Earning Respect
Lt. Mike Albanese, commander of LAPD SWAT, was contacted for this article via the department's public information office. He did not respond.
So far Albanese's only on-record comment about the board's recommendations has been an editorial in the Los Angeles Times that was co-written with Metro Capt. Jeffrey Greer. "The process it [the department] had been using was 20 years old….Tasks were redundant, had little to do with actual police work, and were needlessly hazardous," they wrote. In that same editorial they also noted that seven of 38 candidates were injured during the testing, two seriously enough to be off duty for nearly a year.
One of the officers injured in the 2006 tryouts, Jeniffer Grasso, 36, is now a candidate to become the team's first female operator. Grasso's performance during the earlier tryout earned her the respect of the current SWAT officers, despite the fact that she may be qualifying for the team via a lower standard than previous members.
"Physically, she's a dynamo and tactically she's very solid," one veteran SWAT officer told the Los Angeles Times.
Grasso is not being viewed by her teammates as a politically correct token who was held to a lesser standard. But future officers accepted into the training, male or female, may not be held in high regard by the veterans.
SWAT veterans from Los Angeles and other agencies say that bringing officers onto the team under different qualification standards than the existing team members may damage unit morale.
"In SWAT you have to earn respect," says O'Brien. "[If you come into the team under a different standard], then it will be a long time, if ever, before you earn the respect of the guys. There is a potential wedge brewing within that unit right now."
Squelching Dissent
Of course, the architects of the new LAPD SWAT standards knew that they would meet some resistance from the unit's veterans. Their solution to the problem was brilliant if not Machiavellian in its effect on dissent. They plan to get rid of the veterans.
The SWAT board of inquiry recommended that the unit rotate veteran team members out of SWAT and into other assignments. Under the new policy, team members can only serve 10 years on the team before moving on. There is one exception: Officers can appeal to the chief for a one-time extension of five years.
McCarthy says a rotation policy is unnecessary if the team's commanders are taking care of business. "People do stay too long on teams," he says. "But the reason they do that is that supervisors don't let them know that it's time to move on. It's a mistake to limit people. You have to take care of this problem with good supervision."
Critics of the LAPD's new SWAT rotation policy also point out that the policy discards hundreds of years of combined SWAT experience in favor of moving new blood onto the teams.
McCarthy believes that the people of Los Angeles may come to regret the rotation policy, and he uses the infamous North Hollywood Bank Robbery and Shootout as a vivid example. According to McCarthy, the SWAT officers that ended the incident would have been off the team under the new policy, as one had 22 years on the team, another 17, and the other 12. "All three of these officers would tell you that they could not have accomplished what they did that day when they had just two or three years in SWAT."
At presstime, the LAPD and the civilian police commission that oversees the department are reviewing the rotation policy. Chief Bratton has indicated that he may establish the 10-year rotation for all LAPD special units.
So Goes the Nation
How much the board's recommendations will affect LAPD SWAT is currently undetermined. The department is implementing some of them, studying others, and has rejected a few. Even more difficult to discern is how much these moves by LAPD will affect SWAT teams nationwide. But one thing is certain, they will have an effect.
Even the report by the LAPD board of inquiry notes the influence that LAPD SWAT has on other law enforcement tactical teams. The board wrote as a defense for why it didn't research the practices of other teams: "Each major SWAT operation in the country is, to one degree or another, an offspring of L.A. SWAT…. The board found that the degree of imitation made comparisons to other SWAT operations largely meaningless, with the single exception of the NYPD."
John Gnagey, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, agrees that what happens on the LAPD SWAT team could have ramifications nationwide. "LAPD has been the Mecca of SWAT," he says. "Whatever they developed, especially in terms of tactics, made its way east."
McCarthy says that other SWAT teams have borrowed ideas from LAPD SWAT that sometimes had members of the unit shaking their heads.
"When originally the SWAT team was formed, we had green uniforms," McCarthy explains. "In an urban environment with ambient light, black stands out like an exclamation point. Green is the right color. But a deputy chief said, 'You are going to wear uniforms that look like LAPD.' So up popped the devil and we had black uniforms."
As do most urban law enforcement tactical teams. And that shows the influence of LAPD SWAT being featured in the national news and on TV shows back in the early days of police tactical teams.
Today, many teams are still emulating LAPD, black uniforms and all, but McCarthy wants them to pass on lowering their physical standards to diversify their ranks and establishing expiration dates for SWAT officers.
"I'm hoping that the things that are happening at LAPD SWAT that aren't in the best interest of teams everywhere will not be copied," he says. "I'm hoping that they will be smart enough to sift that out."
In January 2008, POLICE Magazine launched a year-long article series focusing on the “state of American law enforcement.” If you’d like to read the other chapters, click on the links below.
Chapter 1: The Thinning Blue Line. Law enforcement agencies nationwide are competing for a dwindling population of recruits.
Chapter 2: The Blue Mosaic. Policies meant to diversify law enforcement agencies have changed police demographics and will continue to do so in the future.
Chapter 3: Teaching to the Test. Does law enforcement training focus too much on qualifying and not enough on skills that can help you win fights?
Chapter 4: A Love-Hate Relationship. Most people only meet an officer when they are arrested, questioned, or cited. That makes it hard for them to like cops.
Chapter 5: Can the Average Cop Thrive in the Age of Specialization? The generalist cop is part of a dying breed, which means many of today's officers will need to excel at a specialty.
Chapter 6: Women Warriors. Female police officers must walk a fine line between fitting in and making their own way in law enforcement.
Chapter 7: Working on the Front Lines. The patrol officer is the backbone of American policing, but a lot of agencies don’t want to admit it.
Chapter 9: Stopping the Next 9/11. Improvements in intelligence gathering, training, and equipment give you a good chance of preventing the next attack and saving lives if it happens.
Chapter 10: Rules of Engagement. Today’s law enforcement officer is the best trained and best equipped cop in history, so why do policy makers think you have the judgment and intellect of children?
Chapter 11: Gangster Nation. Big city street gangs have taken root in small town America, bringing mayhem to Main Street.
Chapter 12: Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't. When a cop uses - or doesn't use - a less-lethal weapon in contemporary America, there can be hell to pay.