Oxnard SWAT Team Looks Inward and Takes Aim at Changes

Despite the cold night air, sweat streamed down Officer Ben Chavez’s face and stained his camouflaged fatigues.

Chavez and other members of the Oxnard SWAT team had just stormed a darkened, smoke-filled house, shot a couple of gun-toting bad guys with paint pellets and freed two hostages.

“Let’s shine some light on these guys and see who’s been hit,” said Gary Rovarino, a SWAT veteran and consultant who critiqued the four-hour practice siege.

One make-believe hostage had a telltale splotch of pink paint below the knee. The make-believe bad guys were splattered with pink dots.

The mock siege--one of an endless assortment of such precision drills--is part of deep soul-searching by the Oxnard Police Department’s Special Weapons and Tactics team in the wake of two recent deaths during Oxnard SWAT operations, including the friendly fire shooting of one of the department’s own officers.

The two deaths were the first casualties in the 27-year history of SWAT operations in Ventura County, sending shock waves through the tightknit group of elite officers that make up the four SWAT teams that operate here.

“All those years and we never even had to fire our weapons and then bam, bam, just like that,” said Sgt. Bill Lewis, a member of the Oxnard SWAT team for more than 16 years.

The death of Oxnard SWAT Officer James Rex Jensen Jr. last year was hardest to take for the officers.

Jensen was shot by fellow SWAT team member Sgt. Dan Christian during a botched drug raid March 13, 1996. His death was a cruel reminder of the dangers for team members in operations with heavy firepower.

Then, less than a year later, Larry Panky, a belligerent but unarmed Oxnard man, was shot and killed by an Oxnard SWAT sharpshooter during a standoff with police.

Both deaths focused attention and criticism on the Oxnard team and SWAT in general. Relatives of the slain men filed lawsuits and district attorney’s reports pointed out mistakes made by the teams.

The pressure mounted internally as well.

The shootings became a point for self-reflection, said Oxnard Police Cmdr. John Crombach, who heads up the 22-member Oxnard team.

“We took a long look at how we do things after Jim got killed,” Crombach said. “It just shows that in SWAT there is zero margin for error.”

Staying inside that narrow margin is the reason they train so hard, he said.

After the four-hour mock siege one recent evening, team members huddled until past midnight to pore over every move of the operation. Rovarino retraced each member’s steps, looked at what could be improved, praised each officer for creativity, and pointed out their mistakes.

“They are really improving,” said Rovarino, a former Los Angeles sheriff’s SWAT team leader who now operates a consulting company called Tactics International. “They’re working really hard and improving not just their image but their performance.”

Rovarino has worked with many of the local SWAT teams as both a consultant and team trainer.

“This isn’t like L.A., where they have several hundred call-outs in a year,” he said. “Here there might be a dozen or so, and that means that the teams, while good, just don’t have the same experience level. So training is vital.”

In Los Angeles, both the Los Angeles County sheriff’s SWAT team and the Los Angeles Police Department SWAT team have officers on duty full time, and on average the teams respond to 200 to 300 calls a year.

In Ventura County, members of the four SWAT teams have regular duties and their SWAT duty is a time-consuming voluntary ancillary assignment.

The officers and deputies in Ventura County are assigned, for instance, to guard the jail, patrol the streets or investigate drug trafficking. Those duties are interrupted infrequently, sometimes fewer than six times a year by SWAT emergencies.

Despite the infrequency of calls, the Oxnard SWAT team has decided to become the first department in the county to assign officers full time to a Special Weapons and Tactics team.

Starting this month team members will remain together full time, working either on the department’s street crimes unit or on the gang enforcement detail when not responding to SWAT-required emergencies, Crombach said.

“We hope to improve unit cohesion, and it will allow us to devote a little bit more time to training,” he said.

Other departments in the county are watching Oxnard’s experiment closely, and in doing so are looking at one of the biggest operational changes in the county SWAT teams since they began here in the early 1970s.

The Ventura teams are based on a model developed by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1968 as a reaction to the Watts riots three years earlier. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department formed its team about 1970, and since then the two teams have developed the basic outline upon which other Special Weapons and Tactics teams are based.

In 1970, the Ventura Police Department set up the first SWAT team in the county. Oxnard followed the next year. Four years later, the Sheriff’s Department started its team, and the Simi Valley Police Department set up its team in 1983.

All four Ventura County teams use the training developed by their counterparts in Los Angeles, Sheriff’s Cmdr. Ray Abbott said.

“They’re the epicenter for SWAT activity,” said Abbott, a former Sheriff’s Department SWAT team member who now oversees the team.

As elite units within police departments, positions on the small teams seldom come open. And the competition can be stiff.

All applicants must have a clean performance record, be in excellent physical shape and pass written and oral tests. They must also be proficient with firearms and pass an extra battery of psychological tests.

Finally, team members vote on whether to accept new members, underscoring the need for individual officers to work together as a cohesive team.

Once selected, an officer goes through a 40-hour SWAT academy conducted by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Then the officer is given advanced training for SWAT positions, which are broken down into scouts, the entry group, the tear gas experts, snipers, observers and members of the arrest team.

Although specially trained to rescue hostages, control riots and go after snipers, teams in Ventura County spend most of their calls on high-risk search warrants and talking irate, barricaded and suicidal people with weapons out of their homes.

Some SWAT leaders fear the public believes their teams are some sort of military force. The image, they say, is fueled by police dramas on the silver screen.

“That really is a disservice to what we do,” said Lt. Dick Thomas, who heads the Simi Valley Police Department’s SWAT team. “We’re not a military force and I’d like us to shake that image, which ignores the fact that we emphasize negotiations and peaceful resolution.

“On the rare occasions when force is used, the overriding principal is ‘the minimum amount of force to achieve your goal,’ ” Thomas said.

The Simi Valley SWAT team has never had to use lethal force; twice in the past two years, however, the team has fired rubber bullets to subdue men threatening officers with knives.

“Once we’re there we take steps to back everybody off and decompress,” Thomas said. “That gives us a chance to control the situation and resolve it peacefully. We take the time if we have it.”

In 1995 the team didn’t have such a luxury. It had to move quickly to rescue a mortally wounded police officer trapped in an armed suspect’s backyard.

Officer Michael Clark had been shot by a distraught former school teacher named Daniel Tuffree.

While Clark lay bleeding in Tuffree’s backyard, Thomas and three other SWAT members had to devise a quick rescue plan. Thomas used the department’s armored truck to ram a brick wall in the backyard and shield three of his officers who pulled Clark to a patch of grass behind the truck.

Thomas began cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and then moments later helped pull Clark into a patrol car. Clark was rushed to the hospital, but died soon thereafter.

For several hours there was a standoff as officers tried to coax Tuffree to surrender.

Finally, after lobbing in dozens of tear gas canisters, a team of SWAT officers rushed in and arrested Tuffree.

“One of my proudest moments in 32 years in law enforcement was when Tuffree was handcuffed and put on a stretcher with no more injuries than the ones he sustained prior to SWAT’s arrival on the scene,” Thomas said.

“Do I wish [Tuffree] had died?” he said. “I would be lying if I told you I wouldn’t have gotten emotional satisfaction from that. But what’s emotionally satisfying and what’s right are two different things. We did our job professionally from start to finish. That’s what I’m proud of.”

In 27 years the Ventura Police Department SWAT team has never fired a shot, team leader Lt. Pat Miller said.

But the team has had many close calls.

Several years ago the team’s crisis negotiator coaxed a suicidal and heavily armed man out of a motel room after he had killed his lover. The man, the team learned, was dying of AIDS.

“It was a classic case of somebody who had nothing to lose,” Miller said.

The team spent more than 12 hours ready to rush into the hotel room and arrest the armed man before the negotiator was able to persuade him to lay down his weapons and walk outside.

In contrast with some colleagues, Miller said he doesn’t mind SWAT’s precision military image. He said he even likes to cultivate the image a bit because it can play to his team’s favor.

“When we arrive on scene a suspect doesn’t know what we’re going to do,” Miller said. “I mean we’ve had people just give up right when they see us coming. So if it helps resolve some situations, I don’t mind.”

Miller praised the SWAT culture for its willingness to look critically at itself and improve.

“If a mistake is made we are very honest about it,” he said. “We look at what we didn’t do right and what we can make better next time. We’ve evolved in that way. . . . We train a lot and so we expect a lot. There’s a lot of honesty and integrity in this brotherhood.”

After a major SWAT intervention, the police agency very likely will field calls from other SWAT teams across the country who want to learn from the experience.

For instance, the LAPD was flooded with requests for videotapes of the massive firefight in February that left two heavily armed bank robbers dead in North Hollywood.

Several local SWAT members attended a debriefing given by one of the LAPD officers involved in the siege.

Another way to share information is through competition of fitness and target-shooting skills. For several years, the Ventura Police Department has sponsored a SWAT competition, inviting teams from all over Southern California.

This year’s competition is set for early September when contestants will be asked to run through a mile-long obstacle course that includes carrying a 100-pound log, climbing over a building and carrying a team member in a stretcher.

In August, Ventura team members practiced the event, working out kinks in the layout and testing their skills at everything from physical prowess to accuracy with a multitude of firearms.

“These things let us get to know guys on other teams and just see what’s going out there,” said Ray Lau, a Ventura SWAT team member.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Mike De Los Santos, a 19-year SWAT team veteran, said the competitions and tactical exercises are the next best thing to actual operations.

“They’re all good--but you can’t beat the real thing,” De Los Santos said. “Every call we go on, we learn something.”

In 1978, the Sheriff’s Department SWAT team shot and wounded a man in Fillmore after he shot a deputy. But since then the team has resolved all of its operations without firing weapons.

“But in this business it can happen any time,” De Los Santos said.

The smell of gunpowder filled the air as Officer Chavez stood in front of the abandoned ranch house with his fellow Oxnard SWAT team members. He checked his MP-5 hung around his neck. The chamber was clear.

Smoke from the three “flash-bang” explosives continued to billow from the run-down ranch house. The two women who played the hostages laughed off the giddy rush of adrenaline after watching how the 10 Oxnard SWAT officers executed the raid with dizzying speed.

The whole exercise lasted less than a minute, from the moment the team ignited the diversionary explosives to swarming the building, firing off rounds of paint pellets and cuffing the “suspects.”

“Well, what’d you think?” a panting but smiling Chavez asked a reporter.

But before he and the team could savor the moment, Rovarino started his critique: The operation was not as clean as it should be.

One of the female hostages had a bright pink stain on her shin. An officer was hit above the right shoulder, a few others had been nicked.

Furthermore, he said, the officers who scouted out the ranch house were not well concealed and could have been easy targets.

“Let’s get back to the station and go over this,” he said. “It’s going to be a long night.”