Current Threats to Tactical Units & Less Lethal Evolution

The Debrief with Jon Becker

In this episode of The Debrief, Jon Becker interviews Steve Limes about his extensive career in law enforcement and the evolution of less le

Key takeaways

• Steve Limes collaborated with Hans Kornberger in Pennsylvania to develop the SL6 projectile system using an Arwen round.
• The transition from chemical mace to OC spray significantly reduced secondary contamination risks for officers and jailers.

Main topics

• History of less lethal force
• Evolution of tactical policing

Notable quotes

Practice makes permanent. Only perfect practice makes perfect.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a powerful reminder that the strategic implement

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to The V-Brief. On today's episode, we're going to talk about the history of less lethal force in American policing and about a career that spans nearly the entire arc of it. My guest today is Steve Limes, one of the foremost less lethal experts in the world and one of the most sought after use of force expert witnesses in the United States. Steve's been a police officer since 1979, retiring as the assistant chief of police for Springfield, Missouri Police Department and served as chief in two other municipalities. Steve was an original member of the NTUA Board of Directors and built the Lessleaf Instructor Programs for both the NTUA and the IACP. He authored the IACP model policies of Lessleaf of Technologies, TASER, hostage situations, and barricading subjects. He served on post-critical incident panels, including the Stern Commission in Boston and the Rand Commission for the NYPD. and has been a police practices expert in cases including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and George Floyd in Minneapolis. This year, Steve was inducted into the NTOA Speaker 2 (1:04) Hall of Honor. Speaker 1 (1:07) My name is John Becker. For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations. Speaker 2 (1:26) The Speaker 1 (1:30) goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people. Welcome to The Debrief. Speaker 1 (1:52) Steve, thanks for being here with me. Speaker 2 (1:53) My pleasure to be here, sir. Speaker 1 (1:55) So why don't we start? Let's wind up the Wayback Machine and go back and just kind of walk me through, you know, I gave it in the intro. You have an amazing history, but walk me through from your perspective, kind of the career highlights that ultimately define who Steve Imes becomes. Speaker 2 (2:16) Well, the basic policing plan. Speaker 2 (2:20) Late 1978, early 1979, small police department in southeast Missouri, Poplar Bluff, Dolly Parton song, 40 miles from Poplar Bluff. And worked there for three and a half years, worked undercover narcotics, patrol, detectives, and then realizing there's no four-year college there, where my family is originally from, homestead in 1854, I went to Springfield, third largest city. Uh, Four-year colleges, a lot of opportunity, big department. And from there, you go right back through a 26-week academy, right back to the street and patrol. But from that point, about two years after patrol, put back into undercover narcotics, which if you've had experience in that area and others hear about that, active narcotics units like to go back to folks who've been there before. So I end up About three more years undercover narcotics. Back to detectives. And then we have a catalyst event, a hostage-taking incident that actually finished successfully. But from the chief's perspective, police-wise, just dumb luck. Literally, prayer meeting outside and hope this escaped Kansas prisoner lets this woman go when he does. But post-event, he's like, I never want to go through that again, to where we are at the mercy of what an armed ex-convict wants to do because we had no technical or tactical capability to fix it. And he was a get-or-done guy of the seven chiefs I had. And literally within a week, he... pulled me into the office. I'm still not exactly sure why he pulled me in. I was doing some proactive stuff in narcotics. We were doing most of the search warrants, but we were not a SWAT team per se. But he pulled me in the office and said, congratulations, you are the new team leader of Springfield Police Department's full-time tactical team. Go out and see the fiscal secretary and give me a plan back for how we can make sense of this program for the department and the community. Speaker 1 (4:35) Wow. What year is that? Speaker 2 (4:36) That would have been 1988. And I really didn't know that much about tactical policing, but we're pre-internet. And so I just had to do research as best I could. Library, magazines, my next door neighbor was a medical librarian at the Cox Hospital. And as we'll talk about, I'm sure in less lethal pre-internet. medical librarians were the very best resource I had to learn about tear gas injuries, impact projectile injuries overseas. The technologies that hurt people, the archive for that was the hospitals. And the place to find that information was medical libraries that only because I had a medical librarian next door to me was I aware of that. So I began using library information. my next door neighbor's information to begin figuring out who was doing what in the tactical world. And then that led to phone calls. And very shortly, I was and Don Fuhrer, two of us were at D-Team in L.A., went through their initial training rotation, just trying to get our arms around what tactical policing looked like. I learned very quickly that what LAPD SWAT was doing would not fit. in the way we did stuff. I mean, some of the things they did were fine, but just how law enforcement, polices in Southern Missouri was just different than Compton. Sure. But we chewed up the fish and spit out the bones, as they say. We took what made sense and what we could operationalize and stay viable. and add that to 200 plus search warrants a year. We were the number one meth lab state in the nation for the entire time that Haida counted it. Congratulations? I guess. I mean, we had a crime culture created around generational moonshiners who had grown and transitioned into meth cookers. And so that fueled all the violent crime in southern Missouri. We had the Interstate 44, I-44 drug corridor coming right through town. And that's how you do 200 plus search warrants a year. Our record here was 309. That's literally doing multiple warrants every night you're working. And so we began honing our skills through actual process and application. Averaged about 18 barricades a year. And then I had seven, what we call... real hostage takings in the time I had the team as compared to misdemeanor hostage takings. And those are defined in a different way in Southern Missouri, but legitimate real hostage takings, we had seven. And the time I had the team for seven years as full-time team leader, I kept it in my division my entire career. But once I made lieutenant, I was out of the day-to-day rotation and no 10-hour training day every Tuesday and 90 minutes of PT Speaker 1 (7:40) every morning and that sort of stuff. Speaker 2 (7:42) So from there, lieutenant. Had NARCS and SWAT then, and then captain over the patrol division, which still technically had SWAT in it, but well removed by another commander and then assistant chief for the remaining 17 years in Springfield. Wow. So the total time at Springfield? 25 years in Springfield. Speaker 1 (8:02) Okay. Speaker 2 (8:03) And then continued with Greene County. I was dual commissioned with the sheriff's office, largest sheriff's office in Missouri because of the drug work. And then I just stayed with them when I left. Training for them, working at their academy, not full time, but doing training classes for them, consulting with their SWAT team, continue to do that today. Speaker 1 (8:21) Yeah. So when did you first make contact with NTLA? Speaker 2 (8:28) Almost immediately after creating the team. So I began my research, yeah, it would have been 88, 89 at the latest. I went to the 1990 NTOA conference, was the first time I went to the conference. But we very quickly learned that that was an organization that, you know, we're trying to figure out. what foot to put in front of the other. Went to the FBI's SWAT supervisor school and operator school and very eye-opening. We were several hundred warrants under our belt before I went to that school. And we're listening to people telling us how we should be doing warrants. And Don Fuhr again, my assistant team leader, and I were like, wow. They've got us dragging people out of bed at 5 a.m. and screaming and wanting to scare the heck out of them. And there's a benefit in that. And Don and I are going, wow. That doesn't work for us. I mean, if we're waking people up and scaring them to death, they make bad decisions. And we're dealing with people that many of them are armed and they'll fight to the death. Other bad guys, they generally submit to us. I mean, it's a great thing for cops to tell people at bars about how everybody's trying to kill us. But that was not our operational experience. The vast majority of people we dealt with, even genuine bad guys and girls, didn't like us. But they knew overwhelming. superiority of firepower and control, they wouldn't try to kill us generally, but they would routinely try to kill each other. And so if we woke them early in the morning and had them scared to death and they didn't know who we were. That didn't make any sense to us. So a lot of what we were taught in the early days by experts justified logic to us. So we were drawn even more to NTOA and others who were doing what we did every day. And not to be critical of other folks, but a lot of the people who were prominent out there, instructors, federal agencies, for instance, weren't caving in doors every night at work. Speaker 2 (10:33) If you're not doing it with some regularity, you know, that analogy about practice makes perfect. That's really not true. Practice makes permanent. Only perfect practice makes perfect. So when you're doing something a lot, it doesn't mean you're doing it right, but they weren't even doing it a lot. And so we did it enough to figure out what worked for us, but we also wanted examples of what others did. And how we might benefit from that. And NTOA was the perfect conduit for that. Speaker 1 (10:59) Well, I think also, you know, people forget that like the origin story for SWAT, you know, starting at LAPD in 71. But the real expansion is 84, right? It was just before you start your team. 84 summer games come to town. They don't want to repeat at Munich. A lot of funding comes down. LA Sheriff's SCB, LAPD platoon, you know, FBI. At that point, hostage rescue team had started. All of that was focused on rescuing hostages. It wasn't focused on drug crime. It wasn't focused on search warrants. And, you know, when I interviewed Phil Hansen, one of the things Phil talked about was, you know, we had trained in hostage rescue and, you know, and fast entry and, you know, overwhelming force. And then we started doing warrants and we just did the warrants the way that we had done hostage rescues. And it was a long time before we realized. That probably wasn't the best way for us to do it. And then they began to reshape the way they did it. But the origin story is all rooted in hostage rescue. Speaker 2 (11:57) And there lies our dilemma. I mean, Radley Belko, Peter Kraska, these very prominent anti-SWAT academics have made their career by writing books and giving lectures about that point. That what we originally created were units that were to deal with the gravest extreme. hostage takings, a Texas tower incident, something catastrophic that overwhelms patrol resources, but you're chasing stems and seeds. That's the basic argument. That's been this paradox for tactical policing and around the country when I've done a lot of training classes, I quite often have to lead people through. a hard critical self-analysis that begins with, do we really even need a SWAT team in my department? And for many, that's like talking bad about their family. But the practical reality is if you're a 15-person department and you do two search warrants a year, and don't have a barricade hardly ever, do you have to confront that reality about, does it make sense for us to have feed, care, staff, pay for a SWAT team? And for a number of years, the answer was, yeah, everybody has a SWAT team. My response to the question, do we need a SWAT team, is, I don't know. Let's see what your part one crimes are. Let's see what your demographics are. Do you need SWAT capability? You do. That may not be your department. That may not be your team when you put it all in the mix. And if you don't face that reality, you get a number of things that I've had to deal with in the courts. Speaker 1 (13:46) Well, what I think is interesting, though, is so. You know, I've known a lot of you guys my whole career, right, and grew up with, you know, Mike and Ron and Sid. And it was very recently it dawned on me that part of the reason that Mike Hillman is Mike Hillman is because he had to solve the problem originally. He and Ron and, you know, those guys, like Mike told the story when I interviewed him of getting ready for the Olympics and trying to figure out how, you know, they were concerned they're going to put. athletes hostages on a bus so we had to figure out like how do you attack a bus how do you Speaker 2 (14:22) stop the bus keep it from driving Speaker 1 (14:23) off yeah so like and and the way they did that you know hilarity ensues and big bus wheels go rolling down hills and crush cars and all kinds of interesting stuff but they had to originally solve it right same thing here right you're originating a team Speaker 2 (14:38) What Speaker 1 (14:39) I think is interesting, and you've always, as long as I've known you, you've been an innovative thinker. You've been somebody that looked at things and said, well, does this really apply to us? And it's interesting that in 88, you were looking at this already and going, I don't know if this works in Missouri. Speaker 2 (14:55) That's the truth. I mean, the essence of our process from day one was if-then contingency planning. We literally would sit down. and say, if this happens, then what would we do? And in many cases, we had no answer. So that's how the process began. And literally, our Less Lethal program was catapulted over a hostage taking that resolved itself. But we had no answer of if then, as he released his wife and her boyfriend, she comes out and says, he's going to come out shooting. and we're prepared, and he comes out with a rifle pointed down, Speaker 1 (15:37) and Speaker 2 (15:38) we're all in positions of cover, challenging, but boom, boom, he fires off two rounds in the ground, and I could see the look of determination on his face. He was building to do whatever he was about to do. He drops the gun and surrenders, and so we're like, wow. Get him in custody, go back to the office for the debrief. And once again, Don Fuhrer, assistant team leader, says, hey, as we're going through this debrief, what if he hadn't dropped the gun? What if he had just looked right, looked left and started walking and not walking towards directly one of us, but just trying to slice the pie? And I said, well, I just got back from this one famous training program. And the person teaching for an armed, non-assaulted, non-compliant walkout says you would shoot him in the legs with buckshot. That's what I was taught. And Don goes, but under Missouri statute, that would be deadly force, would it not? Serious physical injury or death. Speaker 1 (16:44) Yeah. Speaker 2 (16:45) Well, how would that work for us? Fair enough. We had no answer at that moment. I had on my desk an article written by John Klein, who at that time was the importer of the R1. Speaker 1 (16:58) Yeah. Speaker 2 (17:01) I began thinking extended range, if I could knock that guy down or do something from a distance. And I began looking, where do I find something? in 1990 that can reach out and hit somebody hard enough to make him put down a gun. And so Northern Ireland, as it turns out. And I went with the chief that I had. That's exactly what I did. I went to him because the following Monday, he had me come to the command staff meeting. And I went into the command staff meeting following that hostage resolution and they clapped. Excellent job, SWAT team. Excellent job. And I'm standing there thinking, excellent job. We did nothing. He surrendered and we had no answer to the question. That's the bottom line. So meeting breaks. I stand at his door. Can I help you? Yes, sir. I've got a situation I want to talk to you about. If that guy had gone for a walk, we don't have a good answer. So what's the question? Northern Ireland. They've killed 17 people with impact projectiles, but they've shot a lot of others who haven't died. And basically, he sent me back to that same fiscal secretary and said, run down there and. Speaker 2 (18:19) Take a trip. And so next thing I know, I'm with Jamie Ross at Hounslow in England. And I'm learning about impact projectiles and Queen Victoria Hospital in Belfast and learning about the deaths. And I'm learning accuracy matters. Yeah. And especially with an Arwen round. That literally becomes how the process of development started for the large caliber because we couldn't import Arwens at that time. So no R1s, but no large caliber, but that's the concept. So what do we do? And so that's where development begins. That's where the SL6 comes from because I needed a large caliber spin stabilized delivery system that I couldn't import anymore. So one thing leads to another. And six months later, serial number 001 for the SL6 is sitting in my office, built by Hans Kornberger in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, off of an Arwen round. Oh, interesting. That's how that was developed. He built serial number one around a round for me. Because, I mean, SCB was already using an Arwen at that point. They had been imported. Yeah. But I couldn't get them at that point. Oh, interesting. Okay. So Royal Ordinance stopped importing through John. Oh, yeah, yeah. And so John has this. R.J. Speaker 1 (19:35) Brill? Speaker 2 (19:36) Well, R.J. and Royal Arms, I don't know what, if anything, he ever had to do with them. No, it's Royal Ordinance. Royal Ordinance. Well, yeah. Well, you see, Royal Ordinance is who made it. Yeah. Okay. I'm thinking R.J. Brill and Royal Arms, different companies. So Royal Ordinance manufactured the R137. John Klein imported it. Got it. Okay. And so he sold it to Seattle, to LA, to SEB, to Prince George's County, Maryland, and PG County, Dickey Webster. I've got to give credit where credit's due. So I want a large caliber spin stabilized gun. I know that in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Hans Kornberger is making a 40 millimeter grenade launcher for the South African Army. I call him on the phone, say, hey, here's who I am. I would like to shoot a plastic bullet out of your launcher. And he speaks pretty good English, but not great English. And he said, do you have a fax machine? And I said, yeah. He said, I'm going to send you some questions that I need a machinist to answer. And I need a cartridge, a loaded cartridge. Okay. I've still got all this paperwork. He sends me this fax, 12 machinist questions for the Arwen barrel. Speaker 2 (20:49) I call Dick Webster at Prince George's County, Maryland. I fax him the questions. He takes his Arwen to a machine shop. They answer Hans' 12 questions. I send Hans the answers and an Arwen round. Six months later, serial number 001 shows up in my office. That's crazy. And that becomes ultimately John Klein's SL6. Yeah. But Hans Kornberger in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Penn Arms, made that gun originally. Speaker 2 (21:17) may make pieces or parts of it still today. He still does it, I think, for CTS or he's still alive. Yeah. CTS. Yeah. So he and John, John made the ammo. Hans made the gun. And that's where the SL6 came from. Speaker 1 (21:31) Interesting. So is that the first lust lethal weapon that you guys deploy is the SL6? We actually shot 12 gauge beanbags first. Okay. Mike Keith and MK Ballistics. Speaker 2 (21:41) And you know, everybody says, oh, the. 12 gauge square beanbags, horrible. It was the least worst option that Speaker 1 (21:48) I Speaker 2 (21:48) could buy at the time. So during that evolution, Mike had the flexible baton. We shot tons of people with that thing beyond about 30 feet. It had a mind of its own, but we effectively disarmed lots and lots of people. And the huge movement for us was just the fact that we were really busy and our patrolman shot a lot of people. And I. Had lots and lots of photographs, lots of case studies. Began testing the different rounds and writing articles about them for NTOA. Not that in any way that I not want to be associated with a manufacturer, but I could tell early on if I worked for one of the companies, you would like have the appearance maybe of some relationship and might be focusing, you know, on one versus the other. So I made a decision early on. that I would never work, take money from one of the companies. So it was all just fair game. If you want to send me 40 rounds, here's the test I do. If your round performed badly, I won't write a bad article on you if you'll take my feedback and try to fix it. And I had really good results with that. But I would publish these articles. And lots of people were making 12-gauge rounds, you know. And lots of people were shooting people. But we were getting... About one-fourth had hit as designed and intended. About one-fourth would be on edge. But we were still, bottom line, effectively disarming a lot of people. I had some penetrations. I had some lacerations. Had some... Speaker 2 (23:23) Some ugly outcomes. I mean, the landmark Ninth Circuit case, DeWorley versus Rutherford, is a square beanbag case. I had that as a defense case. If you read the case, the Ninth Circuit just talks terribly about the deputy, the event. But what few people talk about is the fact that it took 11 years, but we won that case at trial. The deputy was totally vindicated. The agency was vindicated. They paid Mr. DeWorley nothing. But it's a square bag that got squirrely on him. And he aims for the belt buckle. It hits him in the face. It's sad. It's tragic. But in the end, all that to say, the square bags, because of their potential to do funny things beyond 30 feet, just cause manufacturers to keep trying and trying and trying. And in November of 99, I get a phone call from Don Pierce at CTS. And he says, I've shipped you 40 of something new. The sock. Speaker 2 (24:19) First one shows up. I stepped right out of my office at the SWAT compound. I set up a 12-pound block, a aromaplastina number two clay, covered with a T-shirt, and fired 10 rounds at 20 meters and put them all in about a three-inch circle. And I went. Speaker 2 (24:37) And so that round changed things because I like the large caliber, but we learned in Springfield, we've shot hundreds and hundreds of people with less lethal at the patrol level, spontaneous street encounters that you just have to have the system readily available and in the hands of officers that are properly trained and equipped to use it. And that's how we've saved so many lives there. Yeah. Never critically injured. Anybody, 11 rounds on one person's the most, 81-year-old man with a gun to head, got video of that, and have saved a ton of lives with a relatively archaic, unsophisticated projectile delivery system. It's Speaker 1 (25:20) a baton that you can hit somebody at a distance with, right? That's it. As you go back, it's funny because I got involved in Less Lethal right then. The transition, there were two companies that originally made the... square ravioli, one made a round ravioli and one made a square ravioli, which is Mike, Keith, and PSI. Yep. Right? And they were both based on a treebore handheld launcher that you see in the movie, was it Hunter with Steve McQueen? Absolutely. He shoots him with it. Speaker 2 (25:47) They're by some water or something. A great big guy comes in and he falls down and shoots him with it. Yep. Exactly right. Speaker 1 (25:52) And I have one of those in my office. Speaker 2 (25:54) Awesome, Speaker 1 (25:54) man. Yeah, I've got an original treebore. Awesome. But that's where it starts. And then it evolves and CTS. DevTech and CTS are both making ravioli-style beanbags. And then, you know, CTS comes out with the sock. They Speaker 2 (26:07) do. Speaker 1 (26:08) Which then takes us down like a whole different genre. But you look at it, I don't know how many people, you know, the two times I've been sued in 40 years were both 12-gauge beanbag rounds that penetrated. Square bags? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, one penetrated, well, one hit her in the sternum. The one that penetrated went between the guy's ribs. The one that hit, they shot basically a crack whore who was stabbing her domestic, shot her in the chest, and it broke off a tiny piece of her sternum and wedged it in her aorta. And she was fine. She went to the hospital. She's great. They do an x-ray. They tell her she's fine. While they're waiting to discharge her, she drops dead in the front of the hospital. And they figured out that this piece of bone had broken off. But those are the two times. But, you know, you think about how many