Last night’s session with the Citizen’s Police Academy took me to downtown Houston, fourth ward, where the SWAT team is headquartered. The building is unassuming, a former fire station, very cramped. It houses the Tactical Operations Division, which includes SWAT, HNT (Hostage Negotiation) and the bomb squad.
The evening got off to a somber start, because the officers had just received word that one of the fellow officers was shot in the line of duty at a routine traffic stop. We found out later that the officer died, the first HPD officer killed in the line of duty in over two years.
The SWAT officer, dressed in a flight suit and lugging around his prodigious inventory of equipment, said that driving patrol is vastly more dangerous than what he does. SWAT officers know that when they’re called to a scene, there’s something bad going on. Patrol officers stop people every day without having benefit of the warning that someone they’re pulling over might be ready to go ballistic at them.
He showed us—and allowed us to heft and don—his 40 pound vest, with pockets filled with gear. Passed around his M-16 rifle with 11″ barrel. He is a point man, which means that when SWAT invades a house, he’s the guy crouched on his knees. His partner is standing behind him in full body contact. The guy laughed that if a man isn’t comfortable being touched by another guy, this isn’t the job for him. They shuffle forward, with the point man moving a few inches and his partner advancing to maintain the contact. If the point guy looks right, his partner looks left.
Unlike TV and movie portrayal, hostage negotiators almost never come face-to-face with a suspect. They do 95% of their work from within a customize ops center, which is basically an RV on steroids. They can hijack a phone signal from any phone box. If they can’t make phone contact, they roll out stadium speakers. They always stay clear of the “kill zone,” which is the area around the suspect where they are exposed to gunfire or other attack. SWAT and HNT always respond together and work in unison, though their missions are somewhat different. A lot of their calls are for people “holding themselves hostage,” barricaded inside a house, unwilling to come out. Often, these people think that the police will just go away after a while, but when SWAT shows up with its armored vehicles, that alone is sometimes enough for them to realize that the cops are there to stay until the situation is resolved, and they surrender.
The bomb squad went through a lot of the munitions that they’ve had to deal with in Houston. Some of it is left over from the oil business, and some of it is ordinance some war veteran brought back home with him from WW-II or Vietnam, and after he dies the family discovers all these explosives in the house, but a lot of it is IEDs built especially by kids who look this stuff up on the internet or improvise using firecracker flash powder or emptying out shotgun shells. There have only been five deaths due to deliberate bombings in Houston in the past dozen years or more. One was a murder; the other four were the bombers blowing themselves up while making devices.
That all sounds very neat! I took a Community Emergency Response Training course a couple years ago, idea being that we’d know what to do in case of major disaster (natural, terrorist, etc.) and we got to do triage and putting out fires and lifting debris off people and rescue stuff like that. But this police thing would be exceedingly cool.
– C.