Bulletproof vest  Ballistic Helmet

Morning, Day 1: Woke up early this morning. Training started at 8 a.m., and the highway is hell on a Monday. Don’t want to be late for my first day. Scarfed a granola bar and a bottle of water and traded heels and a handbag for sweats and minimal makeup. Not looking to pick up any cops at the academy- just wanted to look presentable.
“Active Shooter” training is today. Eight hours of information to prepare for a Columbine-esque occurrence in El Paso. Should be uplifting.

Instructors are a couple of SWAT team guys: Alfred Seelig, Hector Cordova and Doyne Sizemore.
An hour of class starts the day with a Powerpoint presentation outlining tactical solutions and past examples of public massacres, including one in El Paso. Apparently a fireman lost his mind, shot his wife and set his house on fire. He shot anyone who came to help– police, fire– and now, No. 1 priority is to make it to the scene safe. The text on the Powerpoint appears in alternating rainbow colors– purple, yellow, blue, red, pink– and it’s almost comical given the subject at hand. Expect carnage, especially of the very young, one slide reads.

Short test handed out. Everyone passes. Time to practice what we learned. First, dry runs, testing our now top-of-mind room-clearing techniques at the academy’s on-site shoot house. (A multi-room house with no roof and bullet-ridden walls. A few rotten desks and shredded chairs dot the floor as potential cover for psychotic subjects.) Then, “simunitions” at Hondo Pass, former site of Northeast Regional Command, now an abandoned building splattered with paint ball residue and gauged with bullet holes. Armed with massive rifles loaded with paint pellets, teams of four will storm the make-believe preschool, office building, high school, to stabilize a simulated catastrophic situation.

Inside the academy’s shoot house, a faux battle rages. Communication is clutch. Men and women practice synchronized movements meant to keep the whole room in view and each cop accounted for. “Leave no man behind” isn’t just for war. Strapped with invisible weapons and bathed in sunlight, they move slowly, their SWAT instructors stopping them every so often to proffer pointers and advice. “You’re ready,” one instructor says. “Now all you have to do is be aggressive and attack the room.”

Outside the shoot house, a would-be serene setting is shaken by shotgun fire every few minutes. Several of the almost 60 recruits currently undergoing the standard 26-week academy training are on one of the facility’s two shooting ranges wrangling the massive weapons. Snickers waft through a crowd of old pros as the newbies strain against the shotgun’s kick. Several shots sail right past their intended targets, striking the dirt wall buffer and shooting puffs of dust into the air. Shell casings, the corpses of ammo spent, litter the ground everywhere you step, and good shot or bad, the noise is deafening.

Located just off Scenic Drive in a crater on the side of a mountain, the police academy is an ironic juxtaposition of the power of man and the force of nature. Steep rock walls surround the facility– a perfect platform for SWAT team repelling exercises– and are home to foxes and wild dogs. Training Director Ken Mobley has been at the academy for the past six years, and every spring, he sees two hawks– a male and a female– settle into a crevice on the side of the crater until fall. The pair mates up there, and every morning, the female hunts for food, swooping down low over the academy, occasionally rattling a few early bird recruits.

A six-month course to graduation, police academy training is an “intense” mixture of physical and mental training, Mobley says. Combative exercises, simulations and physical training accent ample classroom and computer work to create a well-rounded officer. The job isn’t all action and bad guys– paperwork and police reports are vital to the process– and the academy’s focus on both sides of the coin has earned it props from fellow police academies. El Paso’s training, Mobley alleges, is some of the best in the state– possibly even the nation– and other cities are always asking about what El Paso’s got going on. “It starts at the top,” Mobley says, “and those guys support us. And when we ask them for something, they try their best to get it for us.”

Virtually the only requirement for a potential recruit is that he or she have a high school diploma or GD, plus 12 hours of college credit. The diploma/GD has been department standard for years, but the addition of the college credits is relatively new, part of several edgy initiatives implemented by Chief of Police Richard Wiles. In fact, the reason El Paso Magazine has been granted such unprecedented access to police academy training is because of a culture of transparency Chief Wiles has mandated throughout the department.

Around the time of his promotion to interim chief in September of 2003, the department was involved in several courts of inquiry. People had made damaging allegations against the department, claiming in one case that officers had committed a sexual assault on duty. The department was under a barrage of civil suits, and community members were clamoring for a civilian oversight board to reign in unruly officers and illegal internal affairs. “And I knew that, while this department had some problems, that it was not a bad department,” Chief Wiles says. “It was just a matter of insuring that the public could have trust and respect for us, and one piece of that was opening up this department to the public.”

The trickle-down effect from this open-door policy has become more like a waterfall. In keeping with his promise to satisfy a public hungry for knowledge, Chief Wiles instituted one of his most controversial endeavors to date, creating a website featuring arrest photos of those charged with DWIs and family violence offenses. “It’s designed to get people to understand that if you’re going to engage in this conduct, then people are going to know you did,” he says. “And hopefully, that will be another factor in them making a decision not to engage in it in the first place.” Reactions to the site have been both positive and negative, but the chief asserts that all he has done is make what is already a matter of public record more accessible. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever made a decision that was accepted 100 percent, by the community or the officers,” he says with a laugh. “It’s just a matter of recognizing that you can’t please everybody all the time.”

El Paso Police Academy Training
Afternoon, Day 1: The building out on Hondo Pass is beat to hell and totally abandoned. Hardly even any furniture, save for one room they call “the classroom,” the only room off limits during an exercise. All trainees will be strapped– fake weapons, of course, “simunitions” training means simulation exercise with non-lethal ammunition– and one of the SWAT guys, Sizemore, will play the bad guy. This is the time to make mistakes. Your weapon malfunctions- fix it. You get shot- keep pressing on. If the bullet hits heart or head, you’re dead.

First group suits up- bullet-proof vests, helmets used so many times they’re scratched and permanently foggy, shotguns and pistols loaded with paint pellets. Instructors toss me a mask and an orange DayGlo vest to let everyone know I’m not to be shot. I’m willing to suffer a battle wound, a conversation piece for back at the office, but those pellets can be painful, can draw blood, and the instructors don’t want to see me go down.
Building goes black. Bad guy gears up. Music from an old boom box blares– distraction simulation– and exercise begins.

Situation: Bad guy’s girlfriend is cheating on him with some guy at work. He finds out, storms her office with a semi-automatic and kills two people. He’s armed and dangerous. Officers’ job is to stabilize the situation and take the subject out. “Going hot! Going hot!” one instructor yells into the building. The exercise has begun.

The team enters the blackened building. Almost instantly, three shots explode from the end of a long hall. “Shots fired! Shots fired!” a team member yells, his voice muffled through his mask. The men move forward quickly now, hoping to locate the disgruntled boyfriend by the sound of his semi-automatic. The officer securing the rear keeps a shotgun aimed at my chest as I follow them deeper into the blackness. My adrenaline is racing as I start to wonder how bad a paint pellet to the chest would hurt. Please don’t let this guy trip.

“Pour some sugar on me” is blaring as the team inches closer to the uncharted back of the building. Muffled voices yell commands and crucial information, and partially blind eyes fight to see something, anything. They clear the room to the right and move to the one on the left. More shots fired. I can’t see anything. The team is in the room now, the rear guard’s gun still trained on me, and I hear yelling. They got him. Bad guy’s on the ground and cuffed. One officer shot in the leg– a trace of pink paint on his denim– but nobody died, and that’s a good thing.

The lights go back up and the masks come off, and the team assembles to review what just went down. Communication is vital, the instructor says, so don’t forget to talk to each other. You’re moving fast and your adrenaline is pumping, and so much can go wrong.

The scenarios rotate with each team– a day care assassin in one, a burned boyfriend in the next– and each has its own set of problems. At the end of the day, only one officer is dead and few others hurt. “Overall, you guys did a great job,” the instructor says.

The hope with this sort of training is that it never needs to be used. Every so often, however, situations arise that demand it. Recently, the use of force by the El Paso Police Department has come into question. On March 25, Steven Salguero was shot and killed by police. Holed up in his apartment and claiming to have a gun, Salguero doused the officers who entered his home with bleach before being shot twice with a shotgun. Chief Wiles has spoken openly in defense of his officers, part of his commitment to transparency. Salguero claimed to have a gun, and El Paso PD does not meet lethal force with non-lethal force.
Although Chief Wiles has full confidence in the actions of his officers, his faith is not blind. In conjunction with his “open book” mentality, he has instituted a discipline matrix assembled from time-tested discipline policies in other departments across the nation. The majority of officers are good, decent men and women, he says, but there are those few who give a “black eye” to all.

When Wiles became interim chief, morale throughout the department was low. Delving deeper into the issue and digesting some related research, he determined that much of this low morale had to do with discipline. Some people got away with committing minor infractions, and others were consistently busted. a month after his promotion, he implemented the discipline matrix to standardize the process of punishment. “It doesn’t matter who you are in this organization. If you work for the police department, we have high standards, and everybody’s required to meet them,” he says. One of those standards long handled lackadaisically was that of honesty and integrity. In the past, Chief Wiles had seen five-day suspensions issued as punishment for lies. “My thought’s always been that honesty and integrity are the foundation of the police department and a police officer. You have to trust your police department,” he says. “So my policy was that if you lie, under oath, in a sworn statement or in court, it’s termination.

There’s no second chance.” Since the inauguration of the discipline matrix, the police department has shed about 30 officers. Some lied; some committed much more serious acts of misconduct.
In conjunction with a morality upgrade and an aura of openness, technology has completed the triumvirate of total transparency, adding an element of Big Brother even to recruits. From the moment you step on academy grounds, you are being watched. Cameras are everywhere, Training Director Mobley warns as he leaves me alone only for a moment, so watch any clothing adjustments or expeditions up your nose.

El Paso Police Academy Training
Day 2: Woke up a little late this morning. Got stuck in massive traffic. Twenty minutes late to training. Smooth.

Another eight-hour day ahead- PPCT training, it’s called, Pressure Point Control Tactics (street name: hand-to-hand combat). “I’m a bruiser,” the burly instructor, a man named Mitch with a mustache and a Harley T-shirt, says. “I use my weight to my advantage. I use my strength to my advantage, and I just hit, kick and shove.” Today it’s all about doing damage without really doing damage, about inflicting pain but not causing harm, about subduing someone regardless of size or strength.

An hour of classroom starts the day– tons of technical terms for bones and muscles and the whys and whens for lethal force– and then it’s time for action. Hugging the padded walls of the training room, 30 or so men and women rise from the padded floor and divvy themselves into pairs. I saddle up to the odd man out (a short, stocky, powerful guy) and the two of us take center stage.
He’s the officer, and I’m the suspect. His job is to secure my hands behind my back as quickly and safely as possible. At first, I don’t struggle; I’m the perfect arrestee. Then, the instructor tells us to fight. On my knees, my legs spread and my arms stretching back, I lurch to the left as he grabs my hand and whips a cuff around it. I’m still pulling as he yanks my arm toward him, forcing my body face down on the ground. He cuffs me– he’s nice enough to not put the weight of his massive leg across my shoulder– and releases his grip.

A couple turns of this and my neck is starting to ache. I keep quiet though– want them to believe I’m tougher than I look– because the roles are about to be reversed.

I’m the officer, and he’s the subject now. We go through the same drills, only this time I slap the cuffs on him and drag his solid frame across the floor. I slam my knee across his shoulders and secure my subject. When time’s up, I notice cuff indents in his oversized wrists. Oops.

The air inside the classroom is stiflingly hot now. Beads of sweat stream down the instructors face, and my hands are clammy from the cuffing. We take a short break and then brave the heat once again for “strikes.”

An exercise in the science of hand-to-hand combat, strikes are about seizing control. “Pretend that it is a fight,” Mitch yells over the din of chit chat. “Hips, shoulder, wrist into it. Strike through him!”

Five people grab a padded bag, preparing to bear the force of another’s kick, punch or palm heel. Five more face them, poised to fight. “Ready?” Mitch growls. “Strike!” He repeats it over and over, and the men and women kick, punch and palm heel hard. The bag holders rock back with each blow; the padding absorbs most of the hits, but the body isn’t entirely spared. “That was so sweet,” Mitch mocks after one round of significantly softer attacks. “I think I’ve gone diabetic.”

Taking my spot in front of a bag, I strike and strike and strike, kicking and punching and palm-heeling and back-handing. I get a few good ones in, knocking some sense into my beefy male bag holder, then I strap on a bag.

When the hits start coming, they’re hard and fast. ¬ach strike is solid, forceful, and– it must be said– I did not bear it like a champ. In a most unromantic way, my striker nearly knocked me off my feet several times over. But you can’t blame him. “You’ve got somebody, and the only thing between him and freedom is you,” Mitch says. The subject’s fighting for his freedom. You’re fighting for your life. You have to win to achieve the goal of every day, which is, Mitch says, simply to go home.

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