Episode 7 – Mike Hillman Part 2 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 second part of a two part series with Mike Hellman. 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 nationally recognized as an expert on leadership, crisis management, critical incident management, special operations, and a wide variety of other subjects.

In the first episode, we talked about the history and the origins of SWAT and Mike's career at LAPD. In this second installment, we'll explore Mike's career after LAPD, his views on leadership, critical incident management, tactical decision making, and the role of SWAT in the modern environment.

Mike, I appreciate you sitting down with me again to have this conversation!

Mike Hillman: Jon, thank you very much for at least inviting me and certainly what you're doing here with The Debrief program. I think it's just outstanding.

Jon Becker: Thank you so much! So, first time we talked about history today, what I'd love to do is get into kind of Mike's view, you know, Hillman's view on leadership. Why don't we start with character of a leader, personal conduct. Give me your view on what the essence of an effective leader is from a character standpoint.

Mike Hillman: Well, you know, leaders, some people would say leaders are born. I think leaders are developed, and it depends upon the character, the competence of an individual, and the willingness to really develop themselves. And from the day that I became a Los Angeles police officer, I learned a great deal about leadership because I worked with some really quality individuals.

I worked with some that were what I would call laissez faire type. And I was able to extract the good and the pieces that I really didn't want to apply. And the focus that I've always tried to deal with from a leader's perspective is, what does it look like through the lens of the police officer? And if I'm the leader I expect high performance and I expect individuals to be accountable, and I expect people to be able to look around corners and think ahead.

And so that the components of leadership, which I've always subscribed to have been at the essence of what I would call humility. Whenever I've gone to a class and I listen to somebody identify themselves as an expert, I immediately want to get up and walk away because as I said in the first episode that you talked about, there are no experts in this business. We're students of the problem.

And in 50 years of law enforcement, what I've learned is how much I don't know, and I pay attention and watch other people. But along the way, there's been a lot of lessons learned. The complexities of decision making, the impact of it, the political nuances of it, the right and wrong, the risk versus benefit, all of that comes into play in any of the decisions.

Jon Becker: It's interesting because the way you're speaking about it, it sounds like introspection is a big part of at least your personal philosophy. And as long as I've known you, that is certainly, if you were to ask me, hey, what is the characteristic that sticks out most about Mike Hillman? I do see you as somebody who spends a lot of time looking at their own behavior, looking at their own responsibilities and then trying to develop that. Do you think that's essential to develop, or do you think that happens naturally?

Mike Hillman: It doesn't happen naturally. You have to work at it, because there is a time where leading from the front and having the experience in certain cases to where you have individuals that are of less experience than you to watch them, have to go through the same things that you've learned the hard way. There's always a time where you want to say, you know what? Stop what you're doing. Let me intervene here and put you on the right course.

But if the situation is not a life endangering situation or going to result in some horrendous risk management issue, those people need to learn as well. And so that I can try to help maneuver them rather than say, stop what you're doing, I might say, did you ever think about this? I'm always worked in the leadership area as a suggestion. Have you thought about this? I've never had to.

You know, when I work your way up through any particular organization, you're positioned at various levels of responsibility. Just because you pinned sergeant Stripes on or put Lieutenant bars on or captain commanders or deputy chief or chief doesn't make you a leader. You have to earn the respect of individuals that you're dealing with, you have to be able to walk the talk.

I've never worked a day in my life because I've always, never forgotten where I came from. And it's important that leaders don't forget where they came from. As I mentioned at the beginning, you've got to look at things through the prism of the officers or deputy's eyes, and you have to hold them accountable. You have to expect that they're going to make, you know, good decisions. You have to trust in your workforce, and you have to hire and be able to select into an organization competent and highly skilled individuals.

And today in law enforcement, we talked earlier about some of the SWAT selection process. We have some of the best operators that I'll put up against any of the military or any other agency within the world.

Jon Becker: But it's interesting because you seem to have inherent a guiding principle. One of the things that I talk about in our culture centric leadership program, one of the things I talk about with my own people is the idea that there has to be a guiding principle to the organization.

In our case, it's protecting tactical operators. When somebody's new, they start with us. My first interaction with them, I tell them, do the right thing for the end user, everything else will follow. It seems that for you there is this inner compass of doing the right thing for the individual officer. It's kind of at the core of what you believe.

Mike Hillman: Well, it is. And to kind of address what you're bringing out here right now, leaders need to be visible. They need to be very competent and have demonstrated their competence. They need to be individuals that can react in a very decisive and reasonable manner during a crisis situation. And they need to be able to handle complex types of decisions. They need to be able to make decisions that sometimes their competitive nature of things, because of the complexity of an incident and because of the time component, they have conflicting priorities.

But that decision maker has to be able to provide a solid state decision making and guidance to subordinate elements who are in a crisis situation, are looking to that person to put them on the right path.

Jon Becker: What do you think the root of that decisiveness is?

Mike Hillman: I think that's a good question because it's based upon experience. It's based upon your thought processes and how individuals will make decisions. I think that when I look back on some of the supervisors that I've worked around, which have been just top quality individuals, but there have been some that the lesser experienced individuals may not have the depth and the hard drive to be able to bring out some of the necessary elements to make good, solid decisions, because whatever decision you make, there's a consequence for it or several consequences, and it may take you down the road in a rabbit hole that you don't want to be in.

So that the decisions that are made, you have to really think ahead. And I talk about that, I use that term a lot when I say to supervisors, you have to think ahead. What's this going to look like tomorrow? What's it going to look like politically? And some people would say, well, you know, we don't make crisis decisions based upon politics.

Well, that's not true. We do. We make decisions all the time based upon politics. And then the other issue is you have to start considering risk management. And some people will say, well, we don't make decisions on hostage rescue based upon if we're going to be sued. I get that. No question about it. But you can't be cavalier about it because we're based upon the objectively reasonable, this standard, and also totality of circumstances, Graham versus Connor.

So all of those pieces have to be brought into play. And we can't just go out here and have somebody come up to you and make a recommendation to you as a leader that would say, you know, hey, boss, what I want to try is this thermonuclear grenade and see whether or not it's going to bring the hostages out.

Jon Becker: Yeah, probably not.

Mike Hillman: Because if you don't have the experience to say, what are you talking about and why are we doing this, that's a bad decision.

Jon Becker: Mike, as I listened to you described that, the one thing that is missing in that whole thing is the leader's view of themselves, like their role, their career. I always say the difference between a manager and a leader is a leader does what's right. A manager does what's right for his career. I noticed that as you're talking about that, it's a very selfless approach. It's trying to get to the right resolution, it's trying to manage risk, but there's no thought paid to the effect on the leader himself.

Mike Hillman: Well, as I said, I've never worked a day in my life, which means that I've really enjoyed what I've done. There's been sad moments, obviously, but there has been a very positive interaction that I've had with personnel that I've worked with, and I've never tried to become an individual that was self consumed with their own abilities.

You know, I always looked at my strengths as being able to bring people together, and I looked at my strengths as being able to listen and to engage people that were a lot smarter than I was, to be able to offer advice and direction and to listen to them, and then to be able to implement it and then to reward them.

Jon Becker: Because in the end, one of my favorite things is that an effective leader gets the right answer. He's not necessarily the guy that has the right answer.

Mike Hillman: That's correct.

Jon Becker: And it seems that that's kind of also your view.

Mike Hillman: It is. It's very much, you know, the leader is there to be able to gather all of the information and to be able to accomplish the mission. And you never want to waste a good crisis. If you've got a good crisis, then let's capitalize on that. And many leaders that I've seen always become consumed by, oh, my gosh, I'm going to finish my career in a negative sense by if I make a bad mistake in this crisis.

Well, if you think in terms of that, you're going to lose. But if you think in terms of my job is to focus on the mission, develop the people that come in, listen to what the people have to say, and if people can give me good advice, and then I can basically make the decision on which path we're going to go on, then there's going to be a risk to it. But you can't be in fear of it.

If you're going to be successful, you've got to make that decision. In a crisis situation, people will always gravitate to the strong leaders that they see making decisions. I can think of many times where I've been in situations where there's been a lot of, quote unquote leaders, and that not much was happening. And I was blessed with the fact that I had good people that I was able to bring in and make the decision, to be able to proceed and accomplish the mission through them.

And the workforce that I had suddenly started developing, taking people away from other leaders, and they wanted to join this group because we saw that we were making progress in the success. But good leaders never fall in love with their own decisions. They always want to listen.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's an interesting point. You have to make decisions. Part of being a leader is being decisive. You have to make decisions. It's very easy as a leader to spend too much time, especially in your line of work. You don't necessarily have a lot of time to make decisions. But that means two things. One, you're going to make an imperfect decision, and two, if you stay wedded to it, you're probably going to end up in the wrong place.

Mike Hillman: You're going to end up down in a rabbit hole. You have in the decision making process, the Boyd cycle, but in the decision making process, you have to allow room for flexibility. Some people would say, well, wait a minute, he just said, do this now we're changing course.

Well, you may have to change course, and people need to understand that. And as a leader, if you're going to be the leader, you better declare yourself as a leader. I'm not suggesting that you declare yourself as the most significant individual in the world, but you are basically saying, all right, ladies and gentlemen, this is the direction we're going to go in, or declaring themselves as an incident commander, extremely important.

I can think of numerous incidents that I've been involved in where there are complex incidents that involve a lot of moving parts, or in a crisis situation where you have a lot of people coming in and trying to make decisions and influencing the workforce that are at a higher level, that it becomes very convoluted and takes away from being able to accomplish a, the mission to any degree of success.

Jon Becker: It's interesting you said something that I think is really key. You can't fall in love with your own decisions. Implicit in that is you have to be willing to change your mind. And I think that that is something that we have lost in leadership. Right?

Especially when you look at political leadership and politicized environments. We've gotten to a point where like, no, I made the right decision from the beginning, and they will ride that truck all the way back to the dump, even when they're wrong, rather than saying, I made a mistake. We need to go this way.

Mike Hillman: Well, yes and no. If you are in an extremist situation, which is life endangering, and you sit on a course of action and you have nanoseconds to accomplish it, that speed, surprise and diversion sometimes will be able to be your best friend. And it's better to be lucky in some cases than good with a real, real solid decision that you're going to be able to be decisive and say, we're going in this direction.

But the majority of decision making that is made by leaders involve time. They're not in a critical type of an environment. They're not in an in extremist type of an environment. And those are the kind of decisions that sometimes leading from the front may not always be the best. There may be servant leadership. You know, you look at today's leaders and today's workforce, you're dealing with millennials that are much more, much more versed in social media and the meanings of how to be able to transmit information than I ever was. And I will listen to those individuals. And sometimes you have individuals that are much more competent in some particular area than you could ever be.

Now, your role in that scenario is to guide those individuals. And at some juncture where there needs to be a why on the road that there has to be a decision made. That's where you come into play. But you have to be able to listen to what your workforce says. And the workforce may not always be right, but the good majority of the time they may be. And like General Powell said, you know, the 40% to 70% decision making, if you got 40% of the information, you're probably headed in the right direction, rather than waiting for 70% to make the wrong decision.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because it is this balance of decisiveness and certainty in your decision, but yet openness to others and their information and a willingness to question your own decisions retrospectively. And I think it's a very hard line to walk. What characteristics in a leader do you think are important in order to get there?

Mike Hillman: Well, certainly character is the number one piece because you have to be able to have the character that gains the respect of the workforce. You have to have experience, the experience that you can't just walk into a particular environment and accumulate experience.

Because people look at you, and when they look at you as a leader, they look at you to see, does that person walk the talk. You have to be able to have respect for others and treat people with respect. You have to be an individual that is going to hold people accountable for their actions. You've got to be able to reward good work. You have to be able to discipline those that may not necessarily want to engage in good work. You've got to be able to motivate individuals. You've got to be able to mentor individuals.

So that what I always looked at is that I wanted to make my workforce better than I could ever be when I exited. And that all of those skill sets of being able to listen, to be accountable, to be humble, and to be humble to the point to where you don't walk around saying, hey, look at me. You just do it like the Nike commercial.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because the root of all of that is humility, right? It is acceptance of the fact that you're not perfect. You're not going to necessarily make the decision, in my view, is as a leader, I am the least important person in the room. I'm the one with tasked with making a decision, but I am the least important person in the room because I know the least about almost every discipline. I'm a generalist as a leader.

Mike Hillman: Right, you are. And, you know, leaders are individuals that can bring about change. And change is very, very difficult to implement, especially in cultures, organizational cultures, unit cultures. It's interesting to look at some of the leaders that I've worked for that have come into an organization and made change and how they've done it.

And anytime that you're in an organization and you have to experience change, it's not pleasant because you may be pretty well set in your ways and you may have a pretty much paradigm that you are focused on. And then all of a sudden, somebody comes in and upsets the Apple card.

But the good news is that change is good. You know, I used to be in the organization. Well, in the organizations that I've been in, when you would promote from a police officer, a deputy, to a sergeant, that they would relocate you in some other position within the department so that it took you out of where you were at, exposed you to another environment and other personnel. And I always thought, you know, when I was a police officer in Metro and I got promoted to sergeant, I had to go to a patrol division.

Well, why can't I stay there? It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, because you learn other dynamics, and if you take somebody out of a specialized assignment, there's some good things in there, there that when they go to another assignment, they influence the rest of the department in things that they may not have been experienced in before. So it's a positive thing. But change is very difficult to implement as a leader.

Jon Becker: Well, and throughout your career, you have, I mean, you have acquired a reputation as a fixer, as a guy who could take on very difficult problems, very complicated problems, you know, challenging organizational cultures and make those resets. What is at the essence of that? When you come into a situation that is maybe not correct and are tasked with resetting a culture? Give me your process there. What's the first thing you do? How do you think through that?

Mike Hillman: Well, since I left the Los Angeles Police Department, I've worked at two other agencies. And the first thing that I did when I went into each of those agencies was, number one, to be able to make sure that everyone knew that I was a guest there. And I said that I'm a guest here and that I don't necessarily want to change any of the culture. I want to learn the culture, and I want you to share your culture with me so that I can learn it. But I'm going to need your help along the way. And I respect the culture that you have here.

Now in that process, as we go through the change element, that culture may not be the direction that needs to go for the community. And so that sometimes you're faced with decisions that are contrary to the culture where you came in and introduced yourself and said, here, I'm not going to change this culture.

So now you're faced with either I discredit yourself or you're in a position to where you can help make change. And so what I found to be very successful is that I found very competent individuals that I was able to work with, and I became visible within that workforce, and I did a lot of listening, and I would work very closely with, some cases, the various labor organizations within the organization to determine just exactly what their needs were.

And so as we went forward, I made sure that we had good communications up and down. And that as I started to think about things that we may want to move in a different direction that would impact culture, I would always make sure that other people were brought in to the decision making process to see the direction I was going at. Now, sometimes not everybody would subscribe to it, but that's what leaders have to do. They can't be everybody's friend. They have to be able to accomplish the mission and change the course of things.

You know, when it comes to personal appearance, I'm big into that for leaders, because the community hires us to be representatives of the community, but also to be very professional. And when you look at some organizations that may not have a uniform appearance, that is what I would call to the standard of impeccable, then a leader may have to influence that by bringing in other individuals and convincing them that it's not appropriate to walk around here with a Sam Brown belt that looks like you drug it to work instead of wore it, you know, and the standards of things like that, you walk, you. You are what you appear to be to other people.

And, you know, in a lot of ways, when somebody calls the police or law enforcement, they expect individuals that are going to be very professional in both in appearance and in manner. And so that if we have situations that involve disciplinary issues because people are mistreated, that's not a cultural issue, that's a disciplinary issue.

Some people would attach it to a culture, but it's a disciplinary issue. When you have members of an organization that are supposed to be in law enforcement and public service that come in and treat people with disrespect, then that's where the leader has to either go through some training or some disciplinary process.

Jon Becker: So, Mike, that kind of takes us to leading in this. Curry, like the modern environment, how do you maintain high standards in this environment?

Mike Hillman: Well, you've got to look at what is the modern environment? You know, when I started in law enforcement, the modern environment was the Los Angeles Police Department just came out of a corruption erratic and that the standards of appearance were actually very, very high. And Los Angeles Police Department was always known for very high standards in the uniform appearance end of it.

And as things start to evolve, a lot of this has to do with culture of an organization, but it also has to do with the leaders who are at the top. And in leading the modern day law enforcement professional. They've gone through the academy, individuals have. They've learned a great deal about cultural sensitivity, the nuances of the law of use of force.

And today, much different than one, certainly I came on. The requirements of the law in terms of use of force are much more stringent. We have a social media network now where information moves at light speed. We have such a distrust of law enforcement by the community as a result of things that have happened over since actually Ferguson and even before to where that there is a sense of distrust for law enforcement working in the community.

So that leaders in the community have to be able to collaborate, number one, with the community and be able to showcase their law enforcement agency as being sensitive to all of the nuances that we have today, all of the unhoused population or the homeless, all of the mental health issues that we have to deal with, all of the use of force issues, all of the body worn camera and in cardinal video that recounts every action of police officers, that now has become very public.

So how do we deal with that type of an environment? Well, you get what you select. And so that being very careful as leaders, when we as a police chief or someone that is in charge of hiring, you want to bring in individuals that are willing to follow the rules, bring in solid individuals that are of character and that you can trust on and off duty.

The biggest problem that law enforcement faces today, I think, is some of the off duty conduct of some of our law enforcement officers. And I think that begins with the leaderships in leadership and what we demand of our workforce. When I was on LAPD, I was known for being very hard on officers that got involved in DUI situations and were involved in off duty, traffic collisions and things of that nature, because that affects us all.

Everything that is done in another agency in this modern day environment, everything that's done by a police officer in another agency impacts us. George Floyd, how does that impact other law enforcement agencies? We've had a huge impact. It's changed all of how law enforcement does their business today. You know, and all of the actions that have been taken by individual law enforcement officers.

Individual law enforcement officers need to understand that from, whether they're from LAPD or from some other agency, that what I may do on LAPD could impact somebody from Washington, DC, or Ferguson or Minneapolis or any of those other agencies. And so the leader has to inculcate within the organization an understanding that we work for the community. And it's not all about me, it's not all about our pay. It's about what we can do for the community.

Now, you take all of that and you lay over the top of it because of the lack of trust and the defunding movement that has taken place. And the ideology of some of our prosecutors in coming in and going after law enforcement for use of force situations has put a chilling effect on law enforcement going out here and doing their job on a day to day basis.

So as an individual leader, it's important that we go out and we work with our individual police officers. Be visible, show them that we care. When you get into a police chief position, it's very easy to become isolated from the workforce because you become more politically oriented. You become involved in dealing with the county board of supervisors, you become involved in dealing with the police commission, you become involved in dealing with citizen action groups and all of that.

But when you forget the workforce and you don't go to briefings and to roll calls and communicate with your police officers and actively listen, you're not going to accomplish anything. A good leader, a good leader is highly visible. And not, like I said at the beginning, don't ever forget where you came from and look at the situation through the eyes of the police officer. But you also have to be able to balance that with what the community needs are.

And so this modern day leader has got to take all of these factors and motivate our police officers to go out here and not only answer radio calls, but respect the people that we deal with. And when I hear situations to where police officers really don't spend the time that they should of communicating with the public when they go to a radio call or some type of thing like that, I want to make sure that we focus on that because that's what we have to do. That's our job. Because when somebody calls the police, it's because they need the police for some reason, either in an emergency or some type of a cat is up a tree.

Well, just because a cat is up a tree doesn't mean that we just slough off the radio call. And I'm using this as just an example, but the idea is that we need to spend the time as police officers being able to help individuals. You know, I looked at a lot of the actions of what took place during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in a lot of the different cities.

And when you look at some of the accusations against our police officers for being discourteous and so forth, you know, when you take in the assaults on police officers right now, which I don't have the statistics, but in my time, when you'd make a traffic stop on an individual, you could expect that the individual was probably going to not only be scared, but would probably be in a position to. Wherever. You would have to explain to them, it's going to be all right.

Today, when a police officer goes up here and makes a stop, they're subject to that individual getting out of the car and going right to guns and shooting them. The assaults on police officers right now are horrendous.

So you've taken a modern day leader that's dealing with the threats against police officers, the community engagement that is anti police, the political engagement that doesn't trust police officers, and we wire them up with body cameras and we put them in a police car where they can't even carry on a conversation with themselves and be able to really communicate amongst themselves in a cogent way. Personally, because I'm retired, I think what we've done is gone overboard.

And I think that we need to come back and to really start to take a look at our workforce and to be able to support these men and women that are out here putting their lives on the line every day, it's very, very frustrating. But the modern day leader, the modern day leader has got to take all of that into consideration. Be visible, be a good leader, expect high performance, don't tolerate any nonsense, off duty, hold individuals accountable, and be out there in the community and balance that with the workforce. That's a modern day leader.

Jon Becker: It's interesting because you raised the point. The government regulates. The government governs by consent, right? We empower the government to regulate our behavior and to take our rights away when it is legitimately done under the scope of the constitution. And so there's always this tension between constitutionality and safety, between permission being granted by the community and government overreach.

And, like, you know, you look at the modern environment where so much is recorded, so much is public, you know, there's no hiding anything anymore. It's, I think, very challenging for a law enforcement leader to balance all of those plates at the same time and try to maintain the, I mean, there is a constant tension between law enforcement and the Fourth Amendment. We can be very effective at preventing crime. We can be very effective at honoring people's rights. But there is this tension that always has to be walked between protecting us and respecting our rights.

Mike Hillman: But that's a good thing.

Jon Becker: Yes, absolutely.

Mike Hillman: That's a good thing. Because when you say tension, I would like to describe it as there is a collaborative nature in a balance. And I'm trying to look for the right word ability to be able to synthesize both the Fourth Amendment and the actions of what the police officer has to do to keep society safe and the ability of the leader or the person at the top or the people all the way up through the chain of command, you need to go back over that constantly with our workforce, because what happens is when you take a police officer that's faced with negativism every day in the community, how do you take that and be able to shift him or her back to the mindset of, you know, I'm out here to serve the community, and, you know, not every conflict with the Fourth Amendment, if we have a use of this is something that is a leader.

I learned very early on that every, let's take a use of force situation, for example, the use of the baton and the use of the baton on an individual. It's alleged that the officer used an excessive amount of force with the baton. He used a pool cue jab, he used a power stroke, and that the individual was stopped for grand theft auto.

Well, what did the individual do that precipitated the actions of the officer? Well, that's the actions that the officer has to be able to articulate and that the officer has to be able to articulate that the reasonableness and the totality of the circumstances dictated the fact that this individual was attempting to either get away or to assault the officer, which caused him to have to use the baton.

Now, somebody in evaluation of that meaning within the department says, you know what? That's out of policy, and we're going to take that out of policy, and we're going to discipline that officer. Well, that's correct. If that's the case that they come up with. But not every situation that a police officer is involved in that involves a negative use of force is a disciplinary issue. It may be a training issue.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure.

Mike Hillman: And if we can train the officer not to do something like that, again, that is the way to bring about change. And I mentioned that change is very difficult, but the modern day leader has to balance how we discipline our workforce, if we have to, so that we can bring about change because we want, you know, to use your description, which I think is good, is this friction between the Fourth Amendment and the officers actions. There has to be a level playing field in there.

And that's why we call the objectively reasonable standard and the totality of the circumstances that the officer has to make that decision on. And whether you use. When you use force. Nobody likes how use of force looks, period. Yeah, it just…

Jon Becker: Nobody wins.

Mike Hillman: No, it just doesn't look right, and it looks bad. But sometimes that's the only way that you can use force to overcome resistance, prevent escape, and affect arrest, you know, depending upon what the subject does. So the upside of the body worn cameras is it's able to show what the officer had, was faced with he or she in trying to deal with an individual that was in conflict with the Fourth Amendment. And hopefully it turns out to the point where, see, I told you that the officers did what they were supposed to do.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because body-worn cameras, initially, everybody thought, oh, this is going to be terrible for law enforcement. It's actually been very good for law enforcement, I think, in a lot of ways, because it has shown the public that the actions they're taking are legitimate. And in the end, like, if you look at the founder's intent in the constitution, they were distrustful of the government. They restricted the power of government. Right. And they wanted that intentional responsibility to justify the actions. And I think that that's kind of created an environment where you can demonstrate legitimacy.

Mike Hillman: It has. And just a few minutes ago, when I was talking about that, the body worn cameras, you know, the gotcha type of attitude of some departments with body worn cameras, to me, is wrong, because there is. What comes out of a body worn camera is training issues, and certainly the behavior of the officers and behavior of the public and what the facts and circumstances were that the officer was faced with.

Now, it's not something where you take a body worn camera imagery and you just go out and look at the imagery and decided, oh, my God, the officer used the f word. Well, that was probably discourteous, but, you know, in the grander scheme of things.

Jon Becker: It may have prevented a shooting.

Mike Hillman: But that also might be a training issue.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure.

Mike Hillman: And not necessarily discipline.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you have to balance the actions against the intent. And I think we've kind of lost a little bit of that. We are implying and assuming negative intent so often in law enforcement now. And when the public are holding.

Mike Hillman: That's a media created issue.

Jon Becker: Yes, 100%.

Mike Hillman: That's a media created issue. And people in the public need to understand that. And that continues on the whole concept of what we have in this modern day environment with the social media right now is to sow dissension everywhere we can and distrust of the law enforcement community.

Certainly what happened in Minneapolis, I certainly don't condone, nobody else condones. And what happened there created a tremendous negative effect on law enforcement that's going to take us years to grow out of. But this whole media concept of the negative piece that you just pointed out is what is so destructible.

Jon Becker: I think part of the problem, too, is across the board, our evolutionary biology has been hijacked. Human beings are evolutionarily predisposed towards validating negative information and seeking negative information.

You think about if I said, hey, your neighbor's kid is going to Harvard, you go, hey, that's great. Your neighbor's kids got COVID. The dopamine system in your brain's like, pay attention to that. That's dangerous, right? That tree has good oranges is nowhere near as effective as that tree is poisonous. And we have allowed ourselves to be victimized by that in the food industry, in the media, we want to be fed negative information, and we tend to ignore positive information. And so what we've ended up with is an environment where everybody is just screaming about everything that's bad, and it creates this perception that the world is coming to an end.

Mike Hillman: Well, that's true, but this social media piece that we have right now, if you look at any of the DHS and FBI bulletins that are coming out right now, and you look at the disinformation that's been spread about COVID.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure.

Mike Hillman: And you look at the disinformation that's being spread about rumors involving law enforcement and the fact that you can get on a blog and absolutely castigate someone and use Facebook and Instagram to destroy someone. And in our modern day world, you know, my grandkids, they look at that. They look at that every day. And when you see that type of negativism that comes out of that and I get asked questions by my grandkids all day long, hey, papa, what about this particular aspect? And I say, don't believe it. It's not true. It's disinformation.

And, you know, I don't want to get into the politics of it, but in this last administration, we saw a lot of that flourish and the actions of social media. Being able to bring together large numbers of people in flash type of mobs is huge. And how does law enforcement deal with that? And law enforcement gets criticized for going into the social media world and monitoring that because it becomes an invasion of the First Amendment and their privacy.

And now we have a situation where if we can't, you know, position law enforcement in a fashion to be able to deal with preventing, you know, large numbers of people coming to a particular area to do destructive things, like in Santa Monica during 2020. How do we deal with that? In monitoring that, we get criticized.

Law enforcement get criticized for that, when in reality we should be looking at it and saying, you know what? We're leading at the front end of this, and we're trying to prevent something bad from happening in the community. And I don't mean to take just Santa Monica here, but this is an example of that particular group that came to Santa Monica in May of 2020 that ended up down in the promenade, that ravaged that whole entire area. That was an organized effort by social media. Individuals didn't know each other necessarily.

But when you look at the facts of that, there is a whole series of stolen vehicles that took place in northern California that were brought down here. And essentially, individuals that were attuned to committing this type of criminality, of smash and grab types of things, went to those stolen vehicles, ended up in Santa Monica.

Well, how do I know that? Because of social media. Because of social media. But by the same token, how do we get into the front end of that to prevent that from happening? And, I mean, that's happening all over. You look at what happened in Coleyville in Texas that was live streamed on Facebook for the first 40 minutes of an individual taking hostages.

And in the situation in Powwow with the individual, I think his name, I forgot his name now, but the synagogue that was basically taken over by a 19 year old that shot several people inside there, he was attempting to livestream that. Look at what happened in Christchurch, New Zealand, where they live streamed all of the execution of those people in the mosque. That's social media. That impacts the ability of us in law enforcement to deal with that every day.

Jon Becker: Well, and it's interesting because it's created this kind of movement and flare or this kind of fixation with militarization of law enforcement.

Mike Hillman: Well, that's a whole other issue.

Jon Becker: I'm kind of interested what your thoughts are on that.

Mike Hillman: Well, you know, first of all, this militarization of Swat was brought about post Ferguson. And when you look at some of the things that were brought out by a particular author that authored the book on militarization, I don't necessarily disagree with some of the things that he said in terms of, you know, police are used for warrant service operations on inappropriate types of operations where they should have done more due diligence, or they have used military equipment to the point to try to intimidate or harass individuals.

Well, you know, since obviously Iraq, I mean, you know, during the, with the 1033 program that we have right now, I mean, all the military surplus from the MRAPs to all of the other armored vehicles that we have has been a good thing for law enforcement. But it's the application of it in this modern day environment.

The leaders need to know when to apply a hammer, when to apply a screwdriver, and they need to know that not necessarily everything is going to include showcasing an armored vehicle with an individual in the top, with an AR 15 or an M four, that there may come a time where it might be something to where law enforcement would be pretty much in the shadows, but yet have some in presence to be able to communicate with individuals, to try to soften some of that.

Now, you look at probably what happened back in the 2017 era to where I'm looking at Phoenix. I'm thinking of Phoenix right now to where Phoenix PD had to deal with the president and several other cabinet members that came to the Phoenix Convention center. That obviously created a situation where there was a large number of people and they were very factionalized. They were factionalized. They were the Pro Trump, and that they were the anti Trump. And then you had the antifa that was in the middle of it trying to manipulate the rest of that crowd.

So how does law enforcement balance that Fourth Amendment with the use of force and to be able to deal with trying to deal with crowd control issues when the majority of the crowd are peaceful, but yet they're incited by a group of smaller individuals? And people would say, well, law enforcement should go in and remove those individuals. Well, wait a minute.

If they have a First Amendment right, just like everybody else. And so it's not quite that easy. And then you go into that group and just try to remove those disturbers, if you would, and all of a sudden now you have a situation where the rest of the crowd now becomes against the police because you've tried to remove these individuals, and now you have a much larger problem. So those are kind of decisive issues that a modern day leader has to deal with because everybody's watching. Everybody is watching internationally.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And there is this constant tension, like looking at a crowd control scenario there. You have a tension between the First Amendment and safety. Right? And the Fourth Amendment is certainly in play there. But there's this tension between First Amendment, the ability to, you know, to protest government, which is constitutionally protected, and specific groups that are targeting those kinds of events as an opportunity to, you know, to loot, to break things, to destroy stuff.

Mike Hillman: But that's not a First Amendment issue, right?

Jon Becker: Well, but it's – You're balancing the First Amendment against public order.

Mike Hillman: Okay. The First Amendment applies to individuals being able to voice their opinions, to be, if they want to speak out against the government, they can't. And they have the freedom of the press and they have freedom of speech. But when you have individuals that would like to hijack that First Amendment and become protesters that now go out here and start to not only protest but become looters, they move into the category of riotous.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Mike Hillman: And so when you move into the category of riotous, those are individuals that are beyond that First Amendment. But in that group that turns out to be the First Amendment peaceful group, you have some of the anti government individuals, if you would, or leftist groups that like to be able to come in and sow discord, they start to now interact with them. And you have police that go in to try to remove them or at some point try to remove them on the perimeter. Now, you've taken that entire crowd and basically it was peaceful and turned them into almost a riotous crowd.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting because there does seem to be a growing discussion around the tactics of law enforcement and the result that occurs, whether it's dynamic entry for search warrants or its intervention in crowds, there seems to be this difficult balance between acting early and decisively or being the catalytic event that starts the problem.

Mike Hillman: Yeah, that's true. And you look at certainly what's taken place in Oregon and Seattle here in the last year and a half to two years to where that Oregon was completely taken over by a bunch of left wing individuals. And that we have now a group of individuals that have become riotous, raped, pillaged, and plundered and burned, and that you have the federal government that's come in and tried to be able to defend the federal property while law enforcement has tried to be able to deal with all of those issues, and they've had to use force, and they've had to use kinetic energy projectiles and chemical agent.

And now, all of a sudden, there's injuries that have happened. Well, yes, that's true. There are injuries because nobody likes what the consequences of use of force are. And so now that, because there's been injuries that we now have the media and social media creating an atmosphere in this modern day environment, then we need to get rid of them.

We need to put a moratorium on them, and that we demand from the leaders of an organization to put a moratorium on the use of kinetic energy projectiles in any type of protest. You cannot use chemical agent. You cannot use kinetic energy projectiles.

Well, look what happened. And certainly in Oregon, because now, over the last six months, they had, because of the moratorium. Oregon, Portland in particular, was faced with a situation where in downtown Portland, that a group of individuals came in and ravaged the community and resulted in a lot of property damage. Of course, the community now says, where were the cops?

Jon Becker: Yeah, we as a species, we are very prone to wanting black and white rules, and none of these situations are subject to black and white. So really, the complaint, if you look at the modern environment for law enforcement, oh, there's too much militarization, there's too much kinetic energy, there's too much chemical agents, there's too much all these things, because it's easy to identify the technology and say, oh, the technology is bad, when really what they're complaining about is the application of the technology.

Mike Hillman: That's what I was trying to explain. Instead of, instead of where they used a hammer and they should have used a screwdriver, it may not call for being able to front an MRAP. It may not call for having a SWAT individual with helmeted up and essentially kitted up along with an M4. It may not call for that.

Jon Becker: But I think one of the challenges, especially in the modern tactical environment, with the. There is no national standard. I mean, NTOA has a standard. Not everybody follows it, but there is no national standard as to what constitutes a SWAT team or a SWAT mission. And I think that that creates this gray zone. Just as somebody who deals with thousands of teams.

You know, one of my friends has the expression, my daughter has a driver's license. I have a driver's license. Mario Andretti has a driver's license. We don't all drive the same. I think one of the challenges in the modern environment is the term SWAT has taken on such a broad connotation that now the mission set is not clarified.

Mike Hillman: Well, that's going to be agency specific. And I think back to when we first defined what SWAT missions were, because we had to educate the workforce in LAPD as to what the SWAT missions. And essentially we said that if an individual has committed a criminal act, is suspect thereof, is possibly armed, secreted in a position of advantage, affording cover and concealment, and refuses to submit to arrest.

Those were the criteria that we used on LAPD to say that would call for a SWAT type of component. Now, forget about the negotiations piece, but that was early stages. So in some agencies now, SWAT is a much smaller component. FEMA's tried to type it like they would in a fire truck or fire, yeah, into a fire cabin with four types. And when you don't have SWAT agencies that work together all the time in smaller entities, even some of the regional teams, it's doomed to failure because you have to be able to define clearly what the capabilities of them are.

In some cases, the FBI local field offices, they can use sound and flash diversionary devices, but they can't use chemical agent, and they can't use aviation assets to support them. HRT can. So that limits some of the capabilities of them. Well, some other smaller agencies may not even have any type of capability for that.

When I look at some smaller agencies that have maybe a ten person SWAT team that have a small municipal airport and they're out trying to train at a large international airport on tubular assaults for aircraft, why are we doing that? That's not within their mission set. And what are we going to use them for in terms of warrant service? We have low risk, medium risk, and high risk warrant types of services.

And if you can avoid having to do any of the high risk type of warrant, I to where you can contain and call out or to set up a surveillance and to be able to wait for the individual to come out, then lock it down and go in and secure the location, take the suspect into custody, that avoids confrontation.

And when you look at the statistics of LAPD, in terms of their use of deadly force, what is it less than 1% or 1% of the time, of the number of incidents that they've had over the years that have resulted in any type of use of force, that's the type of thing that we want to engage in. That's the responsibility of the modern day leader is to oversee those types of decisions.

What are we training in and why are we training in that particular area? What's the mission set that we need for this particular agency? So a small agency that has maybe 60 police officers and maybe 10 or 12 SWAT operators, do we need to have a coordinated target selection? Do we need to have a hostage rescue capability?

Probably not. Probably not if we're dealing with a residential environment, but if we have to do a contain and call out or a breach and delay and a warrant service to be able to surround and call out, that's probably what the capabilities of them are, to provide special weapons and tactics to support whatever the mission is.

Jon Becker: So, Mike, it sounds like a lot of time, it's not technology. It's nothing. The concept of special weapons that creates the issues. It's mission set definition. It's what kind of mission should we deploy technologies or tactics on? And that mission creep and mission confusion, kind of creating these events that then create bad law. If you were the chief of a smaller agency, how do you avoid that?

Mike Hillman: Well, let's go back to your statement, and I totally agree with what you're saying here. There is a, the hierarchy of, that goes to the leader of this small agency that has to be able to define a need for that particular discipline. Okay, so if an agency had a series of domestic disputes that have ended up in barricaded suspects and that they don't have the resources of being able to have maybe the county sheriffs or some other allied agency to come in and help them, then they may have to develop a mission set that would go to dealing with a barricaded subject type of situation.

And so then you get into, if there is a need, then what do we need to do to fill that need? And what are the limits of training to meet that need? Do we need to get into tubular assaults? Do we need to get into aviation operations? Do we need to get into bomb squad operations? Probably not. But sometimes the issue that comes up is that leaders will forget there is a specific need versus a nice to have.

And you'll have some people that will try to influence the leaders to say, hey, boss, it would be nice if we could have a SWAT team and that we can be able to stand on our own and do what we need to do as a SWAT unit, when in reality the leader needs to say, I don't think so. And as much as you would like that, number one, I don't see the need, and I don't see that we need to train to that particular level.

So I get into the situation where the leader needs to be able to define the need and then to define the mission and put together the policy statement that says, this is what you will do to be able to resolve this issue. This is the amount of training time that I'm going to give you to build the skill sets necessary to do that. And then, wait a minute. Then the leader needs to be able to influence the community as to, this is the capability that exists and why.

Jon Becker: So it's interesting because all of that takes place on the front end of that problem and not on the back end of that problem. And, you know, one of the things that we talk about in my job is requirements. It's very easy to find technology and apply technology and go looking for a place to run that technology. You saw that initially when Taser first came out, it was like, oh, my God, it's the new tool. Everybody's got to have it. We're going to use it. And all of a sudden, you started seeing bad law being made because they were using it in applications.

You know, people in swimming pools and on roofs and other applications where you're like that. That probably wasn't the best plan. And what you see in the military, actually, in the way they think programmatically, is they define a requirement. So out of the gate they say, we need to be able to do X, Y, and Z.

Mike Hillman: Well, that's what I was referring to with the need that needs to be done by the leader. They need to define what the need is, or as you said, the requirement.

Jon Becker: And then I guess from a leadership standpoint, you also have to then be willing to defend the scope of the requirement and not allow it to creep, which in the case of tactical situations can lead to some unpleasant results, like having to pull your team off and call another team, having to, you know, having to bring somebody else in to complete a mission. You know, those kinds of things.

Mike Hillman: Well, when you defend the requirement or the need and you identify that there's an anomaly, that these guys have gone beyond that, then you need to put a stop to it. That's why leaders, you know, this whole military 1033 program with the military acquisition of equipment really got out of hand because leaders were not paying attention to the screeners from these various agencies. They were getting various equipment from the military.

I mean, it's fine to be able to get a couple of Ranger Polaris types of off road vehicles to be able to use for parades and things of that nature, but do we need to have M14s do we need to have M203s? Why? Because in the modern day environment, we don't need that type of capability that comes from the military.

Well, I mean, I'm being general in my statements here because, you know, a lot of the sophisticated weaponry that we have now do not include the M is a great weapon, but that's not what I'm referring to. But some of the equipment that is getting traction within the demilitarization of SWAT includes the mraps. Well, the thing that people forget about the mraps, that it's a high profile vehicle and it's an armored vehicle.

But what happens in California if we have an earthquake that becomes one of the most valuable assets that we can come up with, especially when you have collapsed buildings to be able to protect the officers that are going in and providing rescues. So it has that type of application and that needs to be put out by the leader. It doesn't need to be put out necessarily by the media that says, okay, here's another example of an over militarization of a local law enforcement agency because that leader needs to define that requirement or that need for that particular piece of equipment.

And one of the things that we got to tell our young SWAT officers about is that technology is not an end all and be all. It's certainly, you got to have communications, you got to have optics, you got to have all of this. But by the same token, you got to be able to operate off the trunk of your crown Victoria or your Ford Explorer when everything quits.

And all of a sudden all you have is a good old ingenuity of the tactician and the ability to be able to maneuver and to be able to get to where the suspect is. Technology is not an end all and be all. It's a great enhancement and it's a force multiplier, but it's not everything.

Jon Becker: That's fantastic! I think I'd like to go through a couple of quick, rapid fire questions with you, just kind of one sentence thinking, you know, off the cuff. What do you think your most important habit is?

Mike Hillman: Consistency.

Jon Becker: Give me a little more on that. What do you mean?

Mike Hillman: Leadership. Consistency in leadership. Be fair, impartial, and do the right thing at all times.

Jon Becker: What do you think the difference between a leader and a manager is?

Mike Hillman: A leader is somebody that's out front working with their individuals and earns the respect of the workforce. The manager is a positional piece.

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

Mike Hillman: I haven't read a book on leadership.

Jon Becker: What is the most profound memory of your career.

Mike Hillman: Attending 76 funerals at police officers that made a mistake or their lives were taken without due cause.

Jon Becker: What keeps you awake at night?

Mike Hillman: Knowing when I was on the Los Angeles Police Department that I had 7000 police officers that had guns.

Jon Becker: And that you were responsible for it. I think that's a fantastic place to stop. Mike, I so appreciate you doing this with me. I learned so much.

And again, thank you so much!

Mike Hillman: Oh, thanks, Jon, very much! Thanks for everything you're doing! I appreciate it!