Episode 6 – Mike Hillman Part 1 of 2: The History of SWAT

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

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

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

Welcome to The Debrief!

This is the first in a two part series with Mike Hillman. Mike is a legend in the tactical community with a list of career accomplishments that would take a podcast of their own. But as a brief bio, Mike was one of the original founders of LAPD SWAT, a deputy chief at LAPD, the assistant sheriff in Orange County, California, and an assistant chief of police for the Los Angeles Port Police.

He was one of the founders of the National Tactical Officers association and is a nationally recognized expert on leadership, crisis management, critical incident management, special operations, and a wide variety of other subjects.

For this first episode, we're going to look back at the history and origins of SWAT, talk about how it has evolved over time, the founding of the National Tactical Officers association, and look at the current challenges being faced by SWAT teams.

For the second episode, we will explore Mike's views on leadership, critical incident management, tactical decision making, and the role of SWAT in the modern tactical environment.

Mike, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate you being here!

Mike Hillman: Jon, thank you very much! And if I can go back, there are no experts in this business of SWAT where all students have the problem. Any day that we stop and we start rewarding ourselves because we've got all the answers, we're headed for disaster.

Jon Becker: It's a fair point. Why don't we, to start, let's go back to the beginning of your career and kind of walk through. You know, it's. Your career started at a critical time in the evolution of SWAT, and you were present for a lot of the events that gave rise to this. So I would love to just kind of walk through the history and parallel that to your career, if you wouldn't mind. So where does it start?

Mike Hillman: Well, you know, the sixties were a very tumultuous time, as they are now. Of course, I mean, history repeats itself. But in 1963, after I got out of high school, I went into the army and got out of the army, and I went into the Los Angeles Police Department in 1966 on my birthday. And it was something that I had wanted to do for some time. I was very impressed with the Los Angeles Police Department. In 1966, we just finished up with the first 1965 watch riots. And because I grew up in Los Angeles, I had a chance to see how the Los Angeles Police Department performed, and I was very impressed with it.

I had a very strong interest in tactics coming out of the army. I was very interested in what LAPD had to offer. And when I got out of the academy, I found myself, like every other recruit, doing the various things that a young police officer would do to be able to help learn their career. And when Rampart opened, we opened Rampart and I went to patrol and then ultimately went to traffic enforcement division. And that was probably right about the 1969 timeframe, when I had a chance to really get exposed to what the Black Panther party was involved in.

And again, there were ambushes of police officers that were taking place. Unfortunately, not much has changed since then. But at the time, it was something that was a very high priority for all of us in law enforcement. And then along came the opportunity to be able to go to what was described then as a full time special weapons and tactics team. It wasn't a platoon then, but there were other fore plank holders and forefathers that were involved in the part time team.

And in 1970, when I was ultimately selected into Metro, we started with a full time special weapons and tactics platoon that ultimately started off with a little less than 60 people. And I was fortunate enough to be a team leader at that particular time.

Jon Becker: So you were a p three at that point?

Mike Hillman: I was a p three plus one plus one, which was an enhanced position of the patrol officer position, and it was in a leadership role.

Jon Becker: And you came in literally as the platoon became a full time element was when you arrived, you were selected into that first group.

Mike Hillman: I came in as a p three, which, when I came into Metro, then ultimately the platoon had started under Bob Smithson, and I was promoted to a three plus one, which put me in charge of. At that time, we called them, you know, an element which was a five person element, and two elements constituted a squad of twelve people with a supervisor.

Jon Becker: Got it. So that's 1971?

Mike Hillman: Yes, it is.

Jon Becker: And then 72 kind of begins the modern terrorism age with the Munich massacre and the beginning of evolution of hostage taking as a methodology of business for terrorists.

Mike Hillman: Yes, internationally. I mean, the Munich Olympics were obviously a benchmark, and there was a lot of lessons learned out of that. We had transportation of hostages, we had buses involved. We had multiple locations that were involved. And now we call them complex, coordinated type of attacks. But at that particular time, that was something that was relatively new.

And I described the seventies, at least in my career, as kind of in dealing with SWAT as pretty much the benchmark of some of the things that we started to do in terms of SWAT. We relied very heavily on the United States Marine Corps to be able to have us be able to come familiar with sophisticated firearms training. And sophisticated firearms training was basically pistol craft and the use of rifles as well as movement building entry was something that was left to us. The marines were not too much into that at that particular time.

But what we saw is, in the seventies, in the early seventies, we had, in Los Angeles, we had a, gosh, Mike Edwards, who was a police officer, was kidnapped and killed. He worked 77th Division. We had, at the time, just after the SLA shooting in May of 74, we ended up experiencing a helicopter crash that killed one of our commanders because we were learning how to be able to shoot out of the helicopter.

And that was a piece of tactical technology that we were looking at, because we were dealing with the aftermath of the Hanafi muslim incident, which took place in Washington, DC, which represented a high rise type of capability. You got to remember that going back to August of 1966, we had the Charles Whitman incident that took place in Texas Tower, Texas Tower in Austin. And so we were concerned about how we were going to deal with that type of situation.

So, I mean, there was a lot of things that had taken place. Marcus Foster, who was a school board superintendent up in Oakland, had been kidnapped and killed by the SLA. And one of the key factors in that whole period of time is because we'd finished up with the Black Panther party in 69, and we started to see ambushes of police officers were becoming much more prevalent. The SLA had planned an ambush situation up in Concord. There had been shootings up there where they were taking vans and basically putting automatic weapons in the back of a van and basically baiting in law enforcement to try to kill them. There was a lot of this type of activity.

So what we were doing in SWAT at the time was trying to develop tactics amongst ourselves that would bring us up to a state where we could be able to counter those types of things. We spent a lot of time training, and this goes to the issue of the reputation of SWAT.

A lot of time training recruits when they came into the department, when they would go through their last portion of their training at universal studios. And one of the pieces that really helped us in SWAT was to be able to build a rapport with the department, SWAT was new.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure.

Mike Hillman: SWAT was new in even, you know, you can go back to 66, 67, and, you know, it was relatively an anomaly at that time.

Jon Becker: It's revolutionary. I mean, it's the one of a kind at that point.

Mike Hillman: Well, it was. And in 70, and during the 70 period of time, we had to spend time internally in developing our own department into understanding what SWAT was in terms of a life saving organization. So the 70s were really a benchmark. We were starting to learn a lot about what we needed to do and where we needed to go.

Jon Becker: Was most of the mission set initially kind of counter ambush, you know, counter, for lack of a better term, insurgency. More focused on that kind of Black Panther weather underground. Like, how do we counter ambush? And that was the initial mission set. When did that begin to change? Was it Munich or was it after that that you began to kind of broaden the – spoke the scope?

Mike Hillman: Munich certainly changed the paradigm a little bit. But to your point, at that time, counterinsurgency wasn't a term that we use. Counter ambush was what we were dealing with. And we were still dealing with the aftermath of the Black Panther party. And one of the issues that we had to deal with is that we had information and intelligence that the Black Panthers were using storm drains to be able to navigate in the underground within the city so that they could be able to move unobserved and to be able to deposit their weapons and that type of thing in that facility.

So we spent a lot of time in the storm phase, believe it or not, which today's hazmat environment would obviously not bode well, sure. But then when we got to the Munich Olympics, then we started to look at the different dynamics of what the terrorists had used.

So that seventies period was obviously we were dealing with the anti Vietnam issues, we were dealing with counter ambush, we were dealing with protests. But for the most part, SwAT was focused on counter ambush and also starting to deal with moving into the counterterrorism field. And that wasn't until the eighties.

Jon Becker: Interesting. So during this period, if my memory serves me correctly from previous conversations, this is kind of when the CNT concept begins to develop for LAPD also, right?

Mike Hillman: Well, it was very interesting, the dog day afternoon that came out with NYPD, it was 1976, excuse me, that there was an opportunity to go back and take a look at what New York Police Department had been doing in terms of what was a completely new concept, hostage negotiations.

And the concept of hostage negotiations in New York police Department was that two individuals, Doctor Harvey Schlossberg, and Frank Bowles, who both had – Both were NYPD personnel, but they had behavioral science degrees, and they were psychologists that started to look at being able to use communications to be able to help people that were in crisis, not only hostages, but also to effect the safe release of a hostage and or surrender of a suspect. We had the Stockholm incident that started to develop, and so that the Stockholm syndrome was part of that.

So we, in LA, were still looking at the methodologies that we're using for what we would call a contain and call out type of environment to deal with SWAT. And one of the issues that became very apparent is that we use time. Talk and tear gas were the three primary issues that we. But at that time, that was what we had to deal with. And we thought, well, you know what I'm. There could be something here that we ought to take a look at. And so that LAPD did not want to become insular. We wanted to reach out.

And so I was fortunate to get a chance to go back to New York, and I took a look at essentially what Harvey and Frank were doing. And I thought, this is an incredible opportunity. But here's the difference. NYPD had the. The ability to be able to draw from detectives and to create a negotiation component out of detectives while their emergency services division would be the tactical operators.

And so that they would respond to an incident that involved a hostage situation, to where they would take their negotiators and put them in the first place, and then bring in the tactical component, and then that there would be, what we would call now an incident commander, or now, at that time, was probably a tactical commander would probably start to listen to what the negotiators would say in terms of what their progress would be.

And the issue that I saw when I was back there is that negotiators would always want to say, just give me a little more time. Where at some particular point, windows of opportunity to be able to rescue a hostage are not always there. And so that negotiators can go past windows of opportunity and miss an opportunity to be able to engage in the number one priority, that's life saving, get those hostages out.

So what the issue was is that they would then get into an intervention mode. Intervention would be the last piece that they would use. And there was always a disconnect. There was competition between negotiators and between tacticians.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Mike Hillman: And so when we had a chance to come back, and at that time, Lieutenant Pat McKinley was the platoon commander, I explained to him that I said, you know, we might want to consider taking this negotiation concept and apply it to all barricaded suspects situations where we can communicate with individuals, time, talk, and to be able to get them to hopefully convince them to release the hostage or to come out.

But we do not want to have a situation where we have to draw from other resources within the organization, because we have the talent pool here within SWAT and D-Platoon to be able to train our operators, as we would call them now, in a position where we can train them as primary and secondary negotiators. But that's not all of it.

We need to bring in a psychologist. And we had a huge behavioral science department within LAPD, and we ended up taking psychologists. And we explained to them, this is what we want to be able to do, is train our personnel in communications to deal with individuals under stress, psychologically deranged individuals, terrorists, you name it, the traditional type of criminals, and to be able to give them communication skills, to be able to overcome that type of action and to be able to coordinate negotiations and tactics. So the idea was that verbal and physical tactics needed to be together.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Fusing the two as opposed to having them as separate disciplines.

Mike Hillman: Precisely. And so we brought them into D-Platoon. Now, since then, I mean, things have evolved. Mike Albanese has done a tremendous job in being able to carry on where some of us left off. But the issues. We had bilingual individuals. Now we have investigators within, or detectives within D-Platoon now that build that component. But the negotiation piece was a huge shift in that 70 period.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that was at the time, not only a swat as a concept, revolutionary, but this whole, you know, like, you go back to Munich and kind of negotiation, and it wasn't. It kind of wasn't a thing. Right. Like, it's. Whoever ended up with the microphone was the guy that was having to negotiate. And it wasn't a discipline the way it was as you guys developed it.

Mike Hillman: Absolutely. You're right on the money. And it just sparked a comment that it was a huge shift to paradigm. It was not well received initially within LAPD because it was like, well, wait a minute, we're digressing from what our operations are. And I became very adamant about it, and so did Pat McKinley. I said, we're special weapons and tactics, verbal tactics and physical tactics. And the priority is to save the lives of the hostages and to avoid confrontation when we can.

Jon Becker: It's interesting! That's a very advanced concept for that place in time. Like now, that's de rigueur, that negotiation occurs, and the two kind of fuse, and you're looking for windows. But at that time, that was a very different view of criminal behavior and the need for intervention. And so I can see where there's probably some. Like, what do you mean, you're gonna negotiate? Like, why are you gonna talk to the guy?

Mike Hillman: Well, and that there was a lot of controversy over that. There became the east coast and the west coast concept. And I always said that verbal and physical tactics need to go together. And I said, we will use verbal tactics to help reduce the potential threat to the hostages, gain the release of the hostages, and also the surrender of the suspect. But there may come a time where we have to use negotiations to manipulate subjects into a position where they can be neutralized to save the lives of the hostages. And we've done that.

Jon Becker: It is like there is that crossover between the two. And there is a point where there are some people you will not negotiate out the kind of the modern islamist terrorist. You're not going to negotiate them out. They're there to die. And so at that point, that communication becomes a means through which you can effectively rescue the hostages, even if that requires an intervention. It facilitates intervention.

Mike Hillman: Well, there's so many tactics that can come out of the negotiation process, and it starts off with the intelligence. And, I mean, you look at the most recent incident that took place in Colleyville, Texas, to where the jewish synagogue was taken over, and yet they had a landlines phone where the suspect in this particular case was positioned and was communicating and basically had a camera in a position to where they could see him.

And so that there was a tremendous amount of intelligence that came out of that. In a negotiation process, if you can use negotiations which has been done to be able to gather that intelligence so that tactically plans can be made to be able to intervene, that's the best case scenario.

And not to move into the eighties, but when we got into the eighties, that's where we started to develop the tactical operations center concept, to where we started taking the negotiators and starting to bring in intel, using the snipers, the Sierra positions, to be able to gather intel for the operators to be able to handle an in extremist type of emergency assault if necessary.

Jon Becker: So it's interesting because even early on, you guys were looking this as a fused concept with an overarching mission not to tactically intervene. Right? I think that's one of the most interesting aspects of what you just said, is it was not just, let's tactically intervene. The objective is to rescue the hostages. And there may be ten paths to doing that. Intervention may be one of them.

Mike Hillman: The objective were to have the suspect release the hostages. And when you talk about the delivery of food, when you talk about the delivery of vehicles, what we started to see here is going back to Munich and going back to one of the incidents that I can recall, specifically the time motel to where we had to plan on. How would you deliver a vehicle if the individual demanded a vehicle for escape?

Well, the decision is we're not going to allow a suspect to go mobile, but we may have to manipulate them from a stronghold into a position of where they come outside so that if we have to intervene, we can. But we need to be able to disable a vehicle and we need to be able to handle vehicle assaults.

And I'm kind of moving ahead out of the seventies, but when we get into the eighties, the technology that started to develop on how we were going to deal with immobilizing a bus was very interesting. But before we got to that, then we started to develop tactics on vehicle assault processes. And that was huge. Coming out of this late seventies and going into the eighties.

Jon Becker: It's interesting because I guess the next, if you look at the history of SWAT, there are certain signposts on that road. Munich obviously, SLA being one, Munich being in the period that follows Munich, the hostage taking period. And then we kind of get to the 84 Summer Games right in LA. And that is a significant moment. Talk to me about the buildup to the Olympics and the effect that that had on you guys.

Mike Hillman: It was about 1979. It was just before the ad period, and the Iranian embassy had been taken over in Tehran, the American embassy. And there was a lot of interest in that particular incident as to how the United States was going to deal with that. And I remember getting a phone call because of some of the relationships that I had with some of the US army special operations groups, which at that time were not considered that, but they were considered something less than special operations.

And we were introduced to several people that came out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Colonel Charlie Beckwith and blue Light. And because of the relationship that LAPD had with the sheriff's department and the fact that we wanted to be able to start thinking about combining our resources of the special enforcement Bureau and LAPD because we got along very well to be able to create a much larger tactical component, we got invited back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and kind of a – You show me your stuff, I'll show you my stuff.

The first relationship started to develop about that time. And it was just a short period of time that we spent with them.

Jon Becker: And just for context, Colonel Beckwith is regarded as the founder for special forces detachment, or Delta?

Mike Hillman: Right. And at the time, the SEAL team six, or Dev group, as it's known now, was starting to spool up as well. So then along came desert one, which was in the eighties, right, in that period of time. And the debacle that occurred in the desert one.

Jon Becker: Which is the failed attempt to rescue the Iranians?

Mike Hillman: Hostages, where it killed a couple of Americans and ultimately ended up leaving a helicopter and a c 130 over in the middle of the Iranian desert. And it was a terrible situation. And it was really kind of an upcoming for, at that time, Delta Force. So it was after that time, probably in 81, where I spent quite a bit of my time. I was a lieutenant. I might have been still a sergeant. I can't remember exactly what it was, either a sergeant or lieutenant, but Daryl Gates had said, whatever we need to do to keep America free and to work with those particular individuals, we're going to do.

So I found myself down at Fort Bragg Adore, spending quite a bit of time with Delta force, who were in the process of recuperating from the debacle that occurred in the desert. And there was a lot of – At that time, a lot of tactics and technology that started to come out of that period. Now, you got to remember that we had the incident that occurred at Princess Gate that involved the SAS.

Jon Becker: 22 SAS.

Mike Hillman: There was the incident that occurred with the Palestine Liberation organization out in the middle of the desert that took over the airliners. There was the guy.

Jon Becker: There was Tebbe. There was there in Switzerland.

Mike Hillman: Not only in Tebbe, but there was GSG-9. A lot of these special operations groups had started to develop about that particular time, and they were sharing tactics and technology with Delta Athenae that time. And so we ended up an LAPD being able to spend quite a bit of time in picking their brains. And to be honest with you, I came back with a mound of information to where I said, okay, now we've got negotiations, we've got tactics. Let's bring it together with a tactical operations center. And it was like, well, what's that going to include?

Well, that means that we take Sierra positions, or at that time, we call them snipers and use them to gather intel and to verify or refute information that was coming in from negotiations so that we had the connection between the two. The negotiators say he's on the phone now. The snipers might be able to see that snipers might be able to see where the hostages are. We could start developing that type of relationship, coordinating it within the tactical operations center.

And I could see at the time it was going to require additional personnel, additional supervisors, because we had negotiation, crisis negotiation team supervisors that were trained. And we had SWAT supervisors that were trained. They were cross trained in each other's responsibilities. So that on a particular call up, you'd have a SWAT supervisor that was in charge of dealing with overall tactics. You would have the crisis negotiation.

Another SWAT supervisor that might have crisis negotiation team training. That would take their primary secondary negotiator, the psychologist and the journalist, and start being able to develop an exchange of information along with a sniper coordinator. So you had all kinds of components that were coming together. And the sophistication of what we were doing in the eighties became, at that time, cutting edge. We started to learn things that we'd seen in the army. Known at that time was hostage rescue. And we called it crisis entry.

And, you know, the involvement of crisis entry was something that, as we started to shift in paradigm. And we got more experience up into the more modern area, it's changed since then, now with limited penetration. But at the time, it was cutting edge type of actions.

And then we started thinking about going back to the Munich timeframe. What about taking Sierra positions and having simultaneous snipers shoot at the same subject at the same time? Oh, that was new. That was called coordinated target selection. And then based upon what we learned after the SLA shooting in the eighties, we needed to establish an exterior perimeter around a particular target site. That would prevent suspects from escaping and would prevent them from moving about.

So we created what we would, at that time, we call the support line tactics concept, which came out of Ron McCarthy's head, which ultimately involved a sniper position that was in Overwatch. And then we had contact teams. And if we had movement in a particular area while an incident was going on, we would move the contact team to be able to interdict it. So all that was coming out of that eighties timeframe.

Now, some of the things that we were dealing with in the eighties timeframe was the development of sound and flash diversionary devices, which we really started to see develop commercially. It became something. I could give you a side note about one of the experiences that I had while I was down at Fort Bragg on that particular issue.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I would love to hear that!

Mike Hillman: During the eighties, there was a – I'm going to start off with probably 1981 to about 1984, because these were the times. This was the period of time where we were leading up to the Olympics. And this was what I call a watershed moment for LAPD at the time, as well as LA county sheriffs, because we had to start developing much more in terms of our skillset to be able to deal with the potential of what we were looking back on with the Munich Olympic debacle that took place, where they had transportation of hostages and the buses, aviation and the snipers had missed, and all kinds of other dynamics and lessons learned out of there to prepare for what was going to happen, potentially, with 1984.

So I found myself down at Fort Bragg, and I found myself working with just absolutely the most incredibly brilliant individuals and tacticians that anyone could ever have. I mean, it just was just so impressive. But it was interesting going back to the GSG-9 hostage rescue incident. An organization or commercial manufacturer known as Shrmali out of the UK had developed a sound and flash diversionary device that they had used to stun, and they were called stun grenades in. They were used to stun the suspects and the terrorists at that time, so that the rescuing force get on the airplane money out, cutting it short.

So now I find myself at Fort Bragg, and the army is going to develop and build their own diversionary type devices. So I was invited into a room by one of the army engineers, Eodtex, and he said, okay, so now we're going to show you how to build flash bangs. I said, oh, this is going to be good, because I can take that back to LAPD. So we started off taking in the table. There was a variety of different tools. There was an M-116, a one hand grenade simulator, which had a pull striker on it, friction fuse made out of cardboard.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Mike Hillman: And then there was a M 201, a 1 second half bouchon type of fuse that was sitting there. And there was a hot glue gun, and there was a small, little three eight inch drill bit. And so I'm….

Jon Becker: Looking Joe Ross.

Mike Hillman: So I'm just looking at these items, and there's five or six other individuals who are sitting there. There's a guy from SAS that's sitting there, and I'm here, and two or three other army guys. He says. Now, very carefully, you want to tap this upside down to get the cardboard and the powder, which is aluminum powder, down in the bottom. It's very sensitive. It's flash powder, which as soon as he said flash powder, I immediately went, this is dangerous.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah.

Mike Hillman: And the next thing he says, you're going to take this three eight inch drill and you're going to very carefully, keyword carefully.

Jon Becker: Don't make a spark, don't cause any static.

Mike Hillman: Push and drill a small hole in the cardboard to which I find myself doing, and everybody else is doing, but everybody's kind of looking at everybody else like, is this really happening? So finally, we do that. Next, you take the 201 a one fuse, you put it inside the cardboard and take the hot glue gun and hot glue around it. And hence you have a flashbang.

Jon Becker: So in one of two ways, you either get a flash bang or you get a flash and a bang.

Mike Hillman: So I had all my fingers.

Jon Becker: You got the flashbang.

Mike Hillman: And when we came back, I ended up talking to Arlie McCree, rest his soul, who at that time was our bomb tech. And he said, you did what? And I said, this is what we did. But eventually we had them build us flashbangs that were made just exactly like that. And that was the precursor to the commercially made ones. Now, there was all kinds of problems with it because they would frag and I. The Bouchon would cause injury things of this.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that would launch. The Bouchon used secondary projectile.

Mike Hillman: That particular piece of it was something that we took and prepared for for the 84 Summer Olympics. So the next thing that we came up with was, how are we going to disable a bus if a bus is demanded, a la Muniche. So the FBI hostage rescue team had started to develop in 1981, and they basically went through the same maturations and processes that we did in terms of learning and bringing in various expertise.

And one of the individuals that I found very insightful was an HRT operator that was a bomb tech by the name of Jamie Atherton. And so Jamie Atherton from FBI came out here and worked with Arlie McCree and Ron Ball in developing a technique on dealing with buses. And so we ordered up for the period of the Olympics, well in advance of it, three Crown coach school buses.

Now, Crown coach was an old style school bus. Diesel back window came up, drum brakes, etcetera. So that the technique that we came up with is that we were going to disable the vehicle if we had to, and still create where we could use speed, surprise and diversion to be able to get on a bus, some type of charge that would prevent the vehicle from moving and essentially stop it.

So we took, not we, but the bomb techs, took about 400 grains of dead cord, put it around the inside of the drum brakes, and basically serrated the castle nuts for the front hubs so that you could take that and tie it into the back with a window and put det cord around the back window to be able to create a shooting port in the back window and then command detonate that with a remote device. And I had the privilege of watching that and watching the front wheels come off of a crown crown, literally, the…

Jon Becker: Wheels coming off the bus.

Mike Hillman: A crown coach type of bus is very impressive because that bus immediately will stop. Now, Mike Albanese, who was a sergeant at the time, did a tremendous job of being able to take the side of that bus and replace all of the safety glass with tempered glass so that you could hit the glass and it would clear out. So that now what we were practicing was a bus assault.

So the bus assault, if we could get individuals that would come out in the open, if we were not able to take, you know, a coordinated target selection piece of it, they would get onto a bus or get on one of these buses, we could essentially be able to stop that bus or prevent it from leaving by blowing the front wheels off.

And then it would be approached from the back with essentially a salt force complex or component, and a assault force that would come up on the side with ladders that were cut down so that they would have shooting ports and at the same time have a rescue component in the front of the bus.

Well, that's what we did, you know, prior to 84. Well, then, because we had basic access to the United States military, to HRT, to a lot of other resources, DARPA, who was the Defense, Defense Advance Research Agency, came out with a concept that they called surrogate travel. And at that time, I had transferred as a lieutenant to anti terrorist division to develop the intelligence component to support SWAT within the tactical operation center. And so I had access to this surrogate travel piece.

Well, in 1983, there was probably close to 500 Department of Defense personnel that came out and took thousands of photographs of UCLA, USC and all of the venues. And they would take photographs of the building from the ground, from afar to each door, to the locking mechanism, to the windows.

So that today, when you go on a virtual tour of a house, you go on that virtual tour of that house, where it all consists and run without any particular interruption at all. Well, this surrogate travel piece came in a pretty substantial size containers. There were two or three different tv sets where you would have one monitor that would show you the overview of the location. You'd be tied into a joystick along with another piece over here that would have about the size of a 33 and a third record, which I just dated myself, that would be on a large cd or a dvd.

Jon Becker: It's like the old record. Yeah, they were like video disc.

Mike Hillman: Well, it was a large video desk.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Mike Hillman: But it was about the size of a 33 to third record. And you would take that and you would be able to manipulate that and you could basically look at a door, you could look at the hinges, you would look at how the door opens, you would see it open, you could walk inside. It would be essentially, what we have today is the modern day version. Well, that was state of the art then.

Jon Becker: That's Google Maps virtual home tour.

Mike Hillman: Correct.

Jon Becker: In 1981, before it's probably anybody is even thinking.

Mike Hillman: I mean, it started to develop in 81 and became a reality in 83. Cause we were using it.

Jon Becker: But it's just, it's crazy to think, like you said several things there that you kind of just passed over as part of the story. But like, you're talking about the birth of flashbangs in law enforcement.

Mike Hillman: Oh, yeah, right.

Jon Becker: Arlie McCree being, if not the foremost law enforcement bomb expert in the country. Certainly one of them. The foundations of the Langford versus Gates suit, which is the seminal decision on the use of flashbangs.

Mike Hillman: Well, we didn't even discuss that one.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, and then pre scouting locations, pre practicing tactics. I mean, this is so much of what is today regarded as modern. And like, this is just what we do. You guys were doing literally for the first time.

Mike Hillman: Well, at that time, this was all cutting edge.

Jon Becker: Oh yeah.

Mike Hillman: And you know, going back to the Hanafi Muslim incident that took place in Washington DC, where we had two high rise buildings that were taken over at the top levels by the Hanafi Muslim at two different locations. We were trying to figure out how we were going to be able to essentially put assault components on each one of the buildings to be able to rescue hostages because they were separated. And so that they were separated across an alley.

And so there was training that we basically engaged in where we put ladders across an alley that was probably close to 5600 ft off the ground where we had operators that would have to carry explosive charges across to another building. And we were at that time looking at, you know, we had a. It wasn't even a one. It was a smaller helicopter that we were looking at to where we started to engage in fast roping and using that technique to be able to insert personnel or extract them off the top of a building.

We went back to the Vietnam area and used spy rigs to start trading our people. If we had to put them on a building and we had to get them off, we could put them in spy rigs and pull them off the building. So all of that was state of the art. And some of the technology that we started to garner from the military is 45 caliber suppressed weapons to where you could use that to take out streetlights or engage in being able to have a sniper that wouldn't compromise an entry because you couldn't hear it to be able to take out some sort of a terrorist that would be a sentry guarding a compound.

Jon Becker: So the beginning of suppressed weapons in law enforcement.

Mike Hillman: And so all of this was, you know, at the time, this was all state of the art.

Jon Becker: What I think is really interesting here is that like all of these things, suppressed weapons, aerial insertion, climbing cadres and extractions

Mike Hillman: And aerial extractions.

Jon Becker: Aerial extractions, things that are today regarded as de rigueur, you had to solve for the 84 summer games between you and the sheriff's department. You had to have a solution for every nightmare you guys could come up with. And in the process, literally triggered things that happened in the industries. Flashbangs, as an industry, developed largely because of those initial forays they did.

Mike Hillman: And it was quite a process with the development of flash bangs. I mean, Sid Heale did a tremendous job of writing the doctrine on how to be able to deal with flash and sound diversionary. But in that eighties timeframe, John Coleman, who retired from the sheriff's department and was in SCB, the special enforcement bureau, he basically started the National Tactical Officers association, and that was about an 82.

And his vision at the time was to bring tactical operators from all over the United States together to share experiences, because no one particular entity had all the answers. And it's very interesting in this business, in law enforcement, you can become very insular, and you need to be looking outward and being able to be much more collaborative and either collaborate or you die. Either one. You know, it's, you have to be able to see what other people are doing, and maybe you take the best from what they have and what didn't work so well and be able to combine it.

So the eighties were really a watershed moment, and it wasn't, you know, after probably the 84 Olympics, when I started to promote up through the ranks, that I finally came back to develop our special operations bureau to where I was able to really have now influence over our aviation component, our special weapons and tactics component, and be able to help merge them together.

So today we have a very close working relationship with our aviation and SWAT components and our K9s. I mean, you look at K9s, the process in the eighties, we started to move K9s into D-Platoon. It wasn't until later on that they became less than an anomaly to where canines were used to assist in searches, the use of breaching, explosive breaching. We had an opportunity to go to work in an off duty capacity to help train the special response teams for the Department of Energy.

Those are the groups that provide the security for the various nuclear sites. And tremendous technology came out of that. We were able to come up with the first two armored vehicles, V 100s, that were provided to Lapden in the eighties. We had the rock houses that we were dealing with, and we were using extraordinary means to be able to get into the rock houses. Extraordinary means that we were using either bar poles or we were taking and penetrating the location with a V 100 that had a long pole on it that ultimately was used to be able to take apart a house.

Jon Becker: That's, I think, another one of those moments that kind of inflected the entire industry. Right? Because prior to that, everybody was using the old bread trucks and the SWAT TV show where they had the bread truck. And the V 100, as far as I know, is one of, if not the earliest deployment of armor by a special tactics team. It's certainly one of the earliest deployments. Tell me a little bit about the environment of the war on drugs and this fortification, the idea behind fortifying houses so you could get rid of the evidence and kind of the tactics that evolved from there.

Mike Hillman: Well, let me go back, Jon, for just a second and touch on a couple of things. You know, everything we've talked about now has not come about without the risk of failure.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Mike Hillman: And the risk of failure means that there are some things that we learned the hard way. You mentioned the Langford V. Gates when we first started with use of flashbangs. Well, unfortunately, there was a flash bang that was used that ultimately caused the demise of a female on a high risk wart server, Dolores Langford. And so the evolution of all of this, going back to it, was a week after the Sibbense Liberation army incident at 54th in Compton, where we were pushing, shooting out of a helicopter because of what happened with Texas Tower and so forth.

And we ultimately ended up killing a commander out of it because we were operating without the expertise of what we were starting to develop on our own that later came about from the United States military. And so that some of this demilitarization nonsense that's come out has been something where I totally disagree with it, because the technology, the tactics, and the ability for us to save lives of individuals is a result of our relationship with the United States military.

Jon Becker: 100%. And what's interesting is throughout my career, since I started Aardvark in 1987, and so I've kind of been a witness to a lot of this evolution and fortunately have known a lot of you guys for a long time, there's this notion that all of a sudden the military said, oh, hey, here's tactics. And that has not been the case. It has been this give and take between the military and law enforcement.

Like, I can remember when we first became involved with DoD was for United Shield in Somalia. And the way I got involved was the sheriff's department pulled me in to meet with the Marine Corps. The conversation started with, what is non lethal? How do we do riot control?

And so you had the exact opposite. You had the US military going into these environments, whether it was Somalia or later into Afghanistan, where they had a multi threat environment, it was not what DoD was built for. And they had to figure out tactics. And frequently the way they figured out tactics was they embedded with law enforcement and said, show us how this happens.

Mike Hillman: You're absolutely right. You just spurred another thought. This is when Jeff Rogers and I were working together, my lieutenant and I was a sergeant working for him that, you know, originally we started off with. We went to the United States Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton to have them help us with, you know, education and what we call now ieds and things of this nature and, you know, pistol craft and rifle and shooting skills.

And later on, the special operations training group out of the United States Marine Corps came to LAPD and said, hey, we're going to go into an in extremist environment and have to start doing house to house type of searches, show us how to do entries. And so we started off with entries and we started off working with them. But going back to this eighties time frame, one of the, I mentioned that, you know, it was not without some errors that took place along the way.

One of the things that came out of the eighties is that we worked very closely in developing this crisis entry or hostage rescue tactics where we'd flood a location with personnel using speed, surprise and diversion that unfortunately took off and became the norm for a while.

So that when we started getting into this rock house business that you mentioned to where we started seeing, you know, the destruction of evidence, narcotics and things of this nature, that using speed, surprise and diversion in a crisis entry was something that was being used not only by us but by a lot of different agencies because it became the norm after the dynamic.

Jon Becker: Dynamic entry was how you just, that was just how you did it.

Mike Hillman: At that time, we still called it crisis entry, but it became dynamic entry. And as a result of that, a lot of people got hurt. And we started to re examine the fact that, wait a minute, why are we having to do this and putting ourselves at risk when we're going after narcotics, when there's other ways of doing it to be less confrontational? So I think that probably Lee McMillan probably had a chance to describe the limited penetration concept that started to redevelop some of that crisis entry. And now we have the container call out, and we have the breach and delay and limited penetration skills that we started to develop now.

But in the eighties, this was something where we really started to pick up on that, the use of Tems, tactical emergency medicine. The NTOA was starting to bring all of these skill sets together. We were doing a lot of aviation insertion extraction work with light observation style helicopters and so forth, and it became quite a, quite an industry.

Jon Becker: So talk to me a little bit about the early NTOA. John Coleman founds it. And then, you know, from my recollection, you know, shortly after there, I think of NTOA. I think of John Coleman, you and Ron McCarthy, as kind of the, at least from here, as kind of the prime movers who was there initially and who kind of built, you know, built it up to what it was.

Mike Hillman: John Coleman and Janice Coleman, husband and wife, built that whole organization. Ron and I and Jeff Rogers and you, because you were involved in bringing a lot of the technology together, were very instrumental in being able to help the NTOA get off the ground. And we started that particular process. You know, my role was to provide the training and the curriculum for the yearly five days and to be able to get the venue.

And, I mean, we had to rely on a variety of different venues. We used San Diego. We used Albuquerque, New Mexico. We used, I'm trying to think where else that we used. But primarily in the early days, those were the two entities that were willing to support us. And it was interesting because in the early days, I go back to San Diego. If it were not for decision makers at the highest level supporting the NTOA, I do not know where we would be today.

Jon Becker: I agree.

Mike Hillman: Yeah, because, and I left out Florida. We went to Hollywood, Florida, on one occasion, but in San Diego, San Diego sheriff's department provided us all the aircraft and the facilities and provided all their personnel. In Albuquerque, a private vendor provided us with an aircraft. Doe provided us with a venue. In Hollywood, Florida. They did the same thing. And a lot of these agencies had administrators and decision makers and chiefs and sheriffs who were putting their careers at risk.

And San Bernardino county sheriff, they gave us a helicopter and a pilot to be able to support the training. Nowhere else in the law enforcement community could any of this take place without the support of all of that. And John Coleman made all of that happen.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting because I remember very early in my career, NTOA became the catalyst through which everybody grew. Like, I can remember, if you advertised in NTOA's magazine, you got the page your ad was on, you never got the magazine. And I don't know whether I was the first civilian member of NTOA, but I definitely was early.

And I can remember every issue reading cover to cover, and it was debriefs and it was tactics, and it was the channel through which the community shared information. And you could watch the entire community elevate through the magazine, through the conference, through LAPD, LA sheriffs going out and doing training. And that was, for me, that was the point where it kind of caught fire nationwide.

Mike Hillman: It did. And the whole focus of what we were trying to bring together was this collaboration, number one. But the true skill set of a good tactician is not fighting the last war, fighting the last incident. But looking forward now, you have to look at some of the successes and lessons learned from what happened before and building what I would call a tactical considerations file to where you, as an experienced operator, can go back to, in my case, I can go back to the sixties, and I can pull up everything from the FBI Florida incident to the, to the GSG-9 operation to any of the major incidents, princess Gate, any of the incidents that we happen in LA, I could pull up pieces from it.

And if I see similarities, I'm able to say, okay, now this is what is an anomaly. This is what's a similarity. This is what worked well. This is what didn't. And I mean, those kind of – That kind of experience level is what John Coleman was trying to inculcate into the community by having debriefs so that, you know, you might not agree with everything that was done, but by the same token, you didn't have to agree with it. This is what happened.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, like, debriefs have always been a thing in the military, to look back at an event and evaluate tactics, evaluate what happened, and try to learn as many lessons as you could. What I think changed with the NTUA was the concept that you weren't only looking at your own debriefs, you were looking at everybody else's.

And I don't know when John saw it, and he may have seen it from the beginning, but this idea that, you know, a tactical command or a tactical operator is using paradigms to make decisions.

Mike Hillman: Correct.

Jon Becker: And those paradigms, you don't have to live through that event to be able to utilize that paradigm. That's like basic. Somewhere in the past, millions of years ago, some guy found a rattlesnake and tried to pick it up and got bit. And everybody since then has said, yeah, don't pick up a rattlesnake. But that's correct.

Mike Hillman: That's a good analogy.

Jon Becker: But not everybody had to go get bit. And I think that one of the things that the NTOA did, especially early on, was it was like, hey, Mike found a rattlesnake. Mike picked it up, it bit him. Don't pick up rattlesnakes. And that was the thing that I really loved early on is the depth of debriefs.

And honestly, that was the genesis for our tactical lecture series was, as a kid in growing up through the industry, going to debrief after debrief after debrief with our teams and realizing as you walked away, like, oh, I know, not to pick up rattlesnakes. And then you have all those paradigms. You have that Rolodex that. Now you look at it and you're like, it's not a rattlesnake, but it's snake shaped.

Mike Hillman: Well, you know, and that's really a good point. And it goes to the issue of what makes a good SWAT operator. And thinking back when I was brought into SWAT, it was, do you have an interest? Yes, I do. Can you run, do pull ups and push ups? Yeah, I can. Can you shoot? Yeah, I can do that, too. Can you think I can do that now, today, as a result of the eighties, Jeff Rogers had taken the selection process from Delta, from Seals, and from HRT. We sent officers back to the hostage rescue team to participate in their selection standards.

And today we have got the best operators that any agency could ever have. And the state of preparedness of these individuals where they don't pick up rattlesnakes and they learn very quickly and they're looking ahead, they're forward leaning, they look around corners.

When I say look around corners, I'm talking about thinking ahead and coming up with new dynamics and tactics. The state of the people that we have today is phenomenal. It's because of the selection process. You get what you select. And I'm sure that some others that you may interview will talk about the selection process for D-Platoon within LAPD. And it's very, very stringent, and it's been highly contested as a result of it.

But today, it's produced the best individuals you could ever have. When I was a deputy chief there, and I had those individuals under my command, I never worried about anything or any decision that they were going to make.

Jon Becker: But a lot of that evolved from all this work that was done early on. I think that's a good place for us to stop our first conversation and lay a foundation for a second conversation. Mike, I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with me.

Mike Hillman: Well, thank you, Jon, for at least you putting forth the effort to be able to share some of the experiences! We really appreciate it!

Jon Becker: My pleasure!