O.C. Sheriff’s Tactical Support Team Undergoes Rigorous Training to Prepare for Risky Assignments

When push comes to quite a bit more than shove in Orange County, the sheriff’s SWAT team usually gets a call.

Formally called the Orange County Sheriff’s Department Tactical Support Team, or TST, the squad is composed of the sheriff’s most mentally and physically disciplined officers. In difficult confrontations--especially hostage and barricade situations or when a potentially violent person faces arrest--the team’s members draw the riskiest assignments. They prepare for these deadly moments with careful and rigorous training.

One warm Monday afternoon, the team slowly congregated outside the empty two-story Orange Unified School District building--a good training ground for entry techniques and rooftop operations.

The men (there are no women on the team) come from detective units, homicide, transportation, and jails, among other parts of the Sheriff’s Department. About half have military experience and were chosen for their “maturity, decision-making skills, calmness and well-above-average job performance,” Capt. Bob Kemmis said.

The team practices in a wide range of environments--on buses, in wooded areas, on the freeway, in condominiums--and several times a year it simulates a real-life situation, sometimes in public buildings, complete with actors who are briefed by a referee. Some are also trained in reading building floor plans.

“When they go into a building that (is similar to one) they’ve already been into, it increases their comfort level,” Lt. Pete Gannon said.

The men can anticipate the floor plans, predict where the windows are and become familiar with a building’s general layout, he said. “When they go to an operation in a real-life situation, they just feel better. It’s one less unknown,” he said.

Gannon is quick to dispel the image of the squad as one that uses high-powered rifles at the slightest provocation. The team has a number of tools at its disposal, and only gradually increases the level of force as the situation warrants, he said.

The hierarchy of tactics generally calls for first locating the suspect, after which the negotiators try to communicate via portable phones. A special negotiation team makes every attempt “to respond to the suspect’s needs, wants and desires,” Gannon said. The biggest problem arises when a suspect, who may be better armed than the average patrol officer, wants nothing--not money, a means of escape or even food.

In that scenario, “you’ve got a possible suicide case,” he said.

Sometimes the very presence of TST members may agitate the aggressor.

“He knows things are going downhill,” Gannon said. Standoffs can last from a few minutes to days; one in Laguna Niguel several years ago went for 48 hours, ending when the suspect passed out from heavy drinking.

A key tactic is to remember that at the outset, the suspect is emotionally at his or her highest peak.

“This starts tapering off and you get a reaction, ‘Look what I’ve done now,’ ” Gannon said, adding that the suspect then begins to look for a way to resolve the situation.

Gannon, who is the liaison between TST members and crisis negotiators (who form their own special team), makes use of information gathered from helicopters, video cameras and interviews with the suspect’s friends and neighbors.

“The tiniest bit of information might be the key that can unlock a situation,” he said. “I can’t afford to miss anything. Every little detail is important. The key is to use all of the tools at my disposal. . . . Time is on our side . . . the more quickly you move, the more problems you are going to have.”

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Wearing heavy bulletproof vests, radios secured around their waists, and heavy Army-style black boots and green fatigues, team members may carry up to 45 pounds of equipment at a time. Their tools include flashlights, handguns, semiautomatic rifles, tear gas, pepper spray, and flash-bang grenades that make a loud noise and cause a brilliant explosion.

For backup, the TST van is filled with weaponry, including more powerful searchlights, rappelling rope and specialized sniper rifles. There are also police dogs available to the unit.

Many of those tools came into play during the training operation at the Orange Unified School District building.

The building is a good choice, instructors say, because it has so many doors opening up into a main hallway. The strategy is to work down the hallway one room at a time.

The men line up, ready to find the imaginary suspect.

“Make a mess, clean it up,” orders one of the TST instructors in the hallway of the building, adding, “Any questions?”

“Make sure of your assignment when you are going in,” calls out another.

Eight men arrange themselves in crouches outside the door of the first empty room.

At a signal, they rush in, hugging the walls as they move from doorway to doorway. Yelling “Sheriff’s Department!” at ach doorway, they quickly clear each room.

One member stands with his submachine gun pointed at a closed door. “Got a door over to my right,” he yells. All other doorways are cleared before the team decides to burst through the final doorway. The team then regroups and goes over what it did wrong and what went right.

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Squad leader Hans Strand, 39, of the department’s homicide squad and a TST veteran, said the rigorous training and meticulous checking before entering a building are key to the team’s high success rate.

“You try to focus on the hazards,” said Strand, whose job is to relay information back to the main command. “If we try to enter rapidly, that’s where mistakes are made,” he said.

Sgt. Raoul Ramos, 36, said being a member of the team “really is a rush but you do have to maintain calm and to have a lot of self-control. We can’t have one guy get caught up in his emotions. You really have to be able to stay focused on the mission.”

Although the job is physically taxing and the hours can be long, the men seem to like what they do.

“I like being in elite groups such as these--the esprit de corps, camaraderie (is there among members) of the same training level,” Strand said during a break in the afternoon exercises. “You can count so much on fellow team members.”

“Physically, you know you will be able to handle it,” he said. “Mentally, you’ve been to so many of these things that you know what you’re doing. Everyone knows what to do.”

Strand has never been seriously injured, but recalls one incident at a doctor’s office in Tustin where he cut his finger when pounding a sledgehammer through a large plate glass. “It didn’t stop me from continuing the mission,” he said.