How do you roll?

Becoming a member of a special team is the goal of many police officers. It sets you apart from the crowd that is already set apart from the public. You get special training, wear special clothes, and operate in special ways. It’s just how you roll.

But when your SWAT or EOD team rolls, who rolls with you?

I deal with teams all over the nation and get surprisingly different answers to that question. In some places, SWAT goes on its own. Sometimes, EOD rolls with them. In most places, when Negotiators go so do SWAT. EOD teams typically go alone, unless they linked with a SWAT team as a matter of SOP or if circumstances require them to be there.

There is no national standard. There are no regional norms. In fact, agencies in the same county may dispatch their special teams in totally different ways. My former agency never rolled EOD with anyone else. SWAT and EOD were rarely (as in almost never) together. They certainly did not train together. In fact, they barely spoke. EOD was the red-headed stepchild of the special ops group. Negotiators were called out when needed. Our SWAT guys trained to do breaching charges that, in many agencies, are set up and placed by bomb squad techs. While many agencies I work with have their bomb tech breachers in the stack with the SWAT team, my agency did not invite EOD to train with them or participate in call outs. I thought this was “normal” for law enforcement. It wasn’t until I hit the road representing my employer that I found out that this model is, in fact, fast becoming outmoded.

There a few reasons for this kind of lack of integration: finances, traditions, and compartmentalized management are the chief issues. Financially, it is simply expensive to roll the bomb squad and SWAT to every call out. It’s a lot of overtime. Lots of fuel costs. Many agencies don’t feel the cost outweighs the benefits. However, there are a growing number of departments at which it does happen. In those agencies, the bomb squad typically sets up any breaching charges and the EOD robot is an integral part of any tactical operation. Our own EOD products first made their tactical debuts through cross-team operations. Our Sentinel repeater/camera unit became a rapid deployment surveillance camera and the control radio fed signals from both the Remotec robot and Sentinel back to command. The advantages were instantly obvious.

The biggest impediment to team integration is tradition. “It’s just not done that way,” say a lot of commanders. SWAT is SWAT, EOD is EOD and the two don’t meet up unless it’s absolutely necessary. Negotiators are just along for the ride and allowed to do their job until they run out of words and nothing seems to be working out. Despite the almost universal use of technology and robotics in both disciplines, this us/them attitude still persists in many places. Again, this attitude prevails on its own; it’s not something you can predictably map by regional, demographic, or political boundaries.

For the most part, the us/them model is going away as the “old school” commanders retire and are replaced by a younger generation more open-minded and willing to try new methods and practices. But that doesn’t mean that compartmentalized management is going away. In many agencies, there is an established command and administrative structure that effectively isolates units from each other. Training days are different, training locations are decentralized, and departmental priorities do not reflect those of the boots on the ground and their commanders. I hear OFTEN from SWAT, EOD and Negotiator commanders that they would like nothing more than to train with each other regularly. “Once a year is really not cutting it,” one SWAT commander told me. “I want to know what those guys in EOD are capable of and I want them to know how we work so they can help us out with the robot and surveillance tasks.” While this seems like an obvious direction to move operationally, it often requires knocking down administrative and org chart walls that have long separated functional units.

The positive news is that, as technology becomes more and more cross-discipline, teams of various types are finding advantages in working together to maximize their hardware. SWAT guys still like to kick in doors but I’ve found they are all too willing to get a bomb robot on scene to peek in the window to see where the bad guy is.

Technology is actually driving a lot of these operational changes. In my own experience, we present teams with technology that is so obviously cross-disciplinary in nature that commanders have started re-writing SOPs and rescheduling monthly training sessions to accommodate the new gear. It speaks highly of the products but even more highly of the insightful group of professionals who can see the obvious benefits of coordinated efforts.