into a pretty robust organization.

And then when Ken was ready to transition out, Sid and I, Archeage and Ramirez, all kind of took over and ran it until this third generation. And I think that the discussion from the beginning about SLP was to find the next generation of leadership. And if you look at the SLP one class, which you named everybody in, I think it's created this third generation. And I think that the guys that were in SLP1 are the guys that are now leading the organization, yourselves included.

Brent Stratton: Yeah. And it's interesting because it's a different dynamic. Right? None of us are coming from a full time team like Ken or Sid or Tim or these guys that have literally written the book about tactics and have done these type of things.

We're not the tacticians in that way that those men are. They're our heroes. They've written the books, and they've done those type of things. Where I really see us focusing is being able to keep the organization alive, to grow the organization, to build the infrastructure of it, to be able to help integrate with police departments, to be able to take the broad spectrum of things that are out there, to identify best practices, to be able to collect data, to take it to where it's a little bit more articulable, to a little bit more synergistic, and be able to take it and launch it and move the organization forward to serve officers based on the challenges and the unique challenges that our cops out there are facing today, and to truly make it a profession and take the things that we're learning. And that comes from a variety of different mediums.

And Marcus has really helped us in that regard with, you know, the podcast and the website and moving things along. And there's just a tremendous amount of people on, you know, the board of directors, people that volunteer their time and effort because they care about the profession, the work that's out there, and then just making cops better so they can serve, like I said, their departments and their communities better.

So there's a definite different style of leadership than we have from our predecessors, but it's our hope that they can look at the organization, be proud of where it is and be proud of where we're going and where we're trying to push it towards.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think, you know, if you look at the way that SWAT has evolved, it really started with the bigger teams, right? I mean, the expansion of SWAT in it was really the 84 Olympics what drove it on the west coast, and that was all the full time teams. And as SWAT has evolved, it's moved down to smaller and smaller agencies. And you've gone. I mean, in CATO’s jurisdiction, there are a handful of full time teams.

So SWAT now really is a 90% to 95% part time team scenario. So it seems logical that the organization would transition more into a mindset of part time. Marcus, what do you see the role of Cato being in the role of regional associations?

Marcus Sprague: Well, there's a lot of talk out there about national policing, especially recently due to George Floyd protests and stuff like that. But in America, you should have a standard, but you should police – Your policing should reflect the community and the values of the community you serve. So the things that police officers have to do in Los Angeles are going to be slightly different than, say, where I work in northern California.

So the role of our association is to bring up that standard, to maintain a professionalism, but have the flexibility to meet the needs of everyone's community. And those are different, and those go all the way back to Robert Peel. So our role is to give that information to raise the training across the state, but give the flexibility through our region rep program that we can meet the needs of your community and where your team is at, because each team's missions are different.

And if we look at historically law enforcement, there are no new problems, but there's a lot of new technology. If you look back when the plank holders of CATO started before Columbine, a lot of that was weight for SWAT to come with their equipment. But if you look now at the average equipment a police officer in California wears, it's tenfold. They carry a lot of the munitions that used to only be for SWAT.

So in some ways, the job is more complex or has more tools. And so we need to reach out and expand those tactical principles to everyone. They're not exclusive to SWAT. And so the mission of our organization is, let's make our SWAT teams better. Since the majority of teams are collateral, how can we help those teams make their departments better? Because then everyone's gonna make better decisions, and the community is gonna be safer, and the officers and deputies are gonna be safer.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's a good point. I think the National Tactical Officers association synthesizes the viewpoints of kind of the whole country. But if you look at regulation and you look at litigation, it tends to happen in state court and be state driven. So it makes sense that the interests of California would vary from the interests of Arizona.

Apart from the cultural differences between California and Texas, there are legal differences between the two states. And I know later we'll talk a little bit about where the state has gone with legislation, but why don't we start with kind of talking about what you see as the hot topics in California? I know from previous conversations, we've talked about the lack of a defined standard for tactical teams. Brent, you want to riff on that a little bit?

Brent Stratton: Yeah. I was fortunate to get to be a part of the second iteration of the California post swot standards and regulations and recommendations on there. So helping be able to kind of shape definitions of SWAT teams and being able to make recommendations for agencies. And the hope then that each agency is able to take these recommendations and then figure out how to be able to apply them for their specific department and their specific community. Because you've talked about some of the differences that you see across the country.

Well, you see a tremendous amount of those differences even throughout the state of California. And that's where I think that there's tremendous amount of value in Cato. And one of the things we've really tried to do is make sure that our board, that our instructors are reflective of really going across the expanse of the state of California.

We have from the top of the state all the way down to the bottom, we have small agencies represented, mid sized agencies, large agencies, collateral assignment teams, full time teams, regional teams that are there because everybody is facing kind of a unique situation, kind of wherever they are being able to take that information and be able to push it out. So it's very difficult to have kind of a one size fits all role and regulation.

So what we do have are some of those standards and are breaking the standards down to a variety of different areas. And it's our hope that teams are able to take those standards and be able to see and identify what the baseline recommendations are and then be able to apply them.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's an interesting problem, because, you know, if you look at the LAPD, La sheriffs, you're talking about 10,000 man agencies that have 60 man full time SWAT teams. That's a very different thing than a 30 or 40 man agency in the middle of nowhere in California. But they still are faced with the same problems. The frequency varies based on agency size. Obviously, there are more problems in the city of Los Angeles than there are in small northern California agencies, but the problems that present themselves the same.

So, Marcus, what are your thoughts on how we are, how CATO can play a role in defining those standards and helping teams to understand what constitutes mission readiness?

Marcus Sprague: So you bring up a great point. The community I serve doesn't really, I wouldn't use the word care, but doesn't recognize that I don't have 270 emissions a year, like, say, LAPD or LASD. When that tactical problem comes to our community, I'm the one that signed up to solve it. So we have to train to that level that we can meet that.

And so part of what CATO brings to the table is we're gonna learn from the experiences of everyone across the state and bring that to you. And one of the biggest values I thought, for me, in my career, Washington, I had an opportunity to meet the plank holders of SWAT for our country. And they're older, and our generation will probably be the last people to get to sit down and learn. But I could call, and through CATO, I can call someone at LAPD or LASD or San Diego or Sacramento and go, when you had this problem, what did you do, and how did that work?

And so that's kind of how Ken started. How do we share information? How do we share these lessons learned? And it's something our profession struggles with. And a lot of times we kind of hide under the blanket of liability. Well, you know, this is a litigation really can't tell. And there's some legal arguments for that, but there's also some organizational ego to that.

And so we're really working on how can we appropriately share information right now so that you can learn from this problem in case it comes to your house? And a great example is our after action report program. We send CATO representatives around the country or the world to be on the ground and go, how did you solve this problem? So we can come back and go, hey, here's a very unique, low frequency, high risk event, and here's the lessons you need to learn.

Brent Stratton: Yeah, I think we do a really good job throughout our profession, oftentimes of being able to explain what happened, especially in critical incidents. And oftentimes you'll find this was legal, it was reasonable, it was necessary. But what we don't see a whole lot, you see it more in tactical teams than you do in other areas of the profession, is being able to critically look at something and identify, here's what we did, and what we did was within policy. It was within the confines of the law, but we could have done better if we'd have done this. And what you see is you see a lot of opposition from it in law enforcement all the time. I'm being second guest. I'm being Monday morning quarterback.

Yes, it's no different. We're trying to get better. It's no different than playing football growing up. You're gonna watch the game, film the next week to be able to identify where you had problems, and then you try to work on that and train to it, so that way you get better the next Friday night. It's no different playing baseball, growing up, filming your swing, your hands are too high, they're too low, they're inside, you're too far in your front foot, you're too far on your back foot.

And being able to work on and getting better with that, with some of the technologies and things that we have now with body worn camera, these are the type of things that we should be doing. It's still okay to be able to go in and defend ourselves criminally, legally, ethically, as to what we did, but also still being open to identifying areas where we can improve and then building in the ability to be able to go in and improve, and then the humility to share that information with others.

And that's difficult to do, to step in and go, hey, we could have done better here, or this is what we did here, people ask you a question, why didn't you do that? And when you sit here and say it like that, I really wish we would have done that. I didn't think of that at the time. I should have done that. Really getting to where we can learn from others.

And thankfully, some of the things that we see is some of the bigger, more experienced teams do share that with those of us who come to collateral assignments teams or smaller teams that don't have the amount of reps, that don't have the amount of operations to help be able to maintain that proficiency.

Cause like Marcus said, the people that we serve in our community, they don't care that we don't have the same level of tools, training, equipment, personnel that the bigger agencies have. We still have the same responsibility. To be able to solve these problems, and being able to help identify and develop critical and independent thinkers, to be able to do that is really the only way we're going to solve these things as a profession.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting. When we started our lecture series, somebody asked me, why do you do that? What's the point of doing this lecture series? So the first person to pick up a rattlesnake learned a really valuable lesson about rattlesnakes. They bite and it hurts really bad and it can kill you if he didn't tell anybody. The second person to pick up a rattlesnake learned the same lesson as did everybody after him.

However, if he went back and said, hey, that thing with a rattle on the tail, don't ever touch one, theoretically, nobody got bit by rattlesnake again. And you know, it's very easy when you have a bad operation, when you have something go sideways to want to not share that information. The problem is, that's where the value is. It went perfect, is not valuable. This is how it went sideways.

One of the first questions I ask people when we're thinking of using them to present our lecture series is, what went wrong in your operation? And if they say nothing, we're done talking. If they go, oh my God, how long do you have? I've got a list. That's our guy.

And I think that one of the services that CATO provides to the community that is easy to overlook is the aggregation of those lessons. And because CATO sits in a position where you have a variety of different regional reps reporting in, one guy finds a rattlesnake, one guy finds a kingsnake, one guy finds a gopher snake, and pretty soon CATO's in a position to say, hey, if it's got a rattle, don't touch it. If it's this color, it's safe. And I think that not everybody has to go out and get bit by rattlesnake.

So one of the things that strikes me is that modern law enforcement, there is no mechanism for capturing lessons learned. There's no mechanism for ensuring expertise. How do you see CATO affecting that?

Marcus Sprague: So I think part of it is the ruler. What's the ruler that we're using. So we all intellectually acknowledge that police officers and deputies can do the right thing and have a bad outcome, but we say that, but we don't mean it. And so often we measure success by the outcome. And so I think it starts with the principle based decisions.

So, recognizing that, I can demonstrate to you all the things I did as a leader, to move all my chess pieces around the board, to bring about the safest and most peaceful resolution possible. And so it starts with the right ruler for Cato. It's teaching those principles at every level and then bringing not just a debrief to you, because everyone likes stories. I love stories.

But if you're going to hear the debrief, you have to know what the Debrief's about. And we struggle this a lot in our profession right now. This happens every five to seven years. I got a lot of emails this week on my executive told me not to write an SOP manual or standard operating procedure manual, to not write after action reports, because those are the sticks that our adversaries used to beat us with.

So basically identifying our mistakes, and I think we're looking at it wrong. I think it's identifying those mistakes, documenting them, and then telling the public, here's what we're doing to fix them. And I think if we had done a better job as a profession of that, we wouldn't see some of the legislation we see today.

So going back to expertise, it's starting earlier in our careers, teaching these principle based decisions so that we don't jam the wrong solution into the wrong problem. And if you look across the country, when you see a, yeah, travesty, you can usually trace it back to some people not understanding the problem for what it really was. So they went back to their most comfortable procedure and tried it. And sometimes they understand that and make adjustments, but a lot of times they don't. And I was one of those people. I would follow the procedures and did them really well, but I didn't understand the principles at play. So if I was ever faced with something I had never seen before. I didn't know how to start kind of.

Brent Stratton: Steal from our friend and colleague Travis Norton. One of the things that he's pointed out and talks about in our profession, we've trained a lot about how to do something, but not a lot of why to do something.

So I would think when you talked a little bit about some of the trailblazers, they're trying to figure out there was no manual on how to do things and kind of move forward from there, then the next generation of law enforcement, I think we've actually done a pretty good job of taking a some of that information and being able to move it forward. That's the basis of what CATO is and other organizations, training organizations, and each department has a training department, and there's post regulations and things that we want to be able to train to.

But we're just starting to get back to the point of understanding why we are doing things instead of just how we do things. And so being able to test competency is your how to do something, but why and what are we trying to accomplish? And I think there's some leadership failures that have occurred as well.

And kind of getting back to a principle of end state, of being able to identify what is the end state? What are you wanting? What are we wanting to be? What does success look like? Are we defining these type of things on the front end? If we're clear about what the problem is and we're clear about what we want to see, then we can start to develop. That's kind of getting to your why. Then we can start to develop how we're going to get to that point and be able to do that.

One of the biggest areas, we've seen some significant issues in our profession, and I think that's true at a local state or a national level. And so really getting to that principle based decision making is really where we want to be in moving that forward. Throughout the entirety of tactics. And we touched on a little bit earlier, too.

We don't believe our organization, while it's generally the bread and butter, has been for tactical teams, we believe that tactics belong to everyone. And that it's not just for tactical teams, but it's for investigators, it's for traffic cops, for patrol officers, for K9 units, for EOD. It's for negotiators, it's for TAC dispatchers.

Being able to take and understand what tools that we need would take the set of circumstances that you have, what are your principles, what you wanted to get to and then be able to move forward from there. And that's really where we feel driven to be able to help provide that for officers.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's an interesting point because the. The how is extremely important for a technique. It becomes less important as you move to a tactic, to an operation, to a strategy. As you're moving up the spectrum, the why becomes more and more important. The problem is that the why is not testable and the how is.

So we can say, Marcus, go on the range, fire this many rounds, you have to hit this percentage, and we can inspect that and say, okay, Marcus has x shooting proficiency. What we can't measure is, does Marcus know when he should or should not?

Brent Stratton: Right. And you're not going to know those types of things until you're able to speak with people and be able to communicate oftentimes. Where do we find these types of things? We find failures in criminal interviews, we find failures in civil litigation, where we have people who are unable to articulate why we're doing these type of things. You're 100% right that these are very difficult sets and circumstances to be able to quantify, to put in some sort of a testing, scoring matrix or things like that.

So I would definitely encourage law enforcement leaders. You've really got to get out and be able to communicate yourself. Make sure that you yourself can communicate it. And if you can't, make sure you're going out and finding as much information that you can to where you're learning and you're constantly learning, you're constantly evolving to help, be able to make sure you have that articulation yourself, and then find ways that you're doing that within your organization and testing people and be able to have these type of conversations and have people articulate these type of things and ask why we're doing these things and ask them to justify it. To be able to do these things.

You don't want to find out that somebody doesn't know why they're doing something when they're being deposed civilly. You don't want to find out they don't know why they're doing something when they should be articulating themselves in a criminal interview. We need to find these type of things out in training and then build that kind of into our training component as well. So it is quite difficult to be able to quantify, you know, what. What some of these sets and circumstances are, but there.

Marcus Sprague: There are organizations that have done it. If you look to the military model, and that's not very popular in law enforcement to say, we take things from the military right now, but we're at a disadvantage.

So when you sign up for the military, they kind of own you, and they'll say, we're going to teach you this principle, read these six books before you show up, and we're going to have you for a month. We take those same principles in law enforcement, and we say, we're going to give you an eight hour class, and we can't make you read anything ahead of time because we'd have to pay you.

And then we measure that success by, we were here for 8 hours, you probably handle this, and then we're off. And we all have limited resources, and we all need to meet the demands of minimum training mandates, and those have almost doubled, if not tripled, in the last five years. So everyone's agency is struggling with meeting all these demands.

So if you're gonna measure true decision making at an operator level, at a entry level, sergeant, say, position or lieutenant, you're gonna have to take the time, do the exercises, do the practical exercises, do the written tests, do the tabletop exercises, so we can measure how you think and teach you that ruler, which I would argue 99% of the time, law enforcement makes the right call.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure.

Marcus Sprague: We do a horrible job at articulating why that was the right call. And that's kind of one of the things that we're passionate about at CATO, is, hey, we think you're doing the right thing, but when it comes to writing it down or explaining it, we got to do a little bit better.

Jon Becker: Well, and constitutionally, I mean, if you think about it like, law enforcement is depriving people of their constitutional rights by definition. That is what law enforcement is. Right? It's seizing people. It's charging them with crimes. It's things that are specifically within the scope of the Fourth Amendment. And what separates a lawful action from an unlawful action is being able to articulate why you did what you did, because the same thing, shooting somebody, can be completely constitutional or completely unconstitutional. And if you can't articulate why it's unconstitutional.

And I think that one of the places that we've failed as a society in supporting law enforcement is, as you guys so eloquently put, focusing on the why and teaching the why. But the why takes a long time. Right?

The why takes a lot of time to learn different paradigms and learn from other people's experiences. One of the things that Kato is doing right now that I absolutely adore, and we're going to actually do an entire podcast on is your decision making exercise. Can you just kind of give us a brief overview of how the DMEs work and why that started?

Marcus Sprague: So everyone likes stories, but there's principles that we can demonstrate in those stories that will help you remember. So there's a lot of science behind how we remember things, and you'll remember the emotion. And so our goal here is to give you a tactical problem that's real and break it down into chronological order with trigger points.

So here's what you have, and you're the leader on the scene. What would you do? And we discuss it, and we go through a series of steps as that event progresses. And the goal here is to see your thought process. And while you're doing that, we have experts participating, legends participating, that will kind of question you on your thought process to help you kind of fine tune it and hone it. And then when you're done, the actual law enforcement officers that were at the event will tell you then what the event was.

If we're fortunate, they can show videos and maps and really break down what worked for them and what didn't work and kind of fill in those gaps. So what we found was it helps you make decisions. It gives you something to put in your rollout X.

So as you see a problem, you don't start from scratch. You start from this is similar to, but we also reinforce the principle part of making those decisions, and then we tell you what really happened. So you get multiple benefits out of this one thing, and you're doing it with officers from around the state with a variety of experience.

So you've, by the time you're done, you have a real life scenario. It's not a made up thing. You've learned what worked for them. You've articulated your decision making process, and you've learned from other people's decision making process, all overseen by people with really thousands of missions under their belt.

And so is very hard to quantify based upon your experience, because it depends on who you are and what you came with. But in the end, you can go back to your shop, give them the same scenario, give them the same talking points, and build up your people and go, what would we do if that happened in our town with the resources that we have?

Jon Becker: Yeah. So much of tactical decision making is paradigm based. Right. It's looking at a situation and saying, okay, this is like. And then being able to draw inferences. And I think one of the things that's challenging about it is if you go back to the snake analogy, we can't measure how many people didn't get bit by a rattlesnake because they knew you shouldn't pick up a rattlesnake. We can only measure ones that do get bit by the snake.

And so that is what I really like about the direction CATO is going right now is it is much, you know, you guys are leading it in a much more proactive DMEs and restructuring classes and. And focusing on tactical leadership because most of the problems actually start at a leadership level. They don't start at a tactical level.

Marcus Sprague: People can execute like the practical application. The skills were very good at training, and we have the time and the budgets to at least meet minimum qualifications for that. But it's much harder to develop thinkers to you. And the older I get, the more I think. It's not really what I think that's important. It's how I think, because what I think is very context specific, but how I think I can apply to any situation that you throw at me.

Brent Stratton: And that's really where the decision making exercises are coming from. And we owe a lot of different people. Again, it's a synthesis of a lot of different areas. It's a synthesis of after actions and debriefs and having the relationships to bring that in. A lot of guys will take a list of these things and they said they kind of keep them as hip pocket exercises when there's downtime and training with their teams pulling them out. And they're kind of just going through some of those trainings that are there.

And this is something that we were forced through with COVID. When we couldn't train, we couldn't get people together. We couldn't be able to provide any of the information that we needed to be able to provide. You know, this turned out to be something where, you know, Toby and Josh, who was studying about, you know, working on his. His doctorate, on how people learn in education and studying these type of things.

And we're thankful that he asked if he could study CATO and some of the training components that we have. And they took some of these, a compilation of all these ideas and then started pushing it out on Zoom. And then we started having more teams that were sitting in there.

And I know I spoke to one commander in particular who said he was talking through what occurred and then was a very difficult set of circumstances where he used every tool at his disposal in a very difficult set of circumstances. And it created a divide within the team from operators, from supervisors, from commanders, about how things went. The decision making that was there. And he's been very torn over his decision making, not wanting to just accept that because it ended well, that things went well.

He said for Sid Heal to be in there and to critique it and then to say, I might have done this instead of that. All in all, your decision making was sound, based on these principles and was here. And I think what you did was reasonable. I think what you did was necessary. I think what you did was right. It provided me a ton of peace on top of that.

So you have people that are learning along the way. You have people that are willing to be critiqued. You're taking it and moving it forward. And I was really proud of the organization to be able to, especially during a difficult time, figure out how can we still take this information and push it out.

And it's really kind of catching fire and moving forward. So we're really proud of Toby and Josh and the work that they're doing and for all the people that have contributed towards it.

Marcus Sprague: And it brings up a great opportunity for us because historically, our profession poorly provides data and research for what we do. It's very much based anecdotally. And then we'll have academics do studies and tell us what we should do. And it's hard for them because they're looking at the data, but they don't understand the other parts of the job. And that's because we have not consistently partnered with academics to have more rigor in our research, in our data, but also have it address the right things.

And so this was one of our opportunities to partner with Josh on developing a little bit more science behind how we teach and have a better, more efficient and economical approach to giving you a product that these folks can use right away.

Brent Stratton: Yeah, we have the ability to add the context to the data collection and things that are going on academically to help be able to get to where we've generally not wanted to work towards that. We really want to push the organization towards being open to these type of things. We think that is what's going to lead us towards some of the answers. We think that it's very easy to say, well, there's these huge political or philosophical differences and divides, and politicians are pushing this, that or the other on us. And maybe it's true, maybe it's not. I don't know any of these politicians personally to know where they are, but we have the laws that we have here.

And I think a big portion of it is not just because of operational failures. I think it's because it's been our inability to be able to capture data, to be able to tell our story, to be able to articulate it and move these things forward in that manner. So if we want to be able to get to where we're more closely aligned with those who we report to the public, those who have authority over us, the politicians, then we've got to do a better job of being able to capture this.

And we really see CATO as being in a unique position to be a clearinghouse to capture that information. But we have to develop the skill and the educational component to it to then be able to tell our story and put context to it and be able to push it out, because generally it's the joke that we always say no comment type thing or we capture things.

Anecdotally, we've got to get better at being able to tell our story and what occurred. And I'm really proud that we're seeing law enforcement moving in that direction, and we're really happy that CATO's playing a role in that.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think historically there's been kind of a circle the wagons mindset that everybody is attacking us, so let's circle the wagons and protect ourselves. And unfortunately, what ends up happening is law enforcement begins to fall behind. So the organized opposition that wants to take away tools and limit power and everything else are out collecting data and they're collecting every bit of negative data and they're aggregating it, and they're using academics to build a. A very clear, articulable story.

And law enforcement is frequently blindsided by that attack because there hasn't been engagement with the opposition. It's you look at people that are critical of law enforcement and frequently, in conversations, you'll hear, well, no, I'm not going to read that book. That guy, he's anti-cop.

The problem is, if you read those books, you learn how the opposition thinks. And recently there have been a series of books and articles that have come out, and, I mean, the most popular being the Radley Balko book, the Rise of the Warrior cop. I disagree with probably.

I agree with probably 95% of what's said in that book, the Constitution, the discussion of constitutional law, 5% I very strongly disagree with. The problem is, if we focus on the 5%, the 95% is how they sell the 5%.

And I think it's a good segue to talk about kind of what's happening in California from a legislation standpoint, because that book, combined with an ACLU report, have funded a spate of legislation probably starting with AB 392. That is certainly redefining the competitive, the law enforcement environment. Let's start with AB 392. What are your thoughts?

Brent Stratton: Well, to kind of get back to what you're talking about, too, even before we go in that direction, I 100% agree. And you're seeing these books that are coming out. You're seeing the legislation that's coming out.

And if it's out there, I'm not gonna say it's not out there, but if it's out there, I'm unaware of people who are writing kind of the flip side of that coin who are able to say, no, that's not what's happening. This is what's going on here. This is what we have. This is the context to that. This is what we're trying to accomplish. These are the standards that are here. This is what our accountability looks like. This is what our transparency is. This is the data that we're trying to capture, to put the data that you have in proper context to be able to tell the fullness of that story. And there's a major gap in law enforcement.

And again, I'll say that a little bit ignorantly in that maybe there are those things that are out there, but if so, we're not seeing it. And we're just now getting to the point where we're starting to be open to it and understanding it and building the infrastructure to be able to have that conversation, to be able to put that type of information truly in context. And if you care about, you know, this profession, you care about what you do.

And I think the extreme majority of the people that are in this profession do that. This job is not just something that they choose to do. It's a little bit about who they are and the service and the things that they have in their heart. That's naturally a part of who they are, then we've got to get to the point where you're not just tactician who understands what tool to use, that you're not just a tactician who understands why you're doing these type of things, but that you can take it and contextualize it and be able to articulate it and speak it in a manner, to be in the same language of those who are speaking a language to us, that's coming off as quite foreign.

So, yeah, I mean, the AB 392, Assembly Bill 48, you know, the changes to penal code section 835 in the a section militarization on Assembly Bill 481. I mean, there's just, there's a ton of them that are coming out, and these things have been building for the last several years because we've not done a good job of being able to put these type of things in context.

Jon Becker: Yeah. To counter the narrative, the example I always use is, it's like a plane crash, right? People are afraid of planes. They're afraid of sharks. You're more likely to die driving to work. But because the sensationalism of a story of a plane crash or a sharkbite, it draws attention. Everybody worries about it, everybody focuses on it and ignores the real risk.

And there are certain incidents in law enforcement going back to Rodney King that have driven this kind of anti law enforcement narrative, and there hasn't been an organized counter. There's a story of Albert Einstein that he was teaching a class, and he wrote ten problems on the board, and they were simple arithmetic problems. 10 plus 10 is 20, kind of thing. And he got the last one wrong. And somebody raised their hand, said Professor Einstein, laughing like, you're supposed to be a genius. You got the last one wrong. And he said, there's a very valuable lesson here, and I did this for a reason. I got every other problem before that. Right?

You don't remember any of that. All you notice is the one I got wrong. And the problem here for law enforcement is there is no one telling the story. Right? There is no one out saying, look at all these times. You look at the recent LAPD hostage rescue, you know, that lady was going to die if they didn't intervene, and they intervened flawlessly. That's not the story we hear. That was a 30 second news story. But every bad outcome is weeks of news. So it strikes me that the role that Cato is playing of trying to be a clearinghouse and provide that information goes a long way to protecting the profession.

Marcus Sprague: Sure.

Brent Stratton: And the fact that it's news in and of itself, in my estimation, shows how infrequently that it occurs. So, again, it's hard to capture and articulate the absence of problems, the absence of death, the absence of force, the absence of those type of things is not and cannot be sensationalized. You could make the argument that it's actually pretty boring.

So when you have these type of things that occur and that's becoming sensational. Yeah, we need to address that. We need to fix those things. If we have failures, of course, we need to own it, move on, and be able to do that. I think sometimes it gets complicated by the economics behind what happens whenever you admit to doing something wrong civilly. But it's big business, but being able to get to the point where we can to articulate those type of things, that's really where I think we need to be. We're not there yet.

Jon Becker: I recently interviewed Lee Macmillan from LAPD SWAT. And one of the statistics, one of our heroes that Lee brought with him was in their last 1200 operations, they've used force of any kind in 8% of the operations, and that includes just twist lock on a wrist. 8% of their operations, they use deadly force one and a half percent of the time.

Brent Stratton:

Right. And you think about that, right? There's a common thought process at one point that talked about SWAT being an automatic escalation of force. When you bring a SWAT team out, you're escalating force. I actually have a different opinion. I think the utilization of SWAT is, by its very definition, de escalation. You're bringing additional resources, you're creating time, you're creating training, you're creating distance, you're bringing a negotiation team to work on communication.

You're bringing drones or robots to help facilitate communication, to open things up. You're trying to utilize time to be able to get to where it is that you want to be to help try to minimize the risk to the suspect, minimize the risk to the public, to the officers, to help facilitate a peaceful solution and resolution to it. You're bringing less lethal tools. You're bringing four to millimeter launchers, you're bringing canines, you're bringing tasers, you're bringing all these things in markets. Touch.

These are things that patrol officers are running with right now, thankfully, in many different departments as well. But you're bringing a whole array of tools to help facilitate a peaceful resolution, ideally. So that's the very definition of what we're trying to do in utilizing tactics to be able to achieve those positive outcomes.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's funny, I recently had Mike Hillman on the podcast, and one of the things Mike said is people tend to focus on the weapons. It's special weapons and tactics. And it's really not the weapons that solve the problems, it's the tactics. It's the negotiation. It's slowing the entire event down, creating less opportunity for the suspect to think he's going to win. It's those types of things that result in a better outcome for both the suspect and the public.

Marcus Sprague: And you're talking about the science behind tactics. So that's the science. Right? Our goal at any level is to manipulate time and train to place that adversary at such a disadvantage. And our people at an advantage that the disparity is so great that they will surrender peacefully or we will use the least amount of force necessary.

And that's the art, the arts, and the application of that. And that's what we're teaching at CATO, a version of that in all of our classes, because that's the science behind what we do. Very rarely will a piece of equipment overcome and win. It can take it away, suspect center of gravity or critical vulnerability, but it's how you manipulate all those pieces.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's funny. It brings back when I first started my career. Sid Heal was very influential in my career and has been a friend now for 30 some odd years. But two things that he said very early on in my career stuck with me. One is that good tactics can often overcome the challenges of bad equipment. The converse is not true.

And the other is that the objective of any type of tactical operation is to put the suspect in a situation where surrender is likely and resistance is futile. And the more we can make the suspect understand that, the more likely you'll have a peaceful resolution.

Brent Stratton: And it's funny that it seems to me that your job becomes to minimize the effects of bad tactics when they get utilized. Because if the equipment isn't going to overcome that, then let's work on having good equipment, because there's going to be times we are going to have bad tactics or bad decisions or bad things are just going to happen to be able to minimize that and provide for that safety. So it's interesting hearing you say that and seeing how you fit in the equation.

Jon Becker: Yeah. There has always been a tension between what the community has taught me and my job. And my goal with Aardvark has always been to vector my career towards providing tools that protect operators. And protecting operators might mean putting in a drone or a robot instead of putting a person. Protecting operators might also be doing a lecture series, doing a podcast, trying to create an opportunity where the people that we encounter every day that are amazing and knowledgeable, like you guys, have a broader platform to reach other people.

And a lot of my personal job as CEO is introducing people. It's saying, oh, you guys have this problem, you should meet this guy. And very early on, Sid and Mike and the guys that really brought me up taught me that information is not something you own, it's something you steward. And if you have information, you share it no matter what.

I mean, I remember Sid teaching a flashbang class when I was probably 19 or 20 years old, and a guy walked up and said, hey, sir, can I have your slides? And this is back when they were overhead slides. And Sid said, yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I think that you guys are doing that is really interesting is this CATO podcast. Can you kind of tell me a little bit more about the podcast?

Marcus Sprague: So the podcast started at a conference, a CATO conference, and we all met. Brent and I met, and several of us met through the strategic leadership program of CATO. And so we developed a pretty good bond with that group of students. And one of our mentors, Tim Anderson, got diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. And we all were kind of talking about it because you don't survive that. And we were talking about the lessons Tim had taught us, and we'd all taken notes, but we felt like that didn't really do injustice.

So we're trying to figure out how do we capture the wisdom that a guy who was a colonel in the Marine Corps and an LAPD metro sergeant, all the things he taught us. So we're kind of figuring that out. And I volunteer to just go down to LA and record my conversations with Tim because I respect and love all three of those guys for everything they did for me. But for whatever reason, Tim and I really hit it off.

So I volunteer to go to LA and record my conversations with Tim, figuring at best, we'll have these recordings, we'll figure out what to do later. Now, I'm not going to lie. There was some whiskey involved, like, a lot of good ideas. And someone mentioned that that should be a podcast.

So next thing you know, I did a podcast, and my first episode was interviewing Tim. We hadn't seen each other for several months, and we met in San Diego during a team leader course. It was the first time I saw Tim in a wheelchair. He couldn't walk anymore. He needed help breathing, using his hands, he could steer the car, the cart. And so the hotel was great, gave us a place. We did our first podcast, and it was just lessons learned from Anderson. And if you listen to our first podcast, you can't even tell, because that's the devastating part of that disease.

But we realized after that that not all these folks are going to be around forever. And the cool thing about the strategic leadership program is there's a lot of leadership programs out there, and there's several that post recommends and that are kind of the staples of law enforcement.

So my argument with my executives attending was, they're great. I've read the books, I'm sure the class is great, but I got to meet the people they wrote the books about. I got to meet Mike Hillman. I got to meet John Coleman. I can call Jack Ewell and ask Jack Ewell, what would LASD do? I can ask Lee. Hey, Lee! How do you guys do this? I can learn from these people. And so Tim would challenge me every. Every session. He would say, what did you learn? What did you learn?

And at the end of SLP, I sat down and he said, tell me. Give me your top 18 things that you learned from this course. And one of them was, your life never goes in a linear path. So invest in yourself, invest in others, and follow it. And so here I was doing a podcast for Tim, and it just kind of spiraled after that. And Brent and I, quite honestly, we're selfish. We do this podcast so that we can learn the questions that we have, and we just hope that there's other people out there listening that would find those lessons valuable.

Brent Stratton: Yeah, it's, you know, when you're Sid, I don't. I don't know who Sid learns from, you know, but he writes these books, and I feel like he has the answers. You sit in a class, and you're listening to somebody who has the answers.

But for us, I know that we are completely dedicated to constantly learning and evolving and trying to get better and never feeling like you reach a rank or a level or a point in your career where you have this stuff figured out, at least. I know I don't. I'm certain I speak for markets and that we don't. And we build in the time to do these things so that way, we can ask the stupid questions that we want to know. And it amazes me that anybody listens to this thing, because sometimes, like, it's probably common sense to everybody listening and probably like, yeah, you're an idiot.

Why are you asking these type of questions? We all know that, but we get to learn and talk to some of the best people, some of the brightest minds, some of the most inspiring people, and it's just another medium to be able to get information out.

So we owe a lot to Marcus, and his idea for bringing that forward is another way to do it, because we've always only relied on the magazine. Being able to write articles in the magazine, that was great. A lot of people really liked it, especially when we stopped doing it. Like, man, I love getting that magazine a couple times a year and being able to have it and read through it.

But based on some of the different financial challenges we had, some just different issues that we had as an organization, we decided to kind of transition to a digital newsletter and then be able to have the podcast as another way for people to be able to listen, just another way to be able to communicate.

So he deserves a lot of credit for being able to move that forward. And just in the year or two that I've been serving as his wingman on that, I know that it's opened my mind exponentially. Helped teach me. I learned something. I learned something every time.

So when we'll call each other usually, and like, hey, happen to get an email or somebody happened to say something kind about the podcast, that they learned this from it, I immediately call him and he does the same thing. Because, you know, obviously we volunteer our time to do this stuff you listen to. We don't have the all the equipment that goes into it. You know, it's not a big, it's not a money making thing, it's none of those things.

So when somebody actually gets some use out of it, it really makes it worthwhile because we're sitting in there, you know, trying to keep the door shut. Kids are playing in the background years usually after work, and you kind of smoked already anyways, and just trying to do something that's useful and beneficial for people.

Marcus Sprague: It's like a lot of things in this profession, you do it because it's the right thing to do. You hope somebody gets value out of it and your family thinks that you're just screwing off in the other room. And that's partially true also.

Brent Stratton: That's what my wife you're just hanging out with your buddy over there, talking on the phone, talking about whatever you guys talk about in the room.

Jon Becker: It can be fun and productive. If I've learned anything in my career is I can have fun and still do productive stuff. I think you've undersold the podcast a lot. I mean, I know that it's got an international following now. I think that one of the things that you guys, by design or by luck, created was an environment where magazines are great, but not everybody will sit down and take the time to write a magazine article and edit it and submit it and go through all that. And not everybody will take the time to sit down and read a magazine article.

And I think that as CATO has evolved, you've moved into a digital platform, you've moved into a means of reaching this generation of officer, but also it gives you the ability to sit down with Tim, who is dying from ALS, and capture hours of the wisdom that we all knew we would lose. Tim has forgotten more than most people will ever know.

And so I really loved the fact that that was where you guys started the podcast. It was an inevitability. And part of what has driven this podcast is that same inevitability, because I was brought up by those guys, and as they're getting older and they're having health challenges and they're dying, we're losing that first generation of information.

Brent Stratton: Is there a week that goes by at your shop where you don't quote something that Tim Anderson taught you? I mean, hand to God, there's not a week that goes by that I will not use one of the phrases taught me in any conversation I have with anybody at my shop.

From differing levels of the organization, the principles that he has said, and the most frequent one that I use, round peg, round hole, square peg, square hole, goes, you learned it in kindergarten. It's still appropriate in law enforcement about how you apply people into an organization and how you can select and evaluate and move them forward, and the training, dedication. I mean, it was just the things that we learned from him have been tremendous.

But when you talk about lessons learned from that, a life lesson for me from this, I would love to tell you, there's this grand strategic plan, and maybe Marcus had it in his mind. It wasn't clear to me that we're going through this, and it was going to create all this different opportunity for us.

I think it's just, you start walking through one door and other doors open, and, like, it kind of takes some of those, that initiative that leads to other opportunities, which has been a very valuable lesson that I learned from you and from the podcast in other areas of my life, too. Just taking those steps and then moving forward, and then that brings other things.

That's kind of my estimation, it's a life well lived, is a series of good decisions made over and over again incrementally. Very rarely do you look back and think that it was this one thing that happened, that everything went right, or this one thing that everything went wrong. It's usually a series of small, bad decisions end up something bad, a series of good decisions, things are gonna end up good. And so it's really been a pretty cool road to get to walk down and excited to see where it takes us.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Talk to me about where CATO is going, what's coming up, what's on the horizon?

Marcus Sprague: So we survived COVID and being shut down. We were able to continue some of our flagship courses. Right now, we are developing our online content decision making exercises, and really, we could have thrown those out a lot sooner. It's easy to tell a story and tell people what went right and what went wrong, but we want to make it so that we can replicate it so that it's not just you attending it.

But now we can give you a product that you can go back to your agency and do that hip pocket exercise with your group. And a lot of them are swap problems, but some of them aren't because the principles apply to everyone.

So we're working forward on that. We really see our mission is continuing on Ken and Sid's work, and that is improving on the professionalism of the organization, improving law enforcement officers as a whole ability to solve tactical problems.

So, you know, this last conference was way back in 2019 now, but we had probation officers there. We had different crime suppression teams there. We had a variety of law enforcement officers from around the state, in the world attend because we hope that they're seeing the value in the leadership track, learning these leadership lessons, listening to people from all around the world talk about their tactical problems and what worked and what didn't work for them.

So we really feel, I guess, a burden to how can we better prepare everybody that has dedicated their profession, their career, to serving their communities so they can make really good decisions and they can explain those decisions, defend themselves to their executives, to their subordinates, prepare their subordinates into the community.

And so, you know, we've expanded. We had a demonstration response class, and it was really because we've identified these principles that a lot of us got wrong in demonstration response. So you'll see that roll out this year. We have our normal skill, staff skills like nonlethal technology, grenadier, chem agent, team leader, commander, those kind of things. But really looking, how can we help the patrol officer in their advanced tactics? How can we teach tactical strategies?

So we, we teach, we have a four hour and eight hour block, and that's a class that Sid created with Darrell Evans. Daryl still teaches it from time to time. I teach it. And post is looking at adopting a lot of those principles for frontline supervisors. And so that's really the mission of CATO. Right? To impact the law enforcement community, to prepare them to make good decisions.

Brent Stratton: Yeah, we're not 100% certain about what it's going to look like. We sat down and wrote a strategic plan a couple years ago just to see, to get us to almost about where we are and keeping the organization alive and functioning and healthy and thriving, being able to move it forward and just to see, we just want to stay in the game and then continue to develop and bring people along. They're going to help move the organization forward with the fourth iteration of CATO whenever that's coming, and I'm certain it's not too far off.

So we've made changes within our board and within our instructors to make sure that it's 100% comprised of people who are active in law enforcement. We have our emeritus board, which is containing of our heroes and the people that help mentor us and develop us, and Hillman and Odie and Heal and RK and Kent, you know, who are helping to make sure that we have the historical perspective and their voice is still there and present while we're kind of trying to move things forward.

But we always want to be pushing out new and useful classes like you talked about, some of the less lethal technologies and the critical incident decision making and developing these type of anything that we can do training wise to be useful and beneficial for officers and membership going forward.

So not 100% certain about what it's going to look like in three to five years, but we are always trying to stay a year or two ahead. Some of the issues that are comprised, though, of having people who are all active in law enforcement, is that we're all spread throughout the state. We're all working well over 40 hours a week at our shops doing things.

So then trying to figure out how we can at the same time dedicate our time and volunteer our time towards CATO and then keep another organization running to help serve other organizations. So that's a definite critical vulnerability for us that, you know, it's incumbent upon Marcus Nye to kind of figure that, and that's going to be a constant, constant balance.

There's always going to be kind of a little bit of friction there, figuring out where that fits time wise and being able to make those type of things happen. But we know that the alternative is not having that and not having that service that we can provide. And that's not an option.

So we'll figure out, we'll continue to grind through it. It looks different day to day, week to week, month to month sometimes, but the organization's here and it's strong, it's recovering financially, and we feel like we're in a good position, that we're uniquely qualified to be able to continue to move forward and serve.

Marcus Sprague:And one of the biggest benefits of CATO is the community. And so we're really investing in our region rep program, and that is men and women who volunteer to represent CATO in their area that they work in. And we really see that as a way that can make us more flexible. So we have the standards that we want to meet that are best practices throughout the state and throughout the country.

But then we have to meet the needs of each community. And so our reps will help help us by giving us the latest information. And at the same time, in turn, they can call and say, hey, I'm having this problem. How do I solve it? And if it's not us, we'll put them in contact with someone who has solved that problem before and really shorten that. And especially in the last ten years, the technology for that is available.

And if there's any positive things we got out of COVID it's just how I can talk to somebody in France and go, hey, what just happened? And I can learn those lessons right away. So we really see that as part of the future of CATO, and that also gives us an opportunity to speak educatedly to the legislature and say, hey, here's what's happening. Here's where we're training our people, but here's the challenges that we have.

Here's why we need more funding or we need more training or we need better grants and really see the organization as a way to represent everyone.

Jon Becker: I like that you're expanding to kind of tactically adjacent because tomorrow SWAT operators start in patrol. All tactical problems start in patrol. And so the idea that the organization is broadening, you know, it's membership to allow people who are fledgling SWAT cops, because it's not like you start, you know, they put a pin on you and all of a sudden you're a tactical operator, right? That's, there's a spectrum that has to develop in an education that has to develop.

And I think one of the problems of the past is that we've just kind of assumed that, oh, well, you're going to go to SWAT school and then you'll know everything. And realistically that education can start much younger.

And so things like the podcast, things like the upcoming conference, create an opportunity for people to get exposed to those more knowledgeable minds, more experienced minds. What's the best way for people to interact with CATO? How can people get ahold of you guys, follow the podcast, all those kinds of things.

Marcus Sprague: So because we're a statewide organization and we're spread throughout the state, Brent's in central southern California, I'm in northern California. We meet a lot online, but we have a website that people can contact us through. We have a phone number, and you also have a region rep.

So you have somebody that speaks a similar language and has common problems that you can go to right away, and that happens often. We had a tragedy in northern California, and we had a bearcat that was disabled. And within hours, everyone in the state knew. Here's the part you need to do in order to make sure this bearcat, this doesn't happen to you. And that's kind of the power of the community, right?

Last night, we had a tragic aircraft crash, and within moments, everyone in the state knows what's going on. What do we need? And so that's what you get from CATO. You know, think about little Liam, you know, and that's hard to not talk about emotionally. But that was a time in law enforcement where there wasn't a lot law enforcement could do that was good. Even when they were doing good, a lot of people didn't recognize it.

Jon Becker: And so probably give some context on Liam.

Marcus Sprague: So Liam was a deputy son who had cancer, and he's struggling with cancer and great family. Someone reached out to CATO and said, hey, we need to help these guys. They're, you know, missing work. They're staying in hotels. They're doing all the stuff you have to do to save your kid's life. And it was during a hard time in law enforcement, and everyone kind of felt like they didn't have a lot of control, and that was a lot of morale issues because you couldn't really impact your environment.

And so they came together and raised money for this little guy who's fighting cancer, and we all get to go down and give the family a check and give him his little vest, which I can't even talk about, that letter. I couldn't read it. I had to make Brent read it. And that's the power of the CATO community. And it wasn't just the gift for Liam and his family, which is a great family and super thankful, but the gift really was ours. The gift was our ability to do something positive for somebody who, you know, served his country and served his community.

And proud to say, Liam's doing great. I got a picture of him the other day. He has big, curly hair, and he is looking forward to being able to go back to school. Still can't go quite yet, but that's the power of having that sense of community that sometimes we forget. We get busy, and we all have the same problems. Brent and I were sitting down at LAPD, D-Platoon, and all the guys are in there.

We're sitting beside Lee, and the presenter talks about an issue with ear pro and testing your hearing every year and all these things that happened, that SWAT cops, that in the end hurt them. And we kind of looked over at Lee and we're like, hey, do you guys get to do A, B, and C? And he's like, no. Do you guys? I'm like, no. Like, we're all the same, you know, and I'm not the same as Lee.

There's not a lot of Lee's around, but we all have the same problems and we need to learn from them. And that's what's kind of cool about CATO, is I'm not going to tell you that I have as much experience as LASD or LAPD. I don't. But I can learn from their experience. And if I have something, I know I can call somebody and they're willing to help.

Jon Becker: Well, in the end, it's a community that has more experience than any individual. If I want to join CATO, how do I do that?

Marcus Sprague: So you can jump online and you can sign up to be a member. As of this date, it is still the second lowest professional law enforcement association in the country. As far as your cost to join with your membership, you know, you have access to our website, all our after action reports, and you can get behind kind of the public facing wall of the website. You can jump online and throw out questions. You can utilize the region reps, you can come to our classes and again, just contribute to the profession.

For me, people ask me sometimes why I do so much for CATO and all that. And quite honestly, my agency, no fault of their own, just cannot spend the time and the money to train me to the level that I need to know. And if you're going to take a leadership position, my opinion is it's your responsibility to go seek that out and become a student of the craft.

And that's something we grew up not having to do because we had the Mike Hillman's and we had the John Coleman's, the plank holders that solved these problems no one had ever seen before. And so we can learn from them. And so joining CATO, I get that opportunity. And I get that opportunity to look outside my village and see how other villages solve these problems.

Jon Becker: Yeah. For less than the cost of a pizza and a beer. I mean, membership wise, it is a ridiculously low amount of money. Guys, I really appreciate you being here and sitting down with me on The Debrief. Before we let this end, Marcus, can you give us where people can find you on the Internet and how they can get a hold of CATO.

Marcus Sprague: So our website is. You can find us on your social media platforms as catotraining, CATO training, and our podcast is on all the normal streaming platforms as CATO Podcast. [One word].

Jon Becker: Thank you so much!

We'll put all of that in our show notes also to make it available to everybody. Guys, I can't thank you enough for being here today.

Marcus Sprague: Thanks for having us!

Brent Stratton: Yeah, thanks for having us, Jon!

We appreciate you and all you've helped develop and teach us as well. So thanks for letting us come hang out with you!

Jon Becker: My pleasure!