SWAT Unit in Ventura County Boosts Training After Shootings

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 in an endless series of precision drills--is part of deep soul-searching by the Oxnard Police Department’s Special Weapons and Tactics team in the wake of two deaths during Oxnard SWAT operations, including the friendly fire shooting of one officer.

The two deaths were the first casualties in the 27-year history of SWAT operations in Ventura County. They sent shock waves through the tight-knit group of elite officers who make up the Oxnard SWAT team and those in three other police agencies in Ventura County.

“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 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.

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

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.

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Both deaths focused attention and criticism on the Oxnard team and SWAT in general. Relatives of the slain men filed lawsuits, and district attorney 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, head of 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 past midnight poring over every move of the operation.

“They’re working really hard and improving not just their image but their performance,” said Rovarino, a former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department SWAT team leader and operator of the consulting company Tactics International.

Rovarino has worked with many of the local SWAT teams as a consultant and a 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.”

Despite the relative 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.

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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, looking at one of the biggest changes in how SWAT operates in Ventura County since the teams were started 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. About two years later, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department formed its team, and since then the two teams have developed a blueprint for other teams.

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 did so in 1983.

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

“They’re the epicenter for SWAT activity,” said Abbott, a former Sheriff’s Department SWAT team member who 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 be proficient with firearms and must also pass an extra battery of psychological tests.

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

Once selected, an officer goes through a 40-hour SWAT academy conducted by the Los Angeles 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, the snipers, observers and members of the arrest team.

With so few calls for SWAT, the team must train that much harder to keep their skills razor-sharp, Rovarino said.

The smell of gunpowder filled the air as Chavez stood in front of the abandoned ranch house with fellow 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 out of the run-down house. The two women playing hostages laughed off the giddy rush of adrenaline after watching how the 10 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 handcuffing 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 have been.

One of the 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 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.”