LAPD D-Platoon's Approach to Hostage Rescue

Welcome to The Debrief. Perhaps no topic generates more discussion or carries greater risk than hostage rescue. Although there are a variety of approaches to HRT, the goal of my discussion today will be to explore how one of the top teams in the world, LAPD SWAT, approaches hostage rescue and to illustrate their approach through discussion of two of their recent operations. My guest today is Jonathan Pultz, a 27-year veteran of LAPD. He currently serves as an element leader and has been a SWAT officer for 16 years and a team leader for six. Jon is a crisis negotiator, explosive breacher, and tactical waterborne team member. He holds a master’s degree in dispute resolution and has authored a book on crisis negotiation. Jon is also a recipient of the LAPD’s Medal of Valor.

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!

Jon Becker: Jon, thanks so much for being here with me.

Jonathan Pultz: It’s a pleasure, Jon. Thanks for having me on.

Jon Becker: Why don’t we start, as we usually do, with your career. Give me the history.

Jonathan Pultz: All right. I’ve been extremely fortunate. I’ve been a member of the Los Angeles Police Department for 27 years. During that time, I’ve had the opportunity to work all around the city. I started my career in Newton Division, quickly went over to Southwest, and then over to Rampart before ending up in our Metropolitan Division. One of the neat things about the city is that every area is so different. The policing is different, the people are different, and the lessons I learned eventually earned me the spot where I work now, which is in the Special Weapons and Tactics team, commonly known as D-Platoon. I’ve been there for about 16 years, and in that time I’ve been fortunate enough to be promoted to an element leader and learned many good disciplines there, which I’ve been able to use on the job; things like crisis negotiation, tactical waterborne, and energetic breaching. I’m also one of our main trainers for our SWAT schools. I work around an incredible group of people who are creative, incredibly good at tactics, and just excellent human beings. They do a wonderful job of solving these intense crises that come across in the city of Los Angeles. Most of the time, when we resolve them, we resolve them peacefully. It’s humbling to be called upon to know that when things go sideways, the city is calling on people like me and the people I work with to help resolve these problems. It’s a great place to work. I’m glad to have an opportunity to share some of that experience with some of your listeners, and hopefully I can pass along some valuable information that will make their jobs easier.

Jon Becker: Like I said in the intro, I think hostage rescue is what some people refer to as the “Super Bowl of special tactics”. It is what almost all teams are training for. It is the most critical mission that you do. It is also a mission that the majority of SWAT teams will never engage in, simply because of operational tempo. But D-Platoon does. What is your current operational tempo, 150 ops a year?

Jonathan Pultz: Yeah, give or take. Depending on the year, anywhere between 120 to 150 per year, and that generally does not include warrant service. We do not serve a lot of warrants in D-Platoon. We serve a very minimal amount, but spontaneous incidents, there are enough of them to go around for a team our size. The good thing about that is it gives us a lot of reps. So we’ve had very good success. We’ve also learned a lot, but having that operational tempo gives us the opportunity to learn and experience these types of incidents.

When you talk about smaller teams who may not get that opportunity, we’re fortunate because we do get to experience it. If there have been mistakes made, we’ve probably made them, and we can pass that information on to them so they don’t have to make that mistake. That’s something that’s worked in our favor, especially over a 50-plus-year period as a SWAT team. We’ve had that opportunity to pass it down from officer to officer, supervisor to supervisor, and that continuing sharing of information and lessons learned is a big part of our tradition and our success.

Jon Becker: One of the things that’s unique about your team versus a lot of other teams nationally that I work with is that, for you to deploy, you’re not serving very many warrants.

Jonathan Pultz: Right.

Jon Becker: When your unit deploys, it’s because the city of Los Angeles pushed the big red button and brought the entire show to town. So it’s not only 150 ops a year; it’s 150 spontaneous ops, hostage rescues, bus assaults. I mean, it’s kind of a litany of all special tactics calls, not just search warrants.

Jonathan Pultz: Correct. We do a lot of little things that people probably aren’t aware of. With the advance of technology, chemical agents, and things of that nature, sometimes we’ll just assist other units within the city or other entities that are working within the city with our expertise. It may not be a full-blown SWAT callout, but the city and the department does a good job of utilizing that experience and that equipment to make other officers’ jobs safer and help bring peaceful resolutions to these situations.

Jon Becker: Looking at it from an HRT standpoint, (obviously most teams are training toward HRT) just to give a sense of scale, how often are you training specifically toward HRT?

Jonathan Pultz: With all the disciplines that we’re responsible for, we encompass HRT training that incorporates probably 60 to 70% of the training period because it’s the most complicated thing we do. It’s the most dangerous thing we do. If you also look at HRTs across the nation, there’s no cookie-cutter HRT. You have different mindsets of people. You have different types of hostage takers. You have different venues. They can be anything from open areas to strongholds, vehicles, vessels, or airplanes. We’ve had HRTs in tents because we have such a huge homeless population.

In order to practice all these dynamics, we need to get a standard operating procedure or a training aspect in our operators’ heads, so that when they come across these different scenarios, they have some sort of template or framework to start their assessment on exactly what they are dealing with. Then, from there, they can develop a plan to successfully negotiate that situation and resolve it.

Jon Becker: I want to walk through LAPD’s view, D-Platoon’s view, of hostage rescue as a discipline. What I’d like to do with you is talk theory a little bit and how you guys approach a hostage situation, and then maybe dig into a couple of very specific debriefs and look at how those points illustrate it and kind of get some lessons learned, if we can do that.

Jonathan Pultz: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: Let’s start with hostage rescue as a discipline. Give me an overview of how you guys see hostage rescue.

Jonathan Pultz: Whenever you launch the SWAT team within the Los Angeles Police Department, it’s a very rigid standard. We are very risk-averse. So we have to meet certain criteria, and those criteria involve: do we have a verified crime, or do we believe that the situation calls for deploying our SWAT team? Is that person in a position of advantage? Are they armed? Do they truly have a hostage?

There are several incidents that I’ve been involved in, and I’m sure several of the listeners have been involved in, where it’s a question of whether it is a hostage situation or not. How do you classify individuals? Sometimes family members will stay back with someone, they won’t come out, and you’ll plan for that contingency, but you may not actually have a full-blown hostage incident.

Being a good investigator makes you a good SWAT cop because the initial information you get going to a location, by the time you get downrange and start to put things into place, may not match what you initially thought you were being deployed for. So in order to be a good SWAT officer, in order to be a good operator in a hostage rescue situation, you have to be willing to ask questions. You have to be willing to make a full assessment of what’s in front of you, and you have to be willing to work with your team to make sure everyone is on the same page and we all believe the same things.

If all those factors come into play and everything seems like it’s lining up to be a legitimate hostage rescue, then certain things will push forward. The big thing is having a clear-cut hostage situation. It is going to involve someone who is not free to leave. They’re being held against their will. The majority of our incidents are spontaneous. It could be something as simple as a car thief who gets scared, runs into a location, and a person is inside, and they are not allowing that person to leave. Or it could be a deliberate hostage situation where someone went to that location, deliberately held that person against their will, and is making certain demands for their release.

Jon Becker: One of the questions that always comes up in a lot of hostage incidents is: is it a co-conspirator, is it a captive, or is it a hostage?

Jonathan Pultz: Right.

Jon Becker: That’s a very slippery slope in both directions.

Jonathan Pultz: And it can get even slipperier. We’ve had incidents where people have made up that they had hostages inside. We’ve been forced to go and do our own investigation, look through video, and kind of put together some of the clues we’ve gotten on scene to make that determination. Is there really someone in here, or is this just a big hoax?

One of the big things you see across the nation on a regular basis now is people’s homes getting swatted, right? Same thing: are some agencies overreacting? In my opinion, what’s in their heart is trying to do the right thing. A lot of times they start putting together information and they find out it’s all a red herring or it’s a ruse. It’s not a true hostage incident. That’s just as important as the hostage rescue itself because once you set that train into motion, there is an infinite amount of things that can happen.

Luck, the actions of the suspect, your equipment—is it working right? All the plans you put into place. Once that thing goes into motion, you don’t know how it’s going to end. You train for it to end a certain way. You train for everyone to be safe, but those are things that are out of your control. So you train to the best of your ability to keep them in your control. However, you better be damn sure that when you push that button to launch that team, everything is in place and you have a righteous hostage situation because you’re going to be holding the bag, good, bad, or indifferent afterwards. That’s important for people in this business to understand.

Jon Becker: When you initially arrive on scene at an HRT or a hostage situation, what is your first mindset? What are you guys trying to do right out of the gate?

Jonathan Pultz: I’m a big believer in process thinking and having a process to go through, and you can apply it to anything in your life, even hostage rescue. I had a team leader when I was a young SWAT officer, and he told me, “Jon, as long as you contain this situation, everything else is going to fall into place.”

Typically, you walk into these incidents and they can be outrageous. They have schoolchildren held hostage. You have a bus that’s moving with hostages on board. I mean, they seem like impossible situations.

Jon Becker: Foreshadowing.

Jonathan Pultz: Right? But as long as you contain that problem, now you have a starting point that gets the cycle moving. It gets the thought process working. It starts to break one giant problem into several smaller problems. Once it’s contained, you can start working on those smaller problems and work toward your ultimate resolution. So the first thing that I would recommend to anyone who’s out there is, whatever you have, whether it’s a barricade or a hostage situation, contain the problem. Direct your energy to the main bulk of your problem and start to work on it. If you don’t contain it, then all kinds of different things are going to happen, and you’re not going to have a clear path to resolution.

Jon Becker: Let’s talk about that for just a second because “contain” is a term that’s very typically used, right? Okay, you’re going to contain the problem. I think you guys have a more holistic view of containment than I see in other places.

Jonathan Pultz: Yes.

Jon Becker: It’s not just “set up a perimeter” for you guys.

Jonathan Pultz: Right.

Jon Becker: Talk to me a little bit about what you mean by containing the problem.

Jonathan Pultz: Good question. Overall definition: you have an area, you set up a perimeter around it, and you make sure all four sides of a structure are locked down. So if that suspect tries to leave or that situation spills out, you have it in one general area. But can you shrink it further? Can you isolate that problem to a certain room? Can you isolate it to a certain area of a vehicle, a train, or a hotel room? Can you change the dynamics of that area with containment? Can you make it so there’s only one way for this person to come out or exit?

There are a lot of things you can do with containment. How can you utilize that containment as an officer or a tactician to make it tactically advantageous for you and your team? That’s important because there are a lot of different things to do. Take something simple like a car barricade or a car hostage rescue. By utilizing natural barriers or vehicles, you can lock it down to one door they can only come in and out of, and that changes the dynamics of where you place your tools or where you focus your attention.

Same thing with a structure. If they’re in a certain location, there are certain things you can do to give your team a better tactical advantage. Those are the things you’re looking at in containment. There are the basics of locking the location down, but there is also using containment to isolate your problem even further, shrink that problem, and make it easier. Even simple stuff.

When I teach barricades to different teams, I tell them, if they enter a structure, because that’s the most common method we teach people—a home or stronghold—think of each room or each area that you enter as its own separate barricade. You’re shrinking that problem until you get to your actual problem. Another tactic we’ll use in hostage rescue is a stealth probe to contact. That essentially means we’re going to enter a location and bite off these pieces until we get to an area where either we have determined is our crisis point or something during that movement has kicked off our crisis point. Essentially, we’re shrinking down the area we have to go to in order to be more effective in doing our job and affecting a rescue.

Jon Becker: You raised two issues there that I think we could push on a little bit more. One, obviously, is that you’re shrinking the problem. You’re shaping the terrain, right?

Jonathan Pultz: Correct.

Jon Becker: If you look at it from a tactical science standpoint, that’s terrain shaping.

Jonathan Pultz: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: You’re narrowing the area you’re having to play on. But you also raised the point of closing distance. It’s a topic that I don’t hear discussed that much in hostage rescue, but in sitting through debriefs with you guys and talking to the team, there’s a lot of focus on the distance between the team and the hostage or hostage taker. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Jonathan Pultz: Obviously, if you find yourself in that situation, the suspect has the clear advantage. They know where they’re at. They usually have control of a weapon. They’re making a lot of the decisions. You’re trying to do what you can to put an advantage for your team, and like you said, you’re changing that terrain and having less reaction time, fewer doors to get behind, or less of an area to have to flood. That’s going to increase your chances of a successful mission.

Plus, it gives you an opportunity to overwhelm the senses psychologically. Fortunately, I work for an agency where we have a lot of manpower and a lot of tools. Sometimes the psychological aspect of seeing the LAPD SWAT team outside your structure, your vehicle, or whatever it is, is a lot to take in. We have a lot of people and we have a lot of tools. People see that, and a lot of times that’s a de-escalation point for us. It’ll cause someone to back down because they realize what they’re up against and they’re willing just to give up and come out. That’s the best-case scenario.

In that small percentage where it actually does happen, that’s where you want to take advantage of opportunity because a lot of times in hostage rescue, you get certain opportunities to exercise your speed, your surprise, and your action. That is what’s going to solve those situations. So by shortening that distance and changing the terrain, that’s going to put you at a higher advantage to being successful.

Jon Becker: You’re leveling the playing field.

Jonathan Pultz: The best you can with the tools, the personnel, and the information you have on hand.

Jon Becker: Once we’ve contained the problem, what’s next?

Jonathan Pultz: Next you want to control it. From there, you want to make sure that you have the appropriate resources. You want to make sure that you have the appropriate tools. You want to make sure that your personnel are appropriately trained to handle that situation. That’s going to encompass everything from where you’re going to stage your medical personnel, your tactical operations center, your potential sniper teams, and your ingress and egress. How are you going to set up for when this person exits? What is your plan there? What if there’s a medical emergency? How are you going to move personnel to the medical teams? Are you going to bring them up to you?

That’s where you start to put the layers of the plan in place. You’re taking control of what you have, and you’re putting parameters in place that are effectively going to help you resolve that issue. Then, on top of it, you’re going to begin to form your contingency plans. If you have one door that they have been coming in and out of, there is a strong likelihood you have to think about things like: is it barricaded? How are you going to get in? Are there windows? Are there back doors? There has to be a delineation of what’s what.

“Hey, I’m looking at the front door,” may not mean anything to anyone else. But if I do something simple, like label the front door as side one and then go in a clockwise manner, two, three, and four, now I’m starting to give a clear indication of what’s what on the structure that we’re looking to potentially affect a rescue on. Windows or openings: one, two, three, and four, left to right, nice and simple. That’s the control aspect of it: you put your pieces in place so that, in the event you do have to launch that rescue team, they’re going to be in a position to succeed.

Jon Becker: The launch of rescue teams is always an interesting topic.

Jonathan Pultz: Oh, yes.

Jon Becker: I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything as hotly debated as whether it is a crisis entry or is not a crisis entry. That is a frequent topic of arguments over beers with the teams that we work with. What is your view? When you guys set up a rescue team, obviously you’re giving them empowerment. How are you initially defining crisis at the problem?

Jonathan Pultz: Good question. If you notice, the first two areas I talked about were containment and control, and it’s that third piece that is communication. One of the big things for us, and I’d imagine for any team, should be your rules of engagement. What is going to constitute a crisis entry? Is it going to be shots fired inside? Is it going to be screams for help? Is it going to be that you’re given a deadline and you have to provide something or someone is going to get hurt?

Everyone has to be 100% in agreement on what those rules of engagement are and what is going to launch that crisis entry, because that’s when things start to go sideways. When the communication aspect starts to break down, where people at the end are saying, “Oh, I didn’t know that’s what you meant,” or “I didn’t know that was what was going to launch us,” things are going bad.

Those information pieces have to be articulated early and often, and they can change. It’s important to let new information come downrange, whether it’s from negotiations, the command post, or the suspect themselves. That information has to be reliably shared with anyone who is on that incident because those are the things that could change whether or not this thing becomes a full-blown crisis entry, or you get a peaceful surrender, or it could even be something where, like we talked about earlier, there may not be a hostage in there at all. So you have to be a good investigator. Part of that, like I said, is talking about these rules of engagement and making sure everyone is on the same page. That is probably the most important part of what we do: making sure that collectively we have the best information at the time and we all understand that information at the time.

Understanding your roles is also important. If you’re put in a specific situation, if you’re in a negotiation position, obviously that’s your job. That’s what you’re doing, right? You’re not going back and forth to become a window breaker or a sniper or whatever it is. If you’re a breacher and you’re tasked with energetic breaching, that’s your mission. You should be collecting every piece of information and sharing that with your team leaders and your teammates so they know what your job is, and letting them know that you understand that role.

If you’re one of the people going on a rescue, you need to know where you’re supposed to be in that stack, what your responsibilities are, and what your count is. If it’s, for example, one suspect and one hostage, that’s incredibly important information because if we launch a hostage rescue—and you did a debrief with Surprise, correct?

Jon Becker: Yeah, Surprise.

Jonathan Pultz: They actually did something very similar to what we do, and every tactical team should do it. They had a one-and-one count from my understanding, and the hostage was a baby. They came across that baby very early on, and they had the good sense to hit the brakes on that hostage rescue. Now they’ve got their prize. You have a barricade, and that’s the best hostage rescue we can do: where we don’t fire a shot, we rescue the hostage, and we don’t hurt the suspect. That’s ideal. That’s what you want. Having the ability to outthink these individuals, keep your people safe, and keep the community safe—that’s what it’s all about.

Jon Becker: One of the things that’s unique about your team, of all the teams that I’ve dealt with, is that there is so much emphasis in D-Platoon on the mental game. All teams like to win. I don’t know that I deal with a team that likes to beat the suspect cognitively more than you guys do. It’s almost like there is more pride in winning the argument or the negotiation game than there is in even the high-risk entry.

Jonathan Pultz: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. We touched on the training aspect of it, how much we train for HRT. The way we break down our training calendar is generally, if you have two element leaders in one squad, every month we rotate off and that squad will be responsible for training. It’s a bit of a pride thing, right? These guys go all out and they’ll scour the internet and news articles and talk to different teams. They’ll look at what type of incidents they had, and then, on top of it, they’ll add their own twists because you can run a basic deliberate hostage rescue in a shoot house all day long, right? Shoot target, no-shoot target, force-on-force, guy with a Sims pistol, no Sims pistol. But our guys take a lot of pride in adding that element of surprise and trying to make people think. A lot of it is based on stuff we see.

One of the things that takes a lot of people by surprise when you get into this profession is the amount of mental illness that we deal with. It’s hard enough being in a hostage situation by itself, but when you have a hostage situation with someone who is schizophrenic or manic depressive, and they have all these other things going on in their mind, some of the things they’re throwing at you and some of the things you’re trying to overcome in an already difficult situation are pretty eye-opening. That’s the beauty of our team: we train for those types of situations. We train to the odd. As ironic as it sounds, as crazy as it sounds, you’ll see guys throw together training scenarios that you’re just like, there’s no way in a million years that this could happen.

The one thing I’ve learned in this profession over the last 27 years is that every time I think I have seen everything humanly possible, I get surprised way too often, to this day. The creativity in the training goes a long way for real-world incidents, and we take big pride in that. Like you said, it’s for us. Our stats—you did a previous debrief with Lieutenant Lee McMillon, who’s our officer in charge, and Lee is a stats guy. He’ll break down the use of deadly force used in our platoon over a 10-year period, and we’re very proud of that. We’re proud of the minimal use of deadly force that we use when resolving incidents, and we take great pride in that.

Jon Becker: It’s an interesting cultural point with the team that is winning the game without having to fight. I mean, Sun Tzu, right?

Jonathan Pultz: Yes.

Jon Becker: To fight and win a thousand battles without fighting is the acme of skill. Let’s keep pushing on communication, then. When you guys are rolling into a hostage situation, are you openly defining what your desired end state is? Is there a conversation out of the gate about what we’re trying to accomplish?

Jonathan Pultz: Yes, without a doubt. When we’re being launched, if we’re on duty, it’s usually a little bit easier to manage that because you have everyone there. You’re kind of already discussing those rules of engagement. You’re discussing who is going to take what roles. If it’s an off-hours callout, there is a standby list, and some of the roles are already defined. But whether you’re rolling code three, you’re listening to multiple radio frequencies, you’re talking, the desk is providing you with information, the lieutenants are providing you with information, your teammates are asking questions, and certain people may arrive there before. So you’re passing all this information on, and you’re trying to instill in these operators who are arriving on scene to do a couple of different things.

First and foremost, like you said, you want to make sure that the location is contained. You want to make sure that they’re putting an emergency rescue team in place. You want to make sure that they’re getting the most updated information and they’re relaying that information.

There is a lot going on at one time, and you’re trying to take all that information and streamline it into a clear, articulable plan. The communication aspect starts from the minute the phone call comes from the lieutenant to the sergeant and the three-plus-one or element leader handling that situation. That communication aspect is dissected and scrutinized from start to finish. At the end of that situation, whether that incident goes really well or really badly, someone is going to be looking at it from start to finish, as far as how this call came about, what the first notifications were, what the first information you got was, and how you acted upon it.

On those three C’s we talked about, the communication aspect is by far the most important because it’s going to drive how your incident goes and how you pivot during that incident. So, again, you have to be an excellent investigator and you have to be willing to question things and analyze things as these crises are going on to make yourself successful.

Jon Becker: As you guys are rolling to a scene, say 20 guys are driving and you’re getting this massive flow of information, who is responsible for coordinating this information into intelligence? Is that a lieutenant’s job? Is it a sergeant’s job? Is it an element leader’s job?

Jonathan Pultz: It’s an excellent question. It’s everyone’s job. The lieutenant generally is our main point of contact. He’s getting his information, but he could be on the phone. He could be listening to different frequencies. We’re listening to different frequencies. So any information that’s coming out that’s pertinent needs to come out from whoever receives it.

Like I talked about, some guys, especially off hours, may end up boots on the ground prior to other people, and it’s important for them to relay that information. Communication and information are everyone’s responsibility. Once the situation becomes a little bit more static, then the information flows a little bit smoother. You’re getting information probably from the command post, which is going directly downrange to the tactical team, or the tactical team is getting information from what they’re seeing at the crisis site and relaying it back to the command post, or the negotiations team is getting information from resources such as family members, friends, or they’re talking directly to the person involved in the crisis.

Once everything is established, and again, once it’s contained and the control is starting to take effect, that information flows smoothly. But at the beginning, it can be fairly chaotic, and you’re trying to funnel that information and filter it to what’s important, what’s not important, what needs to be acted upon first, and what can kind of wait.

Jon Becker: Your team is heavily reliant on your element leaders.

Jonathan Pultz: Yes.

Jon Becker: There are teams that are very top-down teams.

Jonathan Pultz: Yes.

Jon Becker: The lieutenant is going to make decisions, and I think the expectation when people interact with your team—the reaction that I get from a lot of teams that come down and see you—is, “Man, the element leaders, these three-plus-ones, these police officers, have a lot of power.” I think that is kind of a unique aspect. It is true of you, and it’s true of SEB actually, that the authority has been pushed to what some teams would regard as a low level in the organization. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Jonathan Pultz: When people ask me to describe what I do, I refer to myself as a tactical adviser. The way we’re set up, we do have very good checks and balances. Obviously, our sergeants are there as our use-of-force experts, command and control. They filter what it is we want to do through the lieutenant and filter it through the incident commander, but we do get a lot of autonomy downrange to utilize our creativity and our training to resolve these situations.

Like any good negotiator, whether I’m a tactician, a businessman, or whatever, we’re very good at providing options. There is always more than one way to solve these incidents, but generally, from a customer service standpoint, I want to give these incident commanders options. I’m going to bounce them off my team members who I have with me downrange, off my sergeants, and generally we’re all in pretty good unison because we train together. We’re on these incidents together. Unlike many other teams, we all work together all the time. That’s one unique aspect of us.

We don’t have different teams. We’re split into six different squads, but those squads are always training together. I can take different people from a different squad or a different sergeant, and we have two different lieutenants. I can work with either lieutenant, and we all work together seamlessly. The nice thing about it is that we all have the same thought process. A lot of times, we have been involved in the same types of situations. We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t work. If I say something that’s completely off the wall, the people I work with are going to be like, “I don’t know about that, man,” or the sergeant’s going to be like, “Maybe we should think about this first.” But generally, because we have that operational tempo, we all pretty much think alike.

The system for us is a little backwards. If you talk to other agencies, they can’t believe we operate that way. But for us, we’ve been utilizing it for over 50 years, and we’ve been very successful with it. It is definitely something we’re probably going to continue to do. I can’t see it changing for any reason because it has proven successful, and it allows us to put together our collective thoughts and come up with resolutions that have proven to be effective.

Jon Becker: In the case of your team, the corporate expertise is at the police officer, the plus-one level, right? I know that, like any big organization, theoretically your lieutenants can come in with no experience. Obviously, right now you’ve got Lee McMillon as your commander, who has a lot of experience and has been there in every rank. So that helps, but theoretically you could have a lieutenant come in with no experience.

Jonathan Pultz: Right.

Jon Becker: You could have sergeants come in that don’t have experience, but your element leaders, the Eddie Perezes of the world, are 15 years, 20 years. It makes sense to house expertise where the expertise is and to place decisions where the guy actually knows what he’s doing.

Jonathan Pultz: Right.

Jon Becker: One of the things that I see teams struggle with a lot is that they’ll get new leadership who don’t have experience, and now you’re having to argue with your own leadership over making decisions. I think the way you do it makes sense. It’s unique, but when you look at the structure of the team and you look at the amount of expertise, on any one of your squads, there’s 150 years of tactical experience.

Jonathan Pultz: I think that’s probably a really good way to look at it. Even though we may have a sergeant or a lieutenant who comes in with no SWAT expertise, we have new guys who come in who have no SWAT expertise. They’ve been through a school, but they’re all tenured policemen. They’re all tenured tacticians to some point. They do bring something to the table, which is great, and they trust us. That’s a big deal.

If you’re downrange in a crisis situation, you want to be the guy that your people look to and you’re calm, collected, and rationally thinking, no matter what’s going on. Whether there is gunfire going off or people are screaming, they want to know you’re going to be even-keeled. That’s important because that’s going to keep them at a certain level, and it’s going to keep the people above at a certain level: nice, calm, collected, and knowing that what they’re sending in is the right decision and we’re going to make the best decisions in the moment.

That experience, the team leaders, that’s one of the things we probably get knocked for: none of us promote, right? We get in these positions and we love doing what we do. We garner all this experience, and it probably could benefit the department in a lot of different places, but we enjoy this line of work and we stay there. We might get a little isolated, but like you said, we do have that niche, that tactical niche, where we’re very good at it. We take the opportunity to really dive into it deeply and get good at it. But you can get a lot of good information from everyone on that team. It’s definitely a team sport. You’re not going to win this thing by yourself. There are no solo operators. It’s a team for a reason.

Jon Becker: Let’s talk about calling a crisis, because this is a topic with your team. Who makes the decision?

Jonathan Pultz: We’re very risk-averse when it comes to that sort of thing. We have a very clear, concise format as to when we launch. We have to have a very specific criteria that comes into play. Generally, one of the lieutenants will get that call. They’ll talk to the incident commander who is on scene, and they’ll ask them a series of questions about whether or not it fits that SWAT criteria.

In addition to that, we have to have a commander above on scene for that incident. So we like to talk about things we do very well. We often resolve our incidents without any force at all, but there’s an extremely high threshold to actually get us out there. Whether that’s the dynamics of the city and the environment we work in or whatever it is, in order to meet that threshold, a number of steps have to be met. Oftentimes, we have to know that there is an actual crime that this person has committed, a felony crime that they’re going to be arrested for. Are they armed? Are they in a position of advantage? Are they refusing to come out?

You listen to the lieutenants joke sometimes that they’ll get these calls from incident commanders where all hell’s breaking loose, and they haven’t even asked the guy to come out yet. So they’ll say, “Hey, have you asked him to come out?” “Oh, I’ll call you back.” Right? Like, “Hey, he came out.” It seems silly, but sometimes some of these things can be so overwhelming. They have a process. We talked about process thinking. They go through that process, and if it meets all that criteria, then when we get the go-ahead, the lieutenant makes the notifications, launches the team, and we put our tools and our training into practice to try to resolve the situation.

Jon Becker: In an actual hostage situation, we’ve met that criteria, and you guys are there. The decision to make a crisis entry lies with the element leader? Give an example: you’re hearing shots fired, you’re hearing screaming. Who is going to make that call?

Jonathan Pultz: That’s going to be the sergeant. The sergeant is going to make that call. But if I tell my sergeant or any of the sergeants, “Hey, I think we have shots fired inside. We need to go,” these are very sharp individuals. They’re pretty much going to be like, “Yeah, I’m right there with you. That is where we need to go.” They’re going to make the formal launch. We’re letting the guys know, “Hey, get ready. We’ve got shots fired. We’re getting ready to make that entry.” They’re going to actually be the ones that put that out over the air and give the go-ahead because we are a rank-structure organization. There is command and control, just like any other tactical unit, and we need to adhere to that hierarchy.

Knock on wood, but I don’t think you’d ever find us in a situation where you have a plus-one and a sergeant arguing over what we deem is the imminent threat of great bodily harm or death, and arguing about whether or not to enter. It’s because they’re down there with us during the whole process. They’re generally scouting with us. They’re going over the rules of engagement with us. They’re right there during the planning phase. So they’re just as invested in it as we are. The guys have just as much say, but because of the amount of training and operational experience we’ve had, I cannot think of an incident where we’ve had pushback among, “Oh no, we’re not going,” “that wasn’t that,” or “that wasn’t this.”

We’re all pretty much on the same page when it comes to launching. Generally, as I said, the communication aspect of laying down the rules of engagement—what is going to constitute that crisis entry—is laid out ad nauseam before these things even happen. If it’s on the fly, the first thing, if we get downrange with a four-man emergency rescue team, that comes out of those team leaders’ mouths is, “Hey, if we have situation A, B, C, or D, then we need to launch.” Guys are generally going to agree or disagree. The communication aspect of it is the most important part of hostage rescue.

Jon Becker: It’s interesting because you guys put much more emphasis on the front end of the process. As a team, you’re very process-oriented and very structured compared to a lot of the other organizations that I’ve worked with and interviewed. It is interesting culturally how much emphasis is placed on the front end of the thinking process. It almost seems like you guys are much more prone to have the argument on the drive there than have it in the field.

Jonathan Pultz: Yes.

Jon Becker: Debriefing as many incidents as I have, frequently you end up in this conflict where the team says, “We need to launch.” The lieutenant doesn’t want to. They’re trying to communicate. They’re trying to share information. I think one of the unique cultural quirks is that you guys have the argument before you get there, and then it seems like, at the point that it goes crisis, there isn’t a lot of, “Oh, hey, is this the crisis?” You’ve defined your rules of engagement, you’ve defined your triggers, and it’s, “Well, we just hit the trigger, so we go.”

Jonathan Pultz: Yep, like a carpenter.

Jon Becker: Right.

Jonathan Pultz: What do they say? “Measure twice, cut once.”

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jonathan Pultz: We’re measuring the whole time until we’re ready to make that cut, which is initiating that crisis entry. Every contingency, any what-if, any possibility of a situation that could occur, we’re talking about it downrange. What are we going to do if this happens? Even crazy stuff you wouldn’t think would come up in a situation downrange: “Hey, what if the guy pops out with the hostage and he’s got a blanket over him? How are we going to handle that?” Because it’s happened.

Jon Becker: “Clicking our pills in Beverly Hills.”

Jonathan Pultz: Right. That’s why these types of discussions, which are wacky and outrageous, are the things we talk about in training. That’s why our guys do a really good job of throwing these crazy loops at us when we train, so that when they happen in the field, nothing seems off the wall. It seems like anything can happen. You have people who are in an irrational state of mind making irrational decisions, and you have to have an answer for it when it happens.

These discussions come up left and right, but it’s not like a free-for-all. It’s very regimented. They’re clear-cut, articulate conversations. If you have multiple entry points, multiple teams, they’re discussing it on the opposite sides in the event there should be a pass-off or something of that nature. That’s the really neat thing about our team. Because we train together and we work together, there’s no real separation. We have a tendency to handle situations very similarly from squad to squad, team leader to team leader, sergeant to sergeant, lieutenant to lieutenant.

Jon Becker: I think that brings up two interesting points that are worth discussing about your team. One is that you guys have a pretty rigid approach to movement and the way you teach movement. There are teams that I deal with and teams that I’ve worked with where, between their squads, they move differently.

Jonathan Pultz: Yes.

Jon Becker: They have a different approach. That’s not true with D-Platoon. At any point, it seems like you could take three guys from one squad and three guys from another squad, put them together, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Jonathan Pultz: Without a doubt.

Jon Becker: It goes back to this kind of rigid process thinking, right? It’s this, “We do it this way.” The other thing that I think is an interesting point is that everybody on the team, when I interviewed Lee, we talked about this in depth, but everybody on the team is a negotiator.

Jonathan Pultz: Yes.

Jon Becker: The negotiation is taking place inside of the team. You’re not using external negotiators.

Jonathan Pultz: Yes.

Jon Becker: I think that’s how you can do that. Talk to me about that for a minute.

Jonathan Pultz: We’re very big on the negotiation aspect of our team. Like you said, every SWAT officer has to go through a four-week negotiator class, and we have a cadre of negotiators, just like we do snipers, breachers, divers, and tech. They train on a regular basis, but it’s the one thing that we deploy on every SWAT incident. We always have negotiators. Just like we have a huge operational tempo for tactics, you have that same operational tempo for negotiators. So our negotiators are getting a ton of practice. They’re out there. It’s not uncommon for a negotiator to negotiate 10 to 15 times a year, whereas in other agencies, that might be a lifetime for them. So they’re constantly out there and they’re data mining. They’re talking to people and relaying that information.

I think the nice thing about the way we do it is, if you’re a team leader and I’m your negotiator, I can walk right up to you because we work together in different areas and on different teams. In other places, negotiators are in completely different places. I can go downrange. If we go into a structure, and our negotiators have failed to talk someone out, and now our guys are inside a structure and the guy’s in an attic and he says, “Hey, let’s talk about this,” maybe back 30 years ago they might have said, “Oh no, you had your chance.” We’re going to entertain that conversation.

The nice thing is that probably within that stack you have people who are negotiators, so you’re not going to have to risk anyone by bringing them in if it’s a gas environment. Those tools are already in place. It’s an easy transition. If they want to talk to someone on the three-side containment or the backside containment, and they only want to talk to that person, no problem. If a guy is working the tech, we have a robot inside, and he’s trying to communicate with that person through the robot, that guy’s a negotiator. No problem.

It’s an easy transition for us. Just like anything else we do, the majority of disciplines, most of us have the ability to step right in, fill that hole, and make that work. That’s an important piece. The negotiation aspect of D-Platoon is huge because it shows that we put all this effort in on the front end to peacefully resolve a situation. So when it does go sideways, especially now with body cameras and everything else, and the media is right there, it’s all right there. You’re showing all the steps we went through to attempt to get a peaceful resolution from someone. If it does go to a point where we have to step in and use force, we have it documented and we show that we’ve done everything to prevent that.

So it’s a very good thing for us. We go as far as giving warnings to suspects, as far as that force could potentially be used against them, or a dog might bite them. We’re actually letting them know, “Hey, you’re given every opportunity here to kind of go with the flow and go with the program because the people I work with are very good at what they do. They will get you out. I don’t care how tough you are. I don’t care what you’ve done. They will get you out.” Like I said, they’re undefeated. They’re going to get you out.

Jon Becker: You’re not going to win.

Jonathan Pultz: Exactly.

Jon Becker: The question is just how badly you’re going to lose.

Jonathan Pultz: Exactly.

Jon Becker: It’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of it as talking about it in the context of a business negotiation. The thing that effective negotiation skills do is enable the team to better communicate to the guy that he’s not going to win.

Jonathan Pultz: Yes.

Jon Becker: And exactly how bad it could go for him if he doesn’t.

Jonathan Pultz: Exactly. It actually helps as a tactician too, because I spoke earlier about being a tactical adviser, right? I’m giving options to the incident commander on how we’re going to handle certain things. Same thing when you have someone who is barricaded, knows they’re probably going to go to prison, and doesn’t want to come out. Something as simple as involving them in the negotiation process and giving them options on how they want to come out makes them feel like they’re part of the process, and they start to trust you, which is good. That’s what you want.

One of the things in my training is that I got a negotiation certificate from Harvard Business School because there are a lot of things I see in the business world, as far as negotiations go, that work great in crisis negotiation. I figured if I’m dealing with people who are in crisis-level mode and sometimes mentally ill, then I probably could use these same types of negotiation skills with regular people, and they’re quite effective: my children, family members, friends, and people I work with. The CNT aspect of D-Platoon is great, and it’s great for everything in life. It’s just another one of those skills that you can universally apply across all areas and pretty much all occupations and industries.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah. Everything’s a negotiation. If you’re married, everything’s a negotiation.

Jonathan Pultz: Yeah. You may not win that one.

Jon Becker: But surrendering is always the right answer. What I’d like to do is look at a couple of operations. The majority of the time, even with hostage situations, you guys are talking people out. But I’d like to dig into two of the cases that both had quite a bit of notoriety and played out on national television, at least one of them. Just kind of talk about lessons learned from those operations. Why don’t we start with Fifth and Main? That one got a lot of media coverage because at one point there’s video that comes out of the suspect holding the hostage on her knees with a gun to her head, which pretty much everybody agreed was a hostage.

Jonathan Pultz: Yeah, there was not much dispute on that one at all.

Jon Becker: So walk me through that one. Give me the background and then the dilemma that you guys faced.

Jonathan Pultz: Initially, when we got that call, there was video footage. Let me back up a little bit. This individual, who was our suspect, had been on a one-man crime spree prior to taking this hostage. He had shot, I believe, a 14-year-old kid. He had tried to carjack someone. He tried to shoot someone else, but his pistol failed. Then he ran into this building at the 500 block of Main.

Central officers were in pursuit of him, and unfortunately he got away from them. During that time lapse where they didn’t know where he was, he had gone up to a floor above and had taken a female hostage. There was a video clip of it, and he had pulled her into an area of the apartment where the video feed did not show where they went.

So initially, when we got that call, we knew that we had a dangerous armed felon running around this building, potentially holding a hostage. We weren’t 100% sure. This was a seven-story building, if my memory serves me correctly. We launched contact teams to every floor of the building trying to either locate this individual or collect information on whether anyone knew the whereabouts of where this person had been taken, whether they had left, fled the building, or where this was concentrated.

During the course of that, some information came in where a resident of the building had come to the command post or talked to a containment officer and advised them, “Hey, I’ve been trying to reach my girlfriend. She lives with me. She’s not on the lease.” That was one thing they were trying to do: go lease by lease to see who was accounted for and who wasn’t. She would have been one that wouldn’t have been on the documents. They had actually shown him the video, and he identified her as his girlfriend. He was unable to reach her.

He advised us that the apartment he was in was where she would be if she was there. We started to concentrate efforts on that particular apartment. It was a unique building. I believe, at one point, it was a factory, and someone came in and converted it to condos. Very unique to downtown. This particular apartment had two doors, which is very atypical of either an apartment or a condo in a downtown area.

Now we’re concentrating on two doors, which ultimately worked out in our favor. We’re starting to do some more investigation. We contain that location. We start setting up emergency rescue teams. We start talking about tools we may possibly need: breaching tools and energetic charges.

Two of the officers, Officers Jim Brown and Michael Messenger, are on one of the doors, and they hear what they believe is furniture moving and being stacked up against the door. Now, in addition to the preliminary information we got, this is adding to that information. We are starting to transition and treat this as a potential hostage incident and put the personnel and tools into place in the event it turns out to be a righteous hostage incident.

More and more information is coming in, and now we’re really concentrating on this potential location because the homeowner who has come up is adamant that his girlfriend would pick up the phone. He’s trying to text her. There’s no communication going in or out, and he’s worried. This was the last area where our hostage and our hostage taker were last seen on video.

Everyone is now on this floor working this problem, and we’re starting to slow it down now because we don’t have enough information to say 100%, yes, there’s a hostage and a hostage taker inside that location, and we don’t have a clear count of who’s in there. Are there just these two people? Are there more people? We’re not 100% sure. So we’re trying to do some more investigating, and we’re getting ready to set up negotiations. We are getting ready to send a sniper team to an area to see if they can effectively find a location where they can maybe see into this location.

All of a sudden, another citizen comes forward with video, which is the video that was on national TV, where they now see an individual with a pistol to this woman’s head.

Hostage Scene:

Man: He’s got a gun to someone’s head.

Woman: What? Shut the fuck up.

Man: Or a knife.

[People screaming]

End.

Jonathan Pultz: Now we know for sure we’ve got a real hostage situation. But before any of this information even came into play, like we talked about earlier in our hostage rescue discussion, Ed Perez, who’s the main team leader on his team at Entry Red, and Joe Martinez, who’s got control of Entry Blue, are having these discussions. They’re talking about what’s going to constitute a crisis entry. What are going to be the rules of engagement? What type of breaching methods are we going to use on the doors that are presented to us? What’s going to be the plan if these people step out? What’s going to happen if the hostage is released? What are we going to transition to and how are we going to do it? Everything that could possibly happen before the incident unfolded was already being discussed before that crisis team was launched.

When that confirmation came into place, that was passed off to Sergeant Mark Jackson at the time, who was with Ed Perez on that team, and he initiated that crisis entry. When that happened, the contingency plans were in place: dual entries. I’m sure you’ve talked to several teams: if you’re in the hostage rescue business, I don’t care what kind of structure you’ve got, you do the best thing you can to try to find more than one entry point because odds are one is probably going to be barricaded. Your breaching equipment may not work. You need to double down or triple down. You need to make sure you have more than one way to affect that rescue.

That came into play on this one because the energetic charges and the breaching methods that were assigned to the primary entry point were not effective, but they were effective on the secondary entry point. In addition to that, your team has to be well aware of what your tools are able to do. Any energetic breachers out there, people who have effectively dealt with this type of breaching method, are well aware that all the effects from energetic breaching occur on the outside. Inside, you don’t get the same type of effect. There is definitely the loud noise, the shock, the awe. It definitely comes into play. But following up with the use of a diversionary device was important, and that video is fantastic because you see it. Everyone sees it: there is a flash of light, and you see how it immediately changes the suspect’s demeanor.

Incident:

Woman: Bullshit. Oh, bullshit!

Man: Baby. Get down. Get down. Get down. Get down. Get down. Get down. Get down. Get down. Get down.

[Loud explosions]

[People screaming]

[Gunshots]

End.

Jonathan Pultz: He jumps out of his skin. He’s looking right and left. The secondary energetic charge goes, and he’s even more confused. Then the diversionary device goes, and he’s even more confused. That allowed our personnel to get within reach before he could turn that gun on the victim and effectively create that rescue and have the victim rescued safely. Unfortunately, he chose to point that weapon at two of our operators, and they had to do what they had to do.

Incident:

Officer: He’s got a gun. God.

[Gunshots]

Officer: Come here! Come here! Come here! Come here!

[Woman screaming]

Officer: Come here! Come on!

Woman: The cat! The cat!

End.

Jonathan Pultz: Proper front-end planning was the key to success during that operation. Having the right tools and the right training to make that a success: everything that went into that incident took place days, weeks, and years before that incident ever happened. Prior experience, prior training, proper planning—all of that is what made that operation a success.

Jon Becker: I remember when that happened. We did an evening lecture series. You guys came out and debriefed it for a couple hundred guys, and there were several things that were striking about that. One was how, when you saw the failed breach and heard the radio traffic—it was Eddie Perez’s team that had the failed breach—the comments afterwards were like, “It sounded like they were ordering at Taco Bell” when they were reporting that they had a failed breach and were moving to the other entry point. There was nothing. It was urgent and calm.

Jonathan Pultz: Right.

Jon Becker: That entire incident, it’s very clear. They know exactly what they’re going to do. They’re very calm. They’re very deliberate. It’s not fast. It’s not running through the building with their hair on fire. They’re very deliberate. But at the point that the suspect actually is engaged, if he had it to do over again, he probably would pick differently.

Jonathan Pultz: Right.

Jon Becker: But he was already going to lose. It was so quick that the team was on him despite the failed breach, despite the complexity of it. The door fell and got in the way. There were a lot of things when you watched that video, you’re like, “Man, that’s a lot of challenge,” none of which really seemed to impact the team at all.

Jonathan Pultz: No, because you expect it. When we teach people to be SWAT officers, we tell them, “Expect to find the person you’re looking for in whatever room you step into.” We’ll see it in training where people are surprised, and through training we let them know, “Hey, this can happen everywhere.” We expect our breaches to fail. That’s why we set up multiple entry points. We expect our equipment to go down. Tech has really made incredible strides, right? Robots go down. Batteries go down. We have an answer for it. We’ll go back to a mirror if we have to. We have redundant backups in place for things like less lethal. We use redundant less lethal like crazy because we expect it to fail.

We’re realistic about things. We know not everything is going to work. So we’re going to double our odds. When that breach failed, Ed already had it in his mind. He knew this was a possibility. He’d already discussed with the other team how the handoff would occur, when it would occur, and what was expected after it occurred. So when it happened, like you said, it was like he was ordering at Taco Bell. It was, “Okay, they don’t have my Chalupa today. I’m going with the Taco Supreme.”

Jon Becker: That’s about what the radio traffic sounded like.

Jonathan Pultz: Pretty much. That’s what makes a good SWAT team. They’re not training too easily. They’re training to the unexpected. I think in any industry or occupation, that’s what you should be doing to make yourself better: training for the unexpected. I’d imagine, in your line of work, especially during something like COVID, your supply chain must have been a mess and buyers were probably flaking out on you, but I have no doubt you’re still here. You had a plan in place. You had contingencies. You knew how to work around that, right? It’s no different in our line of work. We plan for the unexpected. That’s what you’d expect from any professional, in any profession, no matter what they do: they know that not everything is going to go according to plan. You just have to roll with it and have a plan in place to pick it up where it leaves off because people are depending on you.

Jon Becker: When you look back at Fifth and Main, what do you think the real lessons learned for other teams can be?

Jonathan Pultz: Several lessons. One, obviously, is the importance of having multiple entry points. Doing a proper investigation because it could have been very easy for us to not get that information when we did get it, and to not explore every avenue. We didn’t have to set up on that incident like a hostage rescue because we didn’t have all that information from the start. We thought it was a possibility. You can always pull those charges off. You can always scale back, but until you know for sure, make sure you have those plans in place in case the unthinkable happens.

I talked about how we were just getting ready to slow it down because we still weren’t 100% sure until, all of a sudden, we found out he had a gun to her head. Now we knew without a doubt, but because we already had everything in place, it went smoothly.

Tools: some of the issues we ran into were with our selection of energetic breaching charges. We have plenty of stuff to utilize in those situations. We were a little bit more limited that day. The selection was good for what happened, but certain vehicles were getting serviced during that incident, so we didn’t have the big array that we normally would have. The breachers did a good job of pivoting and using what they had on hand. Sometimes, if you don’t have all your tools, make sure someone is designated to go back and get the tools you need. That might have made their life a little bit easier. They did everything to the best of their ability and they made the right selections, but if you need a certain tool or certain personnel, ask for them.

Could we have potentially used some more people in different positions? Yeah, it would have been nice to have had the opportunity to get a Sierra team or sniper team in place to at least give us eyes on. That video is very deceptive. There was no building directly across. My understanding is that the video was taken from either ground level or a parking structure when it came to us. But if people on the ground could see it, then someone with high-powered optics could see it. Those were definitely three of the big lessons learned: make sure you have the right tools, make sure you have multiple entry points, and make sure you have the ability to get good intel at your disposal because things change in an instant. It was very evident in that situation.

Jon Becker: One of the interesting things about that incident is that it really did play out with a lot that was recorded, and LAPD released a great deal of it, right? They released the body-worn camera footage. They released the footage from across the street. You looked at it. I don’t think anybody looked at the video of him dragging her through the living room with a gun to her head and thought, “Oh no, they shouldn’t go in.” Body-worn cameras are always a topic of discussion with SWAT teams, right? Protecting your deliberative process and protecting your tactics. You guys have had body-worn cameras for quite a while. What are your thoughts on that?

Jonathan Pultz: Like anything else, initially it was the fear of the unknown. You didn’t know, “Hey, are we going to be giving away our tactics? Are we going to be compromising ourselves?” But what we found is that it has actually been an outstanding tool for us.

In that particular incident on Fifth and Main, I think that’s the first time we had a true discussion on rules of engagement that was recorded. If we found ourselves in court on that incident, in years past, those discussions took place and unless they came over radio, were recorded, or there was some other means to transcribe them, they didn’t happen, right? We’re only saying they happened.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jonathan Pultz: But now we have this right here on video, and we can show not only ourselves, our department, and the community, we can show other teams, “Hey, see, these are the things we are talking about.” Plus, it documents things that we can go back and look at during debrief and have open discussion about because it’s right there.

It’s interesting though, there are obviously limitations. I debriefed an incident probably about a year ago, and Force Science was there. I thought that was a pretty neat presentation because what they were doing was taking body-cam footage and kind of doing reenactments of incidents. They had some special glasses that would track officers’ eyes to what they were looking at and what the body cam was seeing. So it’s not 100% accurate because it only sees at a certain level, a certain view, and it doesn’t see everything, but it does pretty much record everything, which is great. There are a lot of things you can get a lot out of, and it’s only going to continue to improve. Camera technology is everywhere.

It definitely has helped us out quite a bit, and now I can’t imagine not having it because it validates a lot of what we do and reinforces a lot of what we do, especially in the pre-planning phase, because there’s no disputing it now. It’s there. It’s on camera, and the lessons learned from it are invaluable.

Jon Becker: LAPD does a very good job of releasing videos, and the way they release them and present them is, at a national level, exceptional.

Jonathan Pultz: Hollywood, baby.

Jon Becker: It really is. Yeah, it is very LA.

Jon Becker: Yes.

Jon Becker: There's no special effects, but other than that, it's very LA. But it also demonstrates the professionalism of the team in a way that surprised me when I first started seeing some of the incidents. You see it and you hear the discussions and you realize, everybody's calm. They're having a very deliberate discussion. It's not a bunch of knuckle-draggers, screaming, "Let me go kill the guy."  and I think in that sense it is very effective.

Jonathan Pultz: No, definitely. You hope it would show professionalism, which it does. And I think maybe that adds an extra element to it. Hey, you want to sound cool because you're on camera, right?

Jon Becker: Yeah. Don't want to look like a dipshit.

Jonathan Pultz: The whole world is going to see this.

Jon Becker: There is an argument that some civil rights lawyers make that simply the fact that you are being recorded professionalizes law enforcement. It does get rid of some of the things that might otherwise have happened, right? Also, I think it probably disappoints them because there are probably a lot of things they thought were happening that aren’t happening.

Jonathan Pultz: For sure.

Jon Becker: As an attorney who worked at police litigation for a couple of years, I do take a great deal of enjoyment in the fact that they publicly release these things because you’ll have the story, “Oh, he was walking down the street carrying his groceries and he was on his way to church,” and then here’s the guy with his pants around his knees, gun pointed at the cops, screaming, “Fuck you. You’ll never get me.” The minute that plays, you’re just like, “Oh, yeah. This conversation is over.”

Jonathan Pultz: Yeah. Law enforcement is an honorable profession. There are so many people who are true professionals. They could do so many other things. They’re smart, they’re articulate, and they choose to do this profession. They do such a great job, and it’s good to see that they’re actually getting credit for it. Hopefully that’s going to be the driver, with this video and some of the things you see, that will drive more people back to the profession.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jonathan Pultz: You can live well, you can make a good living at it, and you truly are doing something for the community. You’re going to leave a legacy behind where you actually helped people. That’s important. With these body cameras, it gives us that opportunity to show that and to tell these stories.

Jon Becker: Whereas before, it was just word of mouth. It was a story.

Jonathan Pultz: Right.

Jon Becker: Speaking of Hollywood, let’s go to the bus. I’ve done this for 40 years. Everybody trains for bus assaults. Everybody trains bus hostage situations. Going back to Munich in 1972, that was where we had to be able to deal with buses. You guys have been actively training bus hostage rescue since the 1984 Olympic Summer Games. I try to think of another hostage situation on a bus that required tactical intervention in my career. I’ve not been able to think of one. Nobody else has been able to think of one. You guys just had one.

Jonathan Pultz: We did. It was September of 2024, and it was an interesting incident, to say the least. Like you said, we do train bus tactics. We have essentially what was a theoretical set of tactics to utilize on a bus that we train to. Like structures, there are several different kinds of buses out there. Fortunately for us, we have a good relationship with our Metro Transit Authority, which pretty much every six months allows us to train on buses. But there was a lot of information that we were lacking prior to this bus assault, which we kind of learned on the fly like we normally do on a lot of stuff, but we had a good enough foundation which made us successful that night.

I was the team leader or element leader handling the call that night, and I got a call from my lieutenant. He’s like, “Hey, Jon, we’ve got a hostage incident on a bus.” I’m like, “Okay, trained to handle hostage incidents on a bus,” and he says, “It’s moving.” It’s like 12:30 and I’m like, “Come again? It’s moving?”

Jon Becker: Is Keanu Reeves involved?

Jonathan Pultz: Yeah. There’s one we have not trained to. So I’m like, okay, going back to our three C’s, I have to contain this thing first and foremost. Now I’m thinking about what options are on the table as far as slowing this thing down. Traditionally, if we have a moving barricade or a moving hostage incident, we just want to get officers out there who can parallel it. When it stops, then we can contain it, get to work, and do what we do. The first thing I asked for was an all-hands response, which means anyone and everyone who’s available because this thing’s moving. We don’t know where it’s going to end up, and I just want to get people there as fast as possible. I don’t care where they’re coming from.

Jon Becker: To clarify, normally there’s a duty team in your rotation. Somebody has the duty. On any given night, there’s a certain number of guys who are going to get triggered if there’s a problem. When you go all hands, it’s like, “Ring everybody’s phone. Whoever can get here can get here.”

Jonathan Pultz: Absolutely. That was the mindset there. Also, because there are so many different buses that operate, I wanted a mechanic or a supervisor. Like I said, I’m fortunate. I work for really good people because they made that happen. In addition, I wanted multiple pieces of armor because, in my head, I didn’t know. I knew we had to stop this thing. How are we going to stop it? Are we going to set up a roadblock? It’s something we don’t do, but if there are hostages on board, we have to figure out a way to stop this thing so that we can operate. So there’s all kinds of crazy stuff going through my head as to how we’re going to get that initial containment piece into place.

I make the notifications. I’m heading out from my residence and I’m listening to SWAT frequency, Metro Frequency, and Southeast Frequency, who have the initial call on this. The way it started out was pretty interesting. This individual boards the bus, and they’re heading south through the city. He’s armed with a pistol. He puts his hand in his pocket and has a negligent discharge. So he essentially induces his own gunfight. At that time, because it’s close to midnight, one of the fortunate things that worked out for us was there were only about eight or nine people on the bus. This particular bus is an 88-passenger bus. It’s 40 feet long. It has two doors, and it’s fueled by compressed natural gas, which will come into play later. When that thing is at full capacity, you can imagine the horror show that would be: 88 people on board. Some of the methods we use to gain entry could potentially be hazardous.

The minimum number of passengers is good. What happens during that time frame is that he pulls out his pistol and starts shooting up the interior of the bus. He ends up hitting one individual twice. The bus driver, who is pretty heads-up, gets a gun stuck in his face and is ordered to drive the bus. He starts heading back toward downtown because that’s what this guy wants. At some point, he allows passengers to get off. As Southeast gets this call for this incident, they’re running into people along the street. They’re getting partial information and being told that there is someone on board who may be shot.

The original incident commander had previous Metro experience. For our listeners, Metro is the division where SWAT and K9 work out of. These officers in particular have quite a bit of tactical training, and this individual sergeant is very smart. He’s already gathering information we need. He made the notifications very fast and gets everyone rolling.

As I got close to where the pursuit of the bus was happening, Southeast Division had used a spike strip on the bus and, surprisingly enough, it was super effective. They were able to pretty much deflate one of the wheels on the front passenger side. By the time I got up to that bus, the rubber on the wheel was almost completely shredded off. The craziest thing was, when I came up to the area of the pursuit, it looked like O.J. Simpson. I had never seen that many black-and-whites trailing.

Jon Becker: It’s a hostage on a bus.

Jonathan Pultz: Right, exactly.

Jon Becker: There were probably cops there from Arizona.

Jonathan Pultz: Yeah, it was pretty impressive. The other thing that caught my attention was that you probably had 50 people on Razor scooters and bicycles trailing this thing too because now this thing is only going about 10 miles an hour.

Jon Becker: Has it been picked up by the media yet?

Jonathan Pultz: Yes, they’re following it.

Jon Becker: So it’s already on the news as a live pursuit.

Jonathan Pultz: Absolutely. You have these stringers following it, and it’s a circus. One thing for the listeners who are from smaller agencies: we are spoiled in D-Team, right? Generally, when we respond to an incident, and we talked about the criteria, it’s pretty much gift-wrapped and handed to you. Your location is set. Usually they have some kind of containment. You’re just replacing containment. A lot of information has been vetted.

I am rolling into this thing, and nothing has been done. Right. So I’m trying to communicate over a couple different frequencies with different people, and this bus starts heading southbound on Alameda Street. It comes to a stop, and it’s still lurching along. So, first things first, we’ve got to contain this situation, right? I grabbed a group of Southeast officers who did not hesitate. They were awesome. I just grabbed them and said, “Hey, come with me.” They came up. They grabbed a shield. We went to the back of that bus. They held cover, and I’m trying to disable this bus.

Typically, in our training, they had given us a procedure to turn this bus off, and of course, it’s not working. So by the grace of God, and another fortunate thing that happened to us that night, directly to the west of where this bus had stopped, there was an MTA bus yard. A mechanic had happened to come out and was talking to one of the other officers on scene, and they’re yelling to us from across the street that there’s a panel on the right that will disarm this bus. So we do that.

We essentially turn that panel off, and the bus goes completely dead. All the power stops. The engine stops. With my limited experience on these buses, I know that the driver also has a 360-degree camera system outside and inside. Effectively, that took away their ability to see us on the outside. But what it also did was, being about 1:00 in the morning and on a very dark street, the bus had tinted windows. It took our ability away to see inside.

During that initial pursuit, one thing that caught my attention, which I hadn’t expected, was that during the COVID era, the MTA had changed where the bus driver sits. They had put almost a little sallyport area, like a little COVID cabinet, for the bus drivers. They had this Plexiglas-enclosed area where they’re at, and he was separated from the hostage taker and potentially our other hostage who was on the bus.

Once the bus is stopped, I put together an emergency rescue team with Southeast officers and kind of give them some preliminary rules of engagement. I advised them, “Hey, this is what’s going to constitute a crisis entry, this is what we’re going to do, and this is where we’re going to attack it from.” In my mind, every time I train on these buses, when you kill the power, it releases the door locks, so you’d be able to force open the doors. Based on the information I had at the time, I wanted to enter from the rear, knowing that the driver was separated from the hostage taker and would be safe in that area if we approached from the rear. If we did have to utilize lethal force, we’d have a good, accurate projection of where that force would go. It would be away from the driver and directed toward the hostage taker if it came to that.

I also talked a little bit about ballistics with these officers, letting them know that essentially what you have is a fiberglass shell encompassing an engine with compressed natural gas on top, and they’re going to have to be very mindful of their shots if they take them.

Jon Becker: They’re climbing into a thin aluminum bomb. Don’t shoot up.

Jonathan Pultz: Right. Plus, nothing’s cover. As I mentioned, I still have this crowd to deal with. There is a ton of video out there, and these guys are walking up to the bus. They’re within the line of fire. To the east is a 24-hour produce mart. They have workers who are now starting to file out. They want to see what’s going on. To my south, I have Olympic Boulevard, which is a ton of traffic, a main thoroughfare. So, in addition to dealing with this crisis situation, we have to get a crowd-control situation. I have to get these people out of the line of fire. I have to go over rules of engagement with all these individuals who have never been in a hostage rescue or trained for a hostage rescue and let them know, “Hey, you guys are going to be fine. Just follow my lead. We’re going to make this work.” I had to give them quick, dirty, on-the-fly hostage rescue training.

All that’s going on, and then little by little our guys are starting to trickle in, which obviously allows me to replace some of the Southeast folks with our people. Ed Perez is one of the first team leaders to come in, and I immediately say, “Hey, Ed, take this emergency rescue team so I can start to put other things into place.”

More officers are showing up, and the first thing we do is declare what’s what on this bus. Our primary entry point is going to be the rear. Our secondary entry point is going to be the front. A unique tactic we implemented was, if we’re in a structure or a stronghold, if we have a known count and we know where that hostage is at, we’ll send a direct team directly to that location. Obviously, we can effectively save that hostage, or if we can take the fight to that hostage taker, we still have to be accountable for everything behind us. But if our intel is good that they’re there, we’ll send a team directly to that location.

This bus, the way it was configured with that sallyport, gave us an opportunity to send a team directly to the hostage. So that was my other thought once my emergency rescue team was established. I wanted to get a second emergency rescue team whose sole responsibility was going directly to the known hostage, which was that bus driver.

Jon Becker: Pulling him out through the window.

Jonathan Pultz: Pulling him out through the window, right? Renee Gonzalez, Martin Beck, and Leah Ryan were the three officers who ultimately ended up handling that task.

Incident:

[Gunshots]

Officer: Watch out, brother. Watch out, brother. Get down! Get down! Get down! Get down! Get down!

Officer 2: Get down!

Officer: We got team. We got team. We got team. Get down. Get down. Get down. Team’s in. Team’s in. Team’s in. Team’s in. Push right here!

Officer 2: Hey, you. Try to get him out.

Officer: Hold down. Hold down. Hold down.

Officer 2: Go, go, go. This way. Go back! Go back! Go back! Okay. Get down! Just get down!

End.

Jonathan Pultz: Once we had the bus contained, we had it stopped, we had our areas of responsibility determined, and our rules of engagement were in place, now it was a matter of controlling the situation more by getting our tools in place. Nick Cho, who is an officer who works in my element or my squad at the time, is completely selfless. This guy lives just south of where the crisis was taking place, very close to downtown, and he calls me up as I’m going to the location and the rest of the guys are going to the location. He says, “Hey, Jon, I can get to Metro faster than anyone else. Do you want me to divert and get a piece of armor?” That’s the type of thinking from people. They’re always thinking ahead, and it was just a selfless action. He could have been there on scene, one of the first ones there, and gotten himself in a prime position, but he’s thinking about the team. He’s thinking about the people on board, and that piece of armor was able to get there relatively fast.

Initially, I had requested four pieces of armor because I would have found a use for all of them at some point. One of the things we talked about earlier was the ballistics and where rounds are flying. Knowing what I was dealing with, if any shooting was going to happen, I wanted to make sure that we had ballistic backstops around this bus so that, with the enormous area we had and the amount of spectators, there weren’t going to be any errant rounds that flew outside that bus. They were going to lodge into a piece of armor if shooting were to take place.

Jon Becker: You’d build your own backstop out of your armored vehicles.

Jonathan Pultz: Absolutely. Any rounds that we let go, we are responsible for, and we have to make sure that we’re keeping the community safe as well as everyone else involved in this incident.

Jon Becker: Even if they’re stupid enough to stand behind a bus with a police SWAT team going into it so that they can shoot video on their cell phone and try to sell it to TMZ.

Jonathan Pultz: Unfortunately, but that’s the reality of my job. So I’ve got to take all that stuff into account. When Nick arrives, we’re able to put that piece of armor in the very front of the bus. It does a couple good things for us. It gives us some eyes inside, which we didn’t have before because of the blackout from killing the power and the tinted windows. In the event the driver is actually able to start this bus up again, that bus is not moving that piece of armor, which effectively disables that bus.

The next order of operations is supplementing that emergency rescue team and pulling Southeast officers off and putting other officers in place. Like I mentioned, to the west was that MTA bus yard, and I thought maybe that would be a good spot where we could get eyes on with a sniper component to be able to look inside that bus. So Officers Mike Messenger and Brian Enderle responded on scene, and I thought it was more important for them to have a vantage point. They took that secondary piece of armor, which I had wanted to put on the driver’s side of the bus inside the produce yard to backstop that area, and used it to give them an opportunity to look above the wall from the MTA bus yard and be able to look into that bus.

That piece of armor fortunately came with the tools we needed, which were the bus ladders and the breaching tools to effectively breach those windows. Simultaneously, this is going on. Like I said, I passed that emergency rescue team off to Ed Perez. Mike Messenger is dealing with the sniper component. Renee Gonzalez is taking a team surreptitiously around the produce yard to set up as a rescue team for the driver. Joe Guzby is now on scene, and he’s going to handle diversionary devices and coordinating resources as I’m talking to our MTA mechanic and supervisor who showed up on scene.

I need to know about this bus. I need to know how I can breach the doors. Are they already open based on my previous training? I’m told, no, this particular bus needs a T-key. So, of course, my initial response is, “What the hell is a T-key?”

Fortunately, she had all that stuff on her. She comes back with a key that goes into the panel that we used to disable the bus, and there is a key port there that will bleed the air out. The way these buses are designed, there is an air loop that not only controls the doors but also the suspension of the bus. It’s all on one loop. When you bleed that, that will release the pressure of the doors. Like we talked about earlier, I’m not going to rely just on that piece of information because it’s not 100% familiar to me. I’m just learning this for the first time now. I’m going to hit both doors with the opportunity of creating two entry points. Plus, on a bus, you have a lot of large windows, so those windows can be used not only as a distraction but also as a tertiary entry point if need be. We need to go in through there. So not only am I doubling down, but I’m tripling down. If I have to get on that bus, I’m going to make sure there’s a way for our guys to get on that bus, and all the resources are in place.

Every time we do something, we want to make sure that we are ready so that our action does not precipitate a negative reaction from the suspect. For example, we move up to bleed the air from the bus. It’s very loud. We’re kind of exposing ourselves, and the emergency rescue team is prepped and ready. “Hey, if we get a negative reaction, like shots fired inside or we hear people struggling, you’re going to launch.” Plus, we’re still trying to verify whether or not we do have someone inside who is bleeding out. That by itself is a reason to launch, right? Preservation of life. We want to make sure that person gets medical attention as soon as humanly possible.

We’re getting a little bit of conflicting information. We’re not 100% sure at this point, while we’re going through this, that that person is in there or not. So when Nick Cho shows up with the BearCat, he’s able to utilize a spotlight inside the bus to kind of look inside. Again, before we do that, we prep the emergency rescue team, which now is a full-on entry team, and several other officers have joined Renee Gonzalez, with Eric Esteban leading them, to be our blue entry on the front doors of the bus. At a minimum, we have enough officers to effectively do a rescue if necessary, and we have full containment and control of this bus.

When Nick shines the light inside, there’s no negative reaction, so that was good. But what he does see is a pair of feet in the aisleway, and he sees blood pooling on the floorboard. At that point, we know we have to initiate a rescue.

Incident:

[Gunshots]

[Officers shouting orders]

End.

Jonathan Pultz: Ed Perez and Billy Lee took the initiative to organize window teams for the assault. I had Entry Red, Eric had Entry Blue, and Renee was going directly to the hostage. Now all facets are covered, and we’re able to realistically and confidently relay to the incident command that, “Hey, yes, you have someone on board who is in need of medical attention.” At that point, I passed it over to the sergeant in charge at that time, Sergeant Mike Noki. He gave us the go-ahead to initiate that rescue.

That rescue took off, and there were a couple challenges. In the city of Los Angeles, when they get new buses, they will outfit them with Plexiglas inserts both on the inside and the outside.

Jon Becker: Over the windows.

Jonathan Pultz: Over the windows. Correct. That’s to prevent vandalism, things of that nature. When these things go in for service, if they have the opportunity to change them out, they’ll change them out. So sometimes they’re in, sometimes they’re out, but there’s no way for you to know that until you’re right up on the window. A couple of the break-and-rake teams who were assigned to windows, as they went to break those windows out, encountered some of that Plexiglas. They’re trying to break that glass with a heavy tool, and they’re bouncing off it. They make adjustments, they check different windows, and eventually they’re able to start breaking windows.

Two of the officers, Officer Louva and Mario Rios, broke the window right over the suspect and were able to freeze him down almost immediately. Plus, they created an entry point, which was the key to our success on that operation because as Entry Red and Entry Blue flowed toward the doors, the doors weren’t opening.

On the body cam, you can hear the system completely bleed out. There are a couple different theories on what may or may not have happened, according to the mechanics. One was maybe we created our own air gap by fighting each other on the doors like an accordion. We’re pushing air into the system, so it’s not allowing either door to open up. Or maybe there was still residual air within the system.

One of the officers, Officer Royce Burroughs, broke off, tried to re-bleed the system, and we also, on the red side, stopped working that door for half a second. The door opened on the blue side, so we were able to pass that entry off to blue. They were able to get on board and take the suspect into custody. Unbeknownst to us, there was a third person inside who had the same clothing and description as the individual who had fired the shots inside.

Jon Becker: Oh boy. Potentially, two different guys could be the suspect.

Jonathan Pultz: Right. Again, we were fortunate that we overwhelmed the senses. Incredible show of force, psychologically. The suspect just froze down. He didn’t want to fight. He did have a .45-caliber pistol, which he had hidden under a backpack just right out of his reach. We just froze everyone down, took everyone into custody, began to apply medical treatment to the down victim, and removed everyone else out of that bus from there.

An incredible amount of lessons were learned during that incident.

Let me backtrack. I forgot to mention that we utilized two diversionary devices. Traditionally, we like to use those diversionary devices on the roof of a bus, and the reason we used two was because we had officers approaching on opposite sides of the bus, which traditionally we would only approach from one side of the bus. But because we knew we could go directly to that driver, now we are creating a crossfire issue, but we’re doing it with an extensive amount of planning. Officers were extremely aware of their areas of responsibility. They knew where our rescue team was going to be on that opposite side.

The height of the bus helped us out because where the driver’s area was, it was a little bit higher window-wise compared to where the break-and-rake over the suspect was. That type of information was essential for those officers to know because initially the expected plan was that I was going to come in with my team from the rear, and our team was going to be traveling from the rear to the front. The fields of fire would be going to the right of where the rescue of the bus driver was at, if any shots had to be fired. But when that didn’t work and we transitioned to blue, now if that hostage taker had stepped directly between that team and the bus driver, now you had potential for a true blue-on-blue. In a hostage rescue situation, it would probably be similar to a hostage overlay, and that’s something the guys train for.

The bus itself, obviously like airplanes, they want to get the biggest bang for their buck. So in addition to the seating, you have poles in there for people to stand, and that creates a very confined area for a fully dressed tactical operator to maneuver through. En route to the crisis, I put on the air several times that if officers wanted to reconfigure their gear, if they wanted to go something a little bit more streamlined, this was an opportunity to do so. I don’t think anyone did, but definitely that was a lesson learned on that. If you have that opportunity, we should have separate rigs for these types of situations, for these close-quarter situations. So we do train to it, but I don’t think anyone had a pre-prepared rig for that where they could just quickly transition.

Choice of firearm: that’s something where, when you find yourself in that situation, we’ve trained with pistols, subguns, and rifles. We talked about ballistic over-penetration, but in an area like that, it’s a 40-foot bus. So if you’re taking a hostage shot, essentially from 17 yards, give or take, that’s a pretty challenging hostage shot to have to take with a pistol. So I didn’t want to limit the officers’ tools if they did find themselves in that situation. I have trust in the people I work with, and so does our leadership, for them to make those decisions. That was another learning lesson, where you question some of the things you’re taught along the way, because there are better tools sometimes to utilize.

Breaching tools: the breaching tools that we used to break the windows. If it was a full load of passengers, we could have potentially injured a passenger with that breaching tool. So now we’re exploring different breaching tools.

Ladders: the ladders we use to get up to the height of the windows. There is better equipment out there we could utilize. We hadn’t updated any of our bus ladders probably since the 90s. So there are different things we have to look at.

Different buses: not just MTA buses, but school buses, coach buses. With the World Cup and the Olympics coming on board, they’re probably going to utilize every single bus they can imagine. Just the MTA alone has 13 different models of buses they’re utilizing right now. Some of them are electric, which we haven’t even seen.

This is all the information that we need to have to successfully do our job, and essentially we were learning on the fly that night. For other teams out there, if you have an opportunity, definitely go down and talk to those mechanics about alternate entry points that you can utilize.

One thing we learned that I’d never heard before was that each bus driver has a key, so if they want to go off to use the restroom or get lunch or whatever, that key has an access point located on the outside of the bus where they can unlock and lock that door. At least it will open the front door of the bus. That was something we didn’t have access to or know beforehand. Now we know. Now we have access to those keys. We have access to the T-keys.

Manpower: for us, we’re fortunate because we have the manpower to utilize. We ended up using 28 officers and one sergeant during that rescue. A tremendous amount of manpower. A lot of times people are like, “Well, it’s just a bus,” but there are a lot of moving parts to make that successful. From the window teams—each window encompasses three guys—to the direct team to the driver, that’s three guys. Multiple guys for each entry point. The manpower stacks up very quickly.

If you’re a smaller team and you don’t have that much manpower, you can effectively clear that bus, I think, with a four-man contact team and use whatever other resources you have as break-and-rake teams to freeze people down. Definitely think outside the box as far as diversionary devices. If you don’t have access to noise-flash devices, something less lethal could be utilized to create noise on the hull. Loudspeakers, barking dogs, whatever your imagination can use. Again, it comes back to shrinking that terrain, like we talked about earlier, and forcing that suspect to focus his attention in a different direction. If you’re going to initiate that assault, any distraction or diversion that is going to help give your officers an edge in that situation has to be considered.

Jon Becker: You talked about windows and doors. I remember when I first started doing this, there was a lot of emphasis on bus assaults. You were using ladders. You were coming through windows. That has kind of started to lose favor. Teams have kind of started, “Ah, it’s really hard, and it’s hard to break the windows, and you may not get a good shot, and it creates crossfire.”

Jonathan Pultz: Yep.

Jon Becker: More and more, you see teams training to just use doors.

Jonathan Pultz: Yep.

Jon Becker: That doesn’t sound like it would have worked for you guys.

Jonathan Pultz: Not on that night. Not in that particular situation. It may have worked in another one. It’s possible. But again, if you’re going to be in the hostage rescue business, you need to plan for all your contingencies. That means expecting for one of these entry points to fail, which they did in our case. The two main entry points, we weren’t getting in immediately. Those window teams for us were money that night. That’s what paid dividends, and that was our third-best option. It ended up being our best option because that’s what froze that suspect down. Think outside the box. Make sure you have more than one point of entry because, as we’ve talked about in two separate incidents, both of which we were successful on, if it weren’t for those additional entry points, we probably wouldn’t have been successful on either one.

Jon Becker: The contingency planning, the mindset that everything can fail, seems so often with you guys to be that it just fails over to the next option. It doesn’t fail over to catastrophic failure, which in both those instances it could have if you had only had that as a primary entry point.

Jonathan Pultz: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I didn’t realize until the following day that I knew it was kind of unique to do a hostage rescue on a bus, but when calls started coming in and people wanted to hear about it, I didn’t realize how rare it actually was worldwide. In the United States, these things just don’t happen on a regular basis.

Jon Becker: It’s really the only one I have ever heard of in the United States.

Jonathan Pultz: Just to have an opportunity to share the stuff we learned with other officers, good, bad, and indifferent, and get the feedback from other people from around the nation as to things we could have done to improve, and the ideas that come from the collective minds of tacticians all over the world—it’s extremely impressive to work among people like that and to see how they think.

The little things in training that we incorporate now as a result: something we did not really consider was, unfortunately, the victim was a rather large man. He was down in the aisleway, and it was not a very crowded bus, but that one person down in the aisleway really slowed the movement of the team and affected the way we train to flow throughout that bus. So things like that, if you’re doing realistic training, if you can get passengers, if you can do it with force-on-force options like simunitions, if you can get victims down, create whatever chaos could possibly happen in real life. When you do find yourself encountering a situation, it’s going to make you that much better.

Again, like we talked about with Fifth and Main, one of the big reasons we were successful wasn’t because of everything that happened that night. It was all the preparation we did beforehand: the days of training before, incidents from the past, handling bus barricades and stronghold barricades and other hostage rescue incidents. All that collective experience and shop talk with other tacticians played a part in making us successful in that operation.

Jon Becker: Fantastic. Jon, thank you so much for doing this. It was a really interesting conversation.

Jonathan Pultz: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jon.