Bank Robbery & Police Ambush Part 2: Lessons Learned

Jon Becker: On June 28th, 2022, the Greater Victoria Emergency Response Team, also known as GVERT, was working as a quick response team for a narcotics surveillance, when a call went out of an active bank robbery in progress. Two suspects, covered almost entirely in body armor, and heavily armed with SKS rifles, were robbing the Bank of Montreal branch in nearby Saanich, British Columbia.

The suspects had herded all of the bank patrons and employees into the back of the bank, and then proceeded to wait more than 12 minutes in the entrance vestibule of the bank, hoping to ambush and kill responding police officers.

In accordance with their policy of remaining covert until suspects left the bank to avoid creating a hostage situation, responding officers from Saanich, Central Saanich, and nearby Victoria PD descended on the area and inserted into covert locations around the bank.

The GVERT team left the surveillance and headed immediately to the bank. As they arrived on the scene and gained situational awareness, the two male subjects covered head to toe in armor, and armed with SKS rifles with high-capacity magazines exited the bank. The team raced into the parking lot in their surveillance van, deployed a flash bang, and began to exit to affect arrest. As they did, the suspect nearest the van calmly turned and opened fire on the van.

In just a few seconds, six of the seven operators in the van were shot, some multiple times, all of them were injured, and at least one of them was at immediate risk of death.

The remaining team members and Patrol officers returned fire, eventually killing the suspects.

What transpired over the next few minutes can only be described as a heroic performance by team members, and an army of Patrol Officers, and other First Responders, who quickly transitioned from taking the suspects into custody to searching for a possible third shooter, clearing the bank, freeing the hostages, dealing with numerous improvised explosive devices that they located, and most importantly providing care and transport for their injured teammates.

In this episode I sit down with four members of the team and talk about their lessons learned from the event. I hope you enjoy this episode with the Greater Victoria Emergency Response Team.

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.

Page 2 of 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!

Jon Becker: Guys, thanks for being here with me. I appreciate you sitting down with me.

John Musico: I know well thanks. Thanks for having us.

Jon Becker: So I mean this is a traumatic event, it's a significant event. There are a lot of lessons learned in any event like this, both positive and negative. What I would love to do is kind of sit down with you guys and just talk through what some of the lessons learned and the takeaways are here.

Why don't we start with Patrol? Because the initial response to this is Patrol. You guys get pulled in after the event kicks off. Let's start with kind of the good. It strikes me that the patrol response here is pretty amazing.

John Musico: Absolutely, it's an interesting experience where Patrol is always going to be your First Responders to these critical incidents.

Jon Becker: Sure.

John Musico: We are trying to instill a lot of our training that we receive within an Emergency Response Team kind of realm into the fundamentals of Patrol response, so that we have this collaborative approach that when we are arriving on the scene as ERT that they've already started to set up the foundation that's going to assist us when we're starting to help kind of solve this problem as well.

So that leads us into some of the really good takeaways, that Patrol was able to accomplish that day, and it is identifying the call classification and then what the proper SOPs are going to be to how to resolve that from their capacity. And they launch right into that SOP, or the Standard Operating Procedures of a bank robbery.

So one of the benefits of that and I think that assisted us, is that they made that decision between covert and over containment. And they elected to remain covert because the whole strategy there is to allow the robbery to take place, allow separation between the suspect and the victims or the hostages inside the bank, and then to challenge the suspects once they leave the bank.

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Jon Becker: Yeah, it's an interesting choice. I mean it's a bold choice. You've got a bank robbery going down, and it's a bold choice to say, “We're going to remain concealed to allow the robbery to complete and the suspects to leave”.

Now in this case because the suspects are planning to ambush you, I don't know at what point Mike Bainbridge's hair starts standing up on the back of his neck but the suspects aren't leaving and so we now know looking back at it they were waiting for the first cops to get there and kill them. So by going covert, it complicated their plan a little bit.

John Musico: Completely agree.

Damian Poloo: Now I think what what Patrol did well was setting up containment. They had an rest team set up at one location another location that had eyes set up. So they're they set up containment. They were making observations and relaying those calls over the radio, so everyone driving in knew what they were coming into.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because one of the patrol members, he's got concealment but he doesn't have a cover. He's hiding behind a sign in the parking lot or something.

Damian Poloo: That's right.

John Musico: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah that's a brave move.

John Musico: That starts to feed into another point or another takeaway from the Patrol response, which is we need to be treating these calls as if they're real in terms of the information that's coming in at the time, and then we just kind of sequentially work through these operations. And what I mean by that is, we all come with a lot of experience and sometimes that experience can lead you down to start to already preplan on how this thing's going to resolve.

Jon Becker: Yeah, well in this case it was only one caller. The Patrol call is a single person calls and reports a guy with a gun, right? Did the bank alarm never go off?

John Musico: Not that I'm aware of.

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Jon Becker: Yeah, so that's really easy to go “This is probably not real, I'll just roll up to the front of the bank and see what happens .”

John Musico: And that's the big takeaway because within our jurisdiction, and the community that we police the traditional bank robbery is a suspect going into a bank handing a note to a teller demanding money usually some type of indication that they're potentially in possession of a weapon and then leaving the bank after a short period.

So that's why everybody's said, “Okay well if we got a hold off alarm or this is a bank robbery that's how it's going to unfold. They're going to walk in, they're going to put a note they're going to get some cash and then they're going to leave and then we'll take that opportunity once they leave to challenge them and to arrest them”

But you're already kind of pre-planning how you think that this thing's going to end, and then you start kind of manipulating the information and that starts to take you down a little bit of a dangerous road.

Jon Becker: Yeah, so you come to the conclusion…

John Musico: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And then make the facts fit the conclusion. And in this case, that would have been dead Patrol officers let's just call it what it is. They're waiting in the vestibule of the bank for that first Patrol officer to come rolling into the parking lot, and he's going to get ambushed.

John Musico: Yes, and that's the good and bad. The good is that they use the right tactics, they're remaining covert, they're making key observations, and then feeding that into the terms of the information and the intelligence that we're receiving.

The bad thing is that that becomes the focus. So when we start to go through some of the takeaways in terms of emergency response and our experiences, is that we have to stay alive to mission transition. So when it's not starting to fit the fact pattern in terms of your typical bank robbery, we need to be re-evaluating and be comfortable to transition between call classifications.

Jon Becker: Yeah, ‘cause I don't know if you listen to Mike Bainbridge in the episode, there's a point he said the hair starts to stand up on the back of his neck, and it is clear that this is not a traditional bank robbery. Yeah, it is then you've got to adapt to what's actually taking place on the ground.

Page 5 of What else have we got from Patrol lesson learns?

Damian Poloo: So there was quite a delay in the patrol supervisor coming up with react plans, just putting out those Critical Incident Responses. Given the amount of time, roughly 16 to 18 minutes, those plans should have come out just so everyone knew their roles and responsibilities and had some basic form of plan to intervene should a certain action take place. So there's a huge delay in that.

Jon Becker: I can see where you'd get sucked into it though.

John Musico: Easily.

Jon Becker: You expect it to be one or two minutes and the guys are leaving the bank and it's nothing's happening, nothing's happening, nothing's happening. And you can see where it would be seductive to not take action until what you expect to happen happens.

Damian Poloo: Exactly.

John Musico: And that relates to our first point which is you've already kind of preprogrammed how you believe that this is going to resolve, and now you're just waiting for that. And in doing so you're starting to waste valuable time, time where you should be using to your advantage in terms of your planning.

And if you're noticing you're standing around and you're not doing anything, then that's a key indicator for me that “Hey, I need to be going back over this fact pattern and reassessing continuously”.

Make no doubt about it, there's a ton of amazing things that happen this day and we are nitpicking at it.

Jon Becker: Oh yeah.

John Musico: To be able to walk away.

Jon Becker: Yeah, this is absolutely you went 4:0 and won the Stanley Cup. What mistakes did you make in the game? This is a situation that should have ended with a lot of dead cops and didn't.

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John Musico: Yeah, and I think just to piggyback on what Damian's saying here when we're talking about managing Critical Incident Response and we're talking about these triggering events or what what can happen and we're always looking at those three big plans in terms of a breakout, a surrender which is the best opportunity for us to arrest the person or an Immediate Action plan.

So, if we have something where now we have to go in, how is that going to happen and what's that going to look like? So when we're talking about Critical Incident Response and planning as a patrol supervisor those three plans are what I need immediately or what the members on the ground are going to need because things we know change rapidly, and you have to already have these plans in place and that communication in place so people know how to properly respond.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What else?

John Musico: We keep coming back to it but I'll layer on top of it which is when we're starting to plot some of your resources because we're so focused on our normal SOPs for a bank robbery. When we're putting our resources or we're asking members to deploy and put themselves in positions, they're doing it from that perspective.

So when we talk about okay we've got this bank robbery going on and we have members utilizing concealment versus cover, and if we could have some better information for them or that ability to kind of reclassify the call if necessary and be able to kind of assign roles and responsibilities, and the members can make better decisions and they'll be utilizing themselves or positioning themselves in positions of cover.

So when the members or the suspects end up exiting the bank that they're in a position of cover if they need to provide overwatch, lethal overwatch that they can do that as well, rather than having putting themselves in a position of concealment where if they challenge the suspects, they've nowhere to go, no egress, and it's a very dangerous place to be.

Jon Becker: Yeah, this bank is particularly challenging also, right? It's a long skinny parking lot along Main Street where the only place you can get to that's mildly safe. It's kind of the end of the parking lot, but now you're also farther away.

There's not having gone up there with you guys and walked through it. There's not a lot of great cover right close to the bank. It's all kind of away. So you can see again, you're going to fall into a well, I want to be able to see, and now you've moved into a position of concealment, but not cover. In this case, we know there's a long gun involved.

John Musico: Right.

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Jon Becker: How long is it before we know there's two long guns involved?

John Musico: Oh my gosh, the patrol members--

Jon Becker: You guys get there?

John Musico: Yes, because by the time we are arriving, Patrol members have been able to confirm that there's multiple suspects, so two suspects at at least, and both of them are in possession of long guns.

Jon Becker: Got it.

John Musico: Yeah, so that information for us is critical which is one of the key takeaways which is they're updating the air, in terms of the police radio, and they're providing that to us so that as we're coming in I said, “Okay we got multiple suspects, both are armed”. That's a critical piece of information.

Jon Becker: Sure. So let's talk about comms for a minute because comms is always a problem. I have been to conservatium in my career thousand debriefs and I've never been to one where they said, “The comms were awesome and everything worked great”

It is always, “Comms sucked and we had problems”. Talk to me about the coms.

Damian Poloo: Yeah, guys are bonking trying to get on the radio trying to give some critical info, but can't, and just waiting, so there's delays in that. People are seeing different things at different times. At one point we got a hot mic which was…

Jon Becker: Every time.

Damian Poloo: A lot of people heard what happened that day, there were shots fired and people heard that. And that delayed some requests for some resources like EHS. So we had that going for us.

John Musico: Communication is always a factor, right, because you're in these critical incidents that are rapidly unfolding. You have several police officers there who are all Page 8 of seeing these critical kind of updates and information right in front of them. And everybody, when you don't know what to do, you want to get on your radio.

Jon Becker: Yeah, everybody wants to share what they see, right?

John Musico: Share what you see. It's important.

Jon Becker: It's not necessarily that helpful.

John Musico: Absolutely. So some of the key takeaways that we started to see in terms of being able to mitigate that type of challenge in terms of communication was assigning actual element leaders to different pods of police officers that would be responsible for communication.

Jon Becker: Got it.

John Musico: To clean up the air, to clean up the communication so that now we can get effective communication over the radio rather than bogging that entire channel down.

Jon Becker: Yeah, so a designated commo guy. We're a four-man element. “Okay you're going to be the combo guy. You do all the communication, we're not going to.”

John Musico: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I guess that's probably not intuitive, because like you said everybody has a radio.

John Musico: Yes.

Jon Becker: They all want to use it.

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John Musico: Yes and everybody wants to share things.

Jon Becker: But you can see where Damian is sharing information that is not that useful and I can't get out and the suspects are coming out, and I'm trying to…

John Musico: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Yeah that would be very frustrating. What about from an ERT standpoint, from a team standpoint? There were a lot of things that went right and wrong here. Give me a kind of the first take on that?

John Musico: I think one of the key takeaways for me as it relates to ERT is just understanding these very simple philosophies that are going to aid in decision-making when you're under duress. And what I mean by that is when we're going to these training opportunities, and going to these incident debriefs, we talk about these philosophies our safety priorities and call classification. All these things make it much easier to make rapid decisions under duress. And the example is these safety priorities commonly referred to as our ‘Priorities of Life’.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

John Musico: And why that's so important here when we're talking about the SOPs for a bank robbery versus a hostage taking. And as soon as I hear this hostage taking as the call classification, that makes it easy for me to make some decisions because I go right to our safety priorities, and I fact check all my decisions against these priorities, and they're so simple. So we know that hostages, innocent people, civilians are at the top. We know police are there, and then we know the suspects are there.

Jon Becker: Those might have been too close together. It's hostages - cops - suspect.

John Musico: But I'll put a caveat on that, which is, and I always do because I think it's an important thing for us to be able to talk about, which is I'm not ranking people's lives over one another. It's all about control.

So where I'm comfortable put the suspects at the bottom is because they have the most control on this scenario. They can give up, they can surrender at any given time. So who has the least control over the hostage because they're being held against their will regardless of location and circumstance.

Page 10 of So going back to our point here and talking about these safety priorities-- and that was one of the great things that the Rodancio ended up doing that day, is that as this became a little bit more protracted, he reclassifies this call as the hostage taking right as I'm rolling up on this bank.

And as soon as I'm hearing this, I said, “Okay I've got two suspects both armed. I've got 22 hostages in the bank.” I agree with his assessment. This is a hostage taking and now I'm going to base all of my decisions and my tactics on those safety priorities.

So what I'm willing to do is I'm willing to risk the lives of the police members to save the lives of the hostages. Versus defensive tactics where we're going to utilize time, distance and cover and we will do everything to promote officer safety on a barricaded kind of suspect operation.”

Jon Becker: That may be the best I've ever heard that articulated. Because ‘Safety Priorities’ and ‘Priorities of Life’ was what it was originally called, and then that hurt people's feelings, and it became Safety Priorities, but I've never heard it classified that, with who has control, which is a very good way to do it. It's interesting because, you said, they reclassify this as a hostage taking, okay, well now they're separated right.

As they're leaving the bank, they're separated from the hostages. So if it's a bank robbery and you want them to leave to not create a hostage situation, you might allow them to just leave and then deal with them as they pull out. Whereas, because this is a hostage taking, it is worth placing you between them, and the ability to return to the bank, which then drives a different decision-making process.

Damian Poloo: That was one of the other things that we got when that call was reclassified as we're coming to it because when it's reclassified as a hostage taking we now know that in a hostage taking we want to exploit ‘Windows of Opportunity’.

So then John is immediately into a place where he's making a plan hastily, that we can exploit a window of opportunity right now if it comes up. And that's ultimately what ends up happening is we have this really quick plan, so that we can exploit a window of opportunity, and we end up getting that window of opportunity and we only.

We’re on the ground for about two minutes, and a minute of that we're trying to communicate with Patrol, let him know “Hey, we're with you”. So, less than a minute, it was hasty and then yeah we can't control when they come out but they came out and the decision was to move in, and we weren't letting those guys get back in the bank.

John Musico: Although it's a very difficult decision to make to launch a takedown that has such complexity and gravity to it, where the risk is so high, just go right back to your safety priorities and fact check it. So every problem that I was coming up with was a police problem and not a hostage problem. So I knew that us moving in and initiating that takedown was respecting those priorities. I wasn't creating an inversion by putting our safety above the safety of the hostages.

Page 11 of So I knew I had fact checked it. I said, “This is good. It's going to be high risk.” And I can offset that risk from a police perspective based on proper equipment. We got ballistic, helmets, ballistic carriers, we've got long guns, we've got access to some of the best tools and equipment that law enforcement can offer, and then we layered on top of that have some of the best training.

So even though I'm going to make a decision that's going to be high-risk for the police, we're going to offset it because of all those things. I've respected our safety parties, which is ultimately let's save the lives of those hostages.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that is a brilliant point, it's interesting because it is that reclassification as you're in route that is going to realign from “Hey, we're just going to wait and see what happens to oh separation, move and then requires that deliberate action.” It's interesting because you talked about complexity. Certainly a pet ambush coming out of a van with two guys with SKS's is not on the list of stuff you want to have happen. That's pretty far down the list but it is above entering a bank with 22 hostages and two guys with guns.

Damian Poloo: Exactly.

Jon Becker: It is significantly simplifying the problem. Although, it is terrible, it is way less terrible than if those guys run back into the bank, and now you're trying to engage them amidst 22 hostages when they have cover and concealment.

Damian Poloo: Yeah.

John Musico: Because what are we ultimately striving for on a hostage rescue, which is your highest likelihood for success, is going to be some type of open area or sniperinitiated assault, and then you layer that with a rescue.

So by having the suspects exit the bank, a massive window of opportunity where you have that separation and this is now time for us to get to work.

Jon Becker: Was there thought given to getting out of the van and approaching on the ground versus kind of a van ambush?

Damian Poloo: That's one of the biggest things that was rattling around in the side of my head there, which is okay if we debus at this point because we are staged probably about 150 meters away from the entrance of the bank. If I debus the members what I was worried about because there had been a limited amount of planning up to that stage about the patrol NCO, nobody knew who was going to make contact with the suspects, Page 12 of who was going to challenge them. And I was fearful that one of the patrol members was going to challenge them, and what was going to result was that scenario of them turning and pushing into that bank.

Jon Becker: Or killing the patrol members.

Damian Poloo: Or getting into a significant shootout.

Jon Becker: Getting into a significant shootout with a less trained and less equipped force.

John Musico: And it's ultimately giving them more time to better their decision-making.

So I said to myself, “I can get into that lot faster inside of a vehicle than I can on foot”.

We were prepared for a pedestrian takedown in that vehicle, and so I saw that tactic and our ability to intervene before anybody else could as our highest likelihood for success, and then that's what drove that decision.

Jon Becker: Yeah it makes a lot of sense. You guys that day were working a narc file where there was a distinct possibility you were going to do a pet ambush anyways, right?

So it's like that's in your mind, the team knows how to do that. You're prepped for that.

John Musico: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And as you said, the other thing with this bank is, if you debus at where you are, you've got to move past all the glass on the side of this bank before you're going to turn the corner and be able to engage a suspect. If they're just looking out the window, that was one thing when we did the drive-through or the walk by the bank, and went inside the bank, it's as if they have glass everywhere.

Damian Poloo: Yeah, three sides of that building are glass. They have the Tactical Advantage, yeah.

John Musico: The one thing with our response there that we don't know at the time, but this is hindsight, which is the complexity of the problem would only exponentially increase with each deviation from what we ended up doing.

Page 13 of What I mean by that is what we don't know is that their car is parked in the lot with a huge arsenal of firepower, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and multiple explosive devices. So if I allow them to get to that set of wheels, that's a hard problem for me to solve.

Jon Becker: Oh yeah that was going to get ugly. If they left that parking lot, it was going to get ugly. All the IDS they had that could have gotten nasty.

John Musico: I think that ultimately that was their objective which they honestly believed they were going to get from the exit point on that bank to their vehicle, and be able to set up and then have contact or be able to get into a shootout with police from their position of cover where they're quite well equipped. Then the secondary problem was the one that we've already talked about, which is they turn and go back into that bank.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

John Musico: For me, and the six guys in the van, make an emergency entry on an unknown location with 22 hostages inside a bank that's filled with glass, that's a really hard problem for me to solve.

Jon Becker: Yes, that is on the ‘this is terrible’ ‘this is more terrible’.

John Musico: Exactly.

Jon Becker: That is pretty close to this, it is about as terrible as they can get. What about the actual tactics, approach? So you guys enter in the van, do a pet ambush, Mike deploys a flashbang, looking back on it now, what are your thoughts on if you did it again (I mean obviously if you did it again you just shoot the guys from 100 yards away). Did that weigh into your decision making, and looking back at it, would you change anything?

Damian Poloo: I think this event caused us to take a hard look at that tactic, specifically pedestrian assaults when our targets on foot. To where we now debus on foot for the advantages of working off our a feet not a moving vehicle. So we've changed a lot in how that looks and works for us on the ground.

Looking back, I don't know if we would have changed anything to get a better outcome with the amount of limited time we had and the guys we had.

Page 14 of Another takeaway we have from all this, is splitting up our resources. We had seven guys in one van, and we had three in a support vehicle, and at the other end of the parking lot. We've taken some advice from that and split up maybe snipers in a separate vehicle with a go bag and their gun so that we could drop them off and and get a good position where they have an arc with an eye.

So I don't know if we'd go back and change anything.

Jon Becker: All of these things cause you to reexamine--

Damian Poloo: Yes.

Jon Becker: The way you’re doing things. Interestingly, this made you go, “Hm okay maybe we need to think about this from a different perspective”.

John Musico: And that's a key takeaway for us from an Emergency Response Team kind of perspective, which is the subject of Preemptive Force Application. I don't know if it would have necessarily changed anything in this fact pattern, because when we look at the civilian oversight that we had and the reviews that were taking place in investigations, one of the big questions was, “Well who shot first?”

This is a big subject matter, within our landscape in Canada, is that there's an onus or an expectation that we are providing proper announcement that you're providing reason for arrest or the purpose of police.

I think in this response, when we go back to those kind of takeaways from Patrol, which is sometimes we get complacent, while this is just a normal bank robbery, we have a lot of them with replica firearms. If we had rolled in with Preemptive Force application, mow these guys down, and then they said, “Hey, you didn't even allow them to surrender, is that lawful or not?”

So this whole talk of Preemptive Force, was a timely conversation, and then we related it to, well, “What information do you have at the time?” So we keep talking about this key concept of control, which is when the fact pattern and the information is/or warrants some type of force application before announcement, we're looking for a history of violence, access to firearms, Propensity for Flight.

When we start satisfying that we say to ourselves, “Well, why would we at the time of arrest or contact take all of this control and hand it over to the suspect and say, “Well, how do you want to react?” Well, we already know how they're going to react which is they want to oppose the police, they're armed they have a history of violence, and they have a history of flight. So why would I take all that and hand it over to them, and then for them to react to shoot back at us or to flee and then us say, “Oh well we knew that was going to happen”.

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Jon Becker: Yeah, I guess they did want to shoot. That's a very valid point. It's an interesting question too, one of the things we talked about decision-making exercise that we did for this is this notion of, “Okay, well before ERT gets there, they come out of the bank but they turn and start walking back to the bank. Do you shoot them?”

John Musico: Well, that's going to come down to the decision-making of the members on the ground and the articulation for us in Canada we have section 25 of the criminal code which is “The members who apply Force are going to have to articulate why they apply that force”.

I would say or suggest for the people within the scenario, when they're making these types of decisions, is that you have two gunmen-- that's not a normal day at any bank. So you have a form of non-compliance already there, and then you have these hostages (like we defined who have no control over the situation because they are being held at gunpoint and their lives are in jeopardy) that when you have that scenario of these two suspects turning, and moving into that bank, you're going to have to articulate why you believe that death or grievous bodily harm is appropriate.

I think in this back pattern you could articulate that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. What about training? What kind of training lessons learned? As you're looking back, how did this change your training?

John Musico: Thoughts?

Damian Poloo: I think we've always had a pretty good view on training. We've taken it seriously. I think this has caused us to take a hard look at a lot of things as far as what we're doing, making sure that the training that we're doing is intentional and that we are training to a level beyond where our hardest days are going to be.

So when we come to these situations, they don't feel as hard as the training that we've already done to get there.

I think when we get into our medical training-- I guess I think we've talked about the story where we trained the week before this incident we had a training day where it was a medical training day where ultimately interestingly Damian's playing the role of the casualty, and we got to the hospital, our medical director says, “Well sorry guys you did your best but Damian didn't make it”. I think being in those roles and doing those larger scenarios where we had trained multiple casualties, we had trained all of this stuff which just set us up well to sort of handle this situation.

From a medical standpoint one of the big things that we were talking about in the week prior, and had been talking about leading up to it is in a mass casualty event making sure that somebody takes a step back as the lead medic and sort of identifies themselves and says, “Hey, I'm going to be the lead medic on this”.

Page 16 of So in this call Mike does that and he does an amazing job where he recognizes that we've got a lot of casualties here. I can take a step back and he identifies himself as Mike as the lead medic.

We've got Patrol rushing in to help us, and some of them were from different departments, maybe don't know Mike or who he is. But now everybody knows that he is a medic, and that he's going to take charge of this situation.

It just gave this real calm to the situation, where people were then having some direction in what they were going to be doing, and putting the training that they had to work.

I just thought I could go about this for a while.

It just goes down such a path. We're doing all of this training. Patrol is doing all of this training where they're doing the same thing where they're bringing themselves up to a level where they can assist us. I don't think you can overestimate how important training is.

Jon Becker: No, I tell you, I use this when I'm teaching and when I'm talking about Lessons Learned from a medical standpoint, I don't know that it is possible to overstate how effective your prep was. We just interviewed Justin Dodge, and one of the things that we talked about was ‘prehabbing’.

You will recover better from an injury if you are in good shape, and you have good practices, and you're healthy, and you eat well, and you sleep well, and all these things.

And in this case, I cannot imagine what that was for Mike Yarosh to not only throw a bang, nothing happens, now you turn around and all your guys are shot, you think your team leader's dead in the front of the car. You're trying to shoot a suspect. Then to have the presence of mind to turn around and go “Okay somebody needs to be a lean medic”.

Especially when you listen to the audio of the phone call, it is chaotic.

What struck me in talking to everybody, and talking to the patrol, talking to Bainbridge and everybody is it was not out of the ordinary for you guys.

John Musico: Yeah.

Jon Becker: You had trained so hard that it just kind of made sense, oh yeah, no this is complicated, so then this is the next step we take. I don't think teams necessarily realize how hard they do need to train.

John Musico: I'll touch on a couple points in terms of training, and then we can move on to some of the medical kind of considerations and takeaways. Training is always the biggest challenge because it's very costly, it takes a lot of time, and a lot of resources.

The return on investment is hard to see sometimes.

Page 17 of We fought as an Emergency Response Team hard to transition our training standard from two days a month to a minimum of 40 hours a month, plus specialty. The area chiefs that we have to take this to look at, “Sure there's value there, there's a massive increase of cost, and I'm going to lose all these resources because of the volume of training that's going on.”

Why it's so valuable is that, specifically about this critical incident, you have such a small amount of time to make decisions. So you are going to revert right back to your training.

I'll give you an example, which is when I'm sitting up at the front of the van and I'm in the shootout with two suspects, I go through a malfunction on my pistol and I run dry. I have no memory of me working through it in terms of having that thought process. It is happening. I do my tap rack and I'm ready. I'm back up into a gunfight. I run dry and I do an emergency mag change without having to think about it. If I'm having to slow down and think about it, lives are being lost because the window is so small.

I'm extremely fortunate and very appreciative of the volume of training that has been invested in me because I utilized it on that day.

Jon Becker: You're right, it is very easy for a chief of police to look at this and go, “Well it's complicated, medical training expensive and all that”. You want the return on investment? Right there.

John Musico: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Right there.

John Musico: Six lives.

Jon Becker: Six lives, and two that under any other circumstances. It is not an overstatement, yeah to say that Damian did not have an extra five minutes yeah for them to figure this thing out. Some of these things you look at and you say, “Okay, well, yeah, I mean like you were shot in the foot right. You're going to survive that.” So you could look, “Oh well the medical mattered but it didn't matter”. And it's easy as a chief of police or as a leader to rationalize that a couple of minutes isn't going to make that much of a difference. A couple of minutes made a difference there.

John Musico: Yep.

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Jon Becker: It's as if you're a chief of police and you're watching this and thinking about it that's what the investment looks like is one of your guys who is going to die before he survives three times is going to survive this event because you spent the time.

After all, you spent the money. It is an amorphous concept, and it's hard to throw money at things that you can't identify. Just pretend that you're here and look at that, and go, that's what this looks like.

John Musico: That's the key takeaway, if you're in a position of administration or management, is to see and understand the value of training. Then if you're in a position of a supervisor or an element leader where you're responsible to set up the training, you set it up as realistic as you can. Reality-Based training is what provides the most benefit to our members.

So you need to invest in the time of your lesson plans and then understand what the objective of that lesson plan is and set it up as realistically as you can.

Jon Becker: Well, you look at the training exercise you guys do the week before, right?

John Musico: Yes.

Jon Becker: You almost roll your armor. It's very easy at that point to go, “Okay we're gonna discontinue the training, we're going to unscrew the vehicle being stuck.” Yeah this is complicated. Okay we're good. Well that's not what you do.

John Musico: Yes.

Jon Becker: You press through it and then to make it worse you get Damian to the hospital and the medal team said, “Yeah I know he's DOA”. That's a dick thing to do, right?

Man, we had a hard training day and you want to win. Everybody wants to win in training. It is difficult if you're the guy setting up training or you're the team leader to set up a scenario where your team is going to fail.

John Musico: Yep.

Jon Becker: But yet, failing is where you find the lesson. It's not in winning. If you win every time, you're not playing a good enough team.

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John Musico: Lastly on the training point, and I think this is one thing that we did well as our environment, our community of police members where we talked about this earlier, where from an Emergency Response Team perspective we're pushing down as much information to the Patrol or the First Responders. Because on this incident we have an immense amalgamation between resources.

When we're having to make an entry into the bank to initiate this rescue, it's not staffed solely by Emergency Response Team. It's a cross between Patrol and Emergency Response Team members.

So for us, we have movement packages, we have training that we provide to our Patrol officers, so that when we're in this type of scenario, we know they don't have access to hostage rescue tactics. But what we have access to is our IRD or ‘Immediate Rapid Deployment’ tactics. So now we can get in a whole pot of people together, regardless of what unit section you are, and we have that common denominator of training. Now we can move into a structure, we can clear it properly and we can save lives in terms of rescuing hostages.

Jon Becker: So it's interesting, one of the things that I talk a lot about is modularity. I always use the example of Legos. All Legos are on the same pattern-- a one, a two, a four, and eight. They all fit together, and you can take little tiny Lego pieces and build something big. I think it's overlooked. What you're talking about is that modularity, it's being able to say, “We're going to teach Patrol this part of this. Everybody's going to understand the same thing. Everybody's going to carry the same gear.” I think in this instance when you do have six members shot, you have to have Patrol.

I think one of the great success stories here as a team and as a group of agencies is you guys maneuvered in time. You talk about the tactical science concept of ‘Maneuver in Time’-- kill Adolf Hitler in his crib. You guys maneuvered in time. You built a response that was bigger than you could build with your team out of little modular pieces in Patrol officers, so when you had a medical casualty, yeah, the team's going to handle that, whatever-- six medical casualties, a different problem.

Now every patrol officer that arrives on scene is not only a plumber who can help with bleeding.

John Musico: Yes.

Jon Becker: He is a tourniquet. He's an Israeli bandage. He's whatever. He's a chest seal.

He's bringing this capability.

Of all the cases that I've debriefed, this is, I think, the most graphic example of where, you guys built a future medical staff.

Damian Poloo: Yeah. Totally.

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Jon Becker: Dam, what are your thoughts?

Damian Poloo: I think what our departments did well was invested in individual ifac.

Every Patrol member, every member of the police department had an ifac that was standard issue. And even between the different police departments, everyone had a tourniquet, everyone had chest seals, and everyone had packing gauze.

What's amazing is, a few weeks before the shooting, our team had just delivered training to patrol a bit of a refresher on Tactical Emergency Casualty Care, where we were teaching them how to apply tourniquets and how to pack wounds with gauze and how to apply chest seals, and what that looked like.

For us to deliver that training, but then on the day of be recipients of that training was amazing. That goes in part to the Department's investing in training and resources, and the standardization of equipment, so that I could grab Travis's ifac and know exactly what's in there and use it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Have you ever taken an account of how many turnstiles were used?

Damian Poloo: Two for me, three for Steve. Seven?

Jon Becker: Seven tournaquets.

Damian Poloo: Yes.

Jon Becker: I know that there was an entire sea locks gauze used on one of your guys.

Damian Poloo: Yeah. Some guys describe it as torunequets where just flying in the air.

“I need this. I need that.”

Jon Becker: A couple of you guys in the interviews used the expression “raining tourniquets”. It was raining tourniquets, but it doesn't rain tourniquets unless you've built that modular response system that allows it to all fall in.

Damian Poloo: Exactly.

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John Musico: Think about how amazing that is from a police response where regardless of your role on that day you could take any one of those people and say, “Okay, I need you to help with medical.” “No problem. Okay, I've got all the skills, the training and the equipment.” “Check that you're not going to do medical I need you to form or to be part of this element because you're going to go in and you're going to do this hostage rescue and you're going to utilize IRD tactics.” “No problem. I can do that as well.”

We have that amazing baseline or that common denominator, we were talking about, where any one of those members can fill any one of those roles well.

Jon Becker: The thing that's smart about it, is none of those members needed to know how to deal with everything that was going on with any of the guys. But what it allowed is it allowed Mike to step back and say, “Put three tourniquets on him. Put a tourniquet on him. He's still bleeding. Okay do this.” So now you take that deeper level of understanding and you are now able to apply that on a much broader swath. Mike is just working on Damian, then Steve's got problems, Travis has got problems.

So, having that same thing when they have to go into the bank, we got six ERT members down and guys that are now dealing with those guys and we need to go clear the bank.

Well now you can take an ERT member with a bunch of Patrol officers who know the tactics. And the ERT guy is making the tactical decisions, but they're executing the movement.

John Musico: That's right.

Jon Becker: It is such a great example of where, one of my friends, he refers to his future Brent and past Brent, he's said, “Future Brent will appreciate the fact that I did this today. I don't want future Brent to look back and go past Brent was such an asshole.”

Future GVERT paid big dividends for what past GVERT did in training.

John Musico: Yeah.

Jon Becker: The same with the agency. That's fantastic. Talk to me about medic stuff.

Damian or Tra, what are your thoughts on kind of the lessons learned, this is a pretty big application of medical equipment and training? What do you look back on?

Damian Poloo: There's a few things and one sort of on the line where we were just talking. What was cool about this Medical Response is Mike was a medic and we had a couple of Medics on scene. Mike is the lead medic who was able to take a step back and sort of oversee this. Aside from-- Page 22 of

Jon Becker: We have three medics, right?

Damian Poloo: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Mike.

Damian Poloo: Mike, myself, and Ben.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Damian Poloo: Aside from TXA that Damian got, there were no other medical interventions done that all of our team and all of Patrol weren't empowered with. You didn't need to be a medic to perform any of the interventions that were done aside from the TXA that Damian got.

Now, had there been any delay in EHS or transports that would have ramped up significantly. But all the interventions that were done, but what Mike was able to add is that control and that sort of coordination of the medical response piece that was that was important. That was just interesting.

Jon Becker: And also the fact that Ben and John are being treated by Patrol members and other guys means that now when they said, “Hey Damian needs TXA…”

Damian Poloo: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Having the ability to administer TXA is why we're sitting here with Damain right?

Damian Poloo: Yes.

Jon Becker: Mike having the cognitive head space, the free computer space because he is at a strategic level, he can look and go “Okay that is a tactical problem that only I can solve. Nobody else is given TXA. I've got to do that so I'll do that.” Or we need a medic to do that one thing, whereas if a medic is mired down putting a tourniquet on somebody else or packing a wound, maybe we miss that.

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Damian Poloo: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So it is on so many levels.

Damian Poloo: Yeah, so when it comes to applying tourniquets, often we'll get good at putting them on and forgetting about them. But what happened when they put my first tourniquet on me, everything's wet and bloody and soon. As you move a patient that can slip and move and almost become ineffective. So checking that you still have compression on that tourniquet. So they did that with me, they moved me, still bleeding so they applied a second tourniquet rather than messing with the first one and stopped the bleeding.

So it's just making sure, and double-checking those tourniquets are working if you move the patient.

Jon Becker: Also, as the muscle is not getting fed with blood, it's going to contract too.

It's not uncommon for a tourniquet to get loose simply because the muscle is not filling up the way it should.

Damian Poloo: Yeah, there is a lot of muscle so yeah.

Jon Becker: We know. Fortunate enough to hold your shattered leg together. There wasn't enough to stop the bullet though, so I'm just saying maybe a little more.

Damian Poloo: Yeah. Another takeaway: We had trained in an incident like this, so we have a medical director who's a doctor who oversees our medical program. One of our SOPs for an incident like this in training would be that we would phone him, get him on the phone to have that influence from him to have his sort of oversight while we're on scene. So we did that in this and he didn't answer.

Jon Becker: But Mike got his voicemail that's super fun for the doctor to pick up that message.

Damian Poloo: Yeah, Mike left him a long voicemail, but what we've talked about-- Page 24 of

Jon Becker: Not intentionally.

Damian Poloo: Thought he was talking to him. What we've talked about since then is that it worked out better that he didn't answer because that call, everything that we did, we could do.

We didn't need the oversight, and the call actually would have taken away from time that we had to be performing those interventions. So certainly there's a time and place where we would still make that call for a ton of things, but in the first early seconds or minutes of this call, we're more empowered now to just go through our medical response.

Once we have time and opportunity to make that call, then we'll start looking at making that call, talking through what we've done, seeing if there's anything we've missed, or any new ideas, things like that. But not maybe making that call in the first instance because it would have distracted us from some of the intervention that we need to.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you're having to relay facts and all that. That's an interesting point. I know that there were some gear Lessons Learned, there's things that we talked about with gear. Why don't we start with that? Give me kind of what you guys think retrospectively?

John Musico: Well, that was one of the big things that changed immediately after this incident for us, our dress and deployment in terms of our uniforms were we were utilizing what we would call ‘Blues’. We’re wearing blue BDUs with our black LBVS or carriers over top. Damian can probably speak to it a little bit better than I can or even Travis with some of the medical stuff. What we experience with those dark colored uniforms is that it became challenging to be able to identify the different injuries that the members had sustained.

Jon Becker: You're not going to see blood on dark blue or black, right?

John Musico: No. Damian is the best example of it, which is that Damian has suffered a catastrophic wound in terms of his femur being destroyed and his leg injury, well that overshadows the fact that he has also taken a through-and-through his torso. The concealment from the dark carrier, the concealment from the dark uniform, all the members are working through and trying to make an assessment, and were missing it.

So when we sat down and we kind of reviewed what teams are using in terms of uniforms, we started to see the value of transitioning away from these dark uniforms to a lighter color uniform, and more specifically moving to a green uniform.

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Jon Becker: Yeah, an OD green or a gray would be the other one that you can see. Yeah that's an interesting point.

Damian Poloo: Yeah. That's a good check too in your medical assessment of a patient, is that you may see an obvious injury like my broken femur and my leg drenched in blood, but you look at my vest and shirt, there wasn't a lot of blood at all. So we'll train on if a guy goes down, we'll cut clothes off, we'll take boots off, we'll take vest off, we'll cut the shirt off.

Then, if we're not seeing obvious injuries, we'll rake the torso front and back. How they picked up my abdomen injury is by just doing those checks and taking my clothes off, and then discovering that I've been shot in the torso, and then boom, two chest seals get slapped on.

So just having those checks and balances in place.

Jon Becker: I'm going to imagine (and I think we talked about this before) but your femur was a displaced compound fracture with a femoral bleed, right?

Damian Poloo: That’s right.

John Musico: That's going to bleed a lot, it's going to hurt unbelievably. It's a very shiny object for a medic to latch onto, yeah, and certainly is life-threatening, but long term, that was one of two problems, and that second problem was the one that ultimately was without a chest seal. It might have killed you. It's an interesting point. That change has happened within the team environment where we've changed all our carriers. We've changed our uniforms to that green color because of the experiences that we've had on that day.

Jon Becker: Anything else? Is there anything?

Damian Poloo: Oh man yeah, I'm sure there's a ton of things. I think overall and overwhelmingly we feel this was a horrible situation to have to deal with, but we did a pretty good job with what we were facing. The biggest thing is just always pursuing what we can do better, always looking at what else? What else? Never just accepting good enough is good enough. I think that pursuit of excellence is just so important. If not for yourself, then do it for the guy sitting beside you because it's just so important to always be looking at how you can improve and how you can do it better.

Jon Becker: I think I can honestly say that I can't think of a better ending for the scenario you guys were faced with. I think when you dig into it and you look at the facts, Page 26 of you realize you guys snatched a victory out of the jaws of an amazingly bad defeat. This was not, “Hey, we won. Things are great.” This was you had six guys shot in nine seconds.

Damian Poloo: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Suspects are both dead. You guys are still here. The team's okay. I think one thing we should talk about is culture a little bit because I do think that what struck me when I sat down with you guys the first time in Victoria (and was in Saanich technically), the culture of the team is amazing. It's not just a culture of trying to build a better team, but the amount of support that you guys have for each other. The relationships between the guys, I think, is an easily overlooked lesson learned here. This is a team that suffered six members getting shot in nine seconds and almost losing a couple of them, and no one has left your team. None of you hate each other. You all still love each other and still spend time together and are still friends, and that is ridiculously unusual.

Somebody who spends his time talking to guys that have been through traumatic injuries, it doesn't end the way it did for your team. What do you think it was about the culture (again prehab), what was it about the culture of the team beforehand that got us here today?

Damian Poloo: I think it goes back to what Travis was just talking about in our team motto is nothing matters more than the guy at your side, whether you're training your best so that you can be your best when they're at their worst, or if they're at the worst and you can pick up the slack and fill in the gaps for them. Everything we do is to protect the guy beside us.

And as soon as you've been brought on on this team, that messaging is in the room in Latin on the wall, we understand it, we talk about it, and it sinks into the heart. We're a small team and we work a lot of hours together standing outside houses or in a van. We make sure we do socials at Christmas and summertime and in between. We're working out. We're sweating. We're bleeding. We're crying together. We're having moments of just being real and vulnerable, especially since this incident. It just builds a relationship that will endure a tough time as this.

Jon Becker: Boys. Very proud of you. Amazing. Amazing. I appreciate you guys sitting down with me and doing this. I'm certain that the Lessons Learned here are going to help other teams.

John Musico: Thank you.

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Damian Poloo: Thanks for having us.

Jon Becker: Absolutely.