Behind the Badge 2024 copertina

Behind the Badge 2024

Behind the Badge 2024

Di: Stories from Behind the Badge
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 Behind the Badge provides interviews and news from a law enforcement and public safety perspective. We interview officers, investigatiors and even reporters who work within the law enforcement community.Copyright Stories from Behind the Badge Politica e governo
Episodi
  • He looked into the eyes of a one of the worst serial killers, and saw nothing. An interview with retried homicde Det. Dan Salcedo

    He looked into the eyes of a one of the worst serial killers, and saw nothing. An interview with retried homicde Det. Dan Salcedo
    Oct 9 2024
    Retired Homicide Detective Dan Salcedo talked to Behind the Badge about meeting Kraft and other cases in his career as homicide detective.

    The frail old man shuffled into the interview room. Shackled by the arms and legs he was escorted into the cell off the interview room. He was small, shrunken, much less than his listed 5-foot-10, 170 pounds. Gone was the hair, the 1980s mustache, and any trace of the smirk he occasionally flashed in court decades earlier.“It’s weird, when you look at him there’s nothing memorable,” said Dan Salcedo, a retired homicide detective with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, who interviewed the notorious Randy Kraft in 2012. “He’s not the prototypical media version of what a killer looks like. If you put him in a room filled with people, he’s the last one you’d pick.”Monsters are rarely what you expect and this guy was a definition of the “banality of evil” description that has been applied to some of the worst serial killers and rapists in U.S. history. Banal, boring, and unoriginal, hardly the stuff of nightmares.


    Randy Kraft was known as the Scorecard Killer. He committed the rape, torture, and murder of a minimum of sixteen young men between 1972 and 1983, the majority of whom he killed in California. Kraft is also believed to have committed the rape and murder of up to fifty-one other young men and boys.
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    46 min
  • The price officers pay for responding to hundreds of critical incidents over a career

    The price officers pay for responding to hundreds of critical incidents over a career
    Sep 3 2024
    Dr. Heather Williams, founder of Premier First Responder Psychological Services, came of age professionally in an era when increased attention - and resources - was brought to mental health and wellness for members of the emergency response professions as well as victims of crimes.

    Williams spent more than 20 years working in crisis and trauma from differing perspectives, both with the Orange County Sheriff deputies in peer support and victims of crime with the Community Service Programs (CSP) Victim Assistance Programs.While the connections between the two may not be apparent at first, Williams says, “When you think of crime and victimization, it’s like a ripple effect. When you throw a rock in a pond, the ripples spread and many people are affected.”While working with the sheriff’s and victims’ programs,

    Williams said she was “peer pressured,” to go back to school and earn her doctorate. In 2019, she created Premier, which offers counseling, consulting, peer support, crisis response and wellness resources to criminal justice personnel and first responders.

    Since Williams entered the field, shocking statistics such as the rate of suicide among police have been researched and discussed with solutions hard to come by. Between 2016 and 2022, 1,200 law enforcement and corrections officers died by suicide according to First HELP, an organization that tracks first responder suicides.Officer-involved shootings, child abuse, vehicle accidents, death or serious injury of co-workers, line-of-duty death, and gruesome homicides are just a few examples of such events, referred to as critical incidents that police are regularly exposed to.

    While members of the public may be exposed to two or three critical incidents in a life, by the time a police officer retires that can easily be subjected to 200 or 300, Williams said.Williams sat with Joe Vargas, a retired Anaheim Police Captain and columnist, content editor with Behind the Badge, to talk about trauma, PTSD, and mental issues responders face, the realities and myths, and strategies to handle and treat them.

    For more information about Premeir 1st Responders click on the link.
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    38 min
  • Retired Secret Service agent Mike Succi talks about the agency amid recent failure

    Retired Secret Service agent Mike Succi talks about the agency amid recent failure
    Aug 16 2024
    It’s said it’s hard to prove a negative.

    When an event is prevented from occurring, that statistic is rarely reported and the public doesn’t know what might have been.

    Mike Succi spent 23 years as a member of the Secret Service and in the Oval Office with the George W. Bush and Barack Obama teams. During that time the goal was to keep the protection of public officials out of the news by stopping threats before they happened. And the Secret Service is very good, which is why attacks on political figures are so rare.

    “For every attempt, there are hundreds that look for an angle, that look for a weakness,” said Succi, who now runs Succi Investigations, which offers an array of services from personal protection, surveillance, and site surveys, to digital and forensic investigations. “We train for that one percent,” he said of the Secret Service and stopping those who carry out an attack on a public figure.

    The greatest successes of the Secret Service are from the attacks that never occur.Thomas Matthew Crooks, who wounded former President Donald Trump on Saturday, July 13, with a rifle shot in rural Pennsylvania, was that exception.

    “What failed,” Succi said of the Secret Service and law enforcement protection, “was the advance work.”

    Succi sat down with Behind the Badge to discuss the Secret Service, how it operates, its strategies and tactics in protection and also what failed at the farm near Butler, Pa.

    Violence as old as politics

    As long as there have been governments and politics, there have been attacks and assassinations. In the United States, presidents have been in the crosshairs ever since house painter Richard Lawrence attempted to shoot President Andrew Jackson with two pistols that misfired. Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy were shot to death while in office. Ronald Reagan was the last sitting president wounded in 1981.

    While there have been countless attempts, plots, rumors, and contemplated attacks in the intervening years, the Secret Service remarkably has kept every President and presidential candidate from harm. It is a testament to the agency’s scrupulous training, procedures, and policies over the years. The best sign of its effectiveness was in how little it was mentioned.

    And then came the attempt on Trump.

    Succi notes that with better planning during set-up of the venue, equipment and banners could easily have been shifted to eliminate the line of sight from the building where Crooks fired to the stage. There was also a failure to react to the sightings of the assassin and his suspicious behavior before the event.

    Succi noted another factor was the Trump campaign’s tendency to favor outdoor settings, rather than arenas and stadiums. Such venues are less expensive to set up, but harder to protect.

    Regardless, Succi says the Secret Service had the needed assets to do the job.

    Although he praises the counter-snipers for quickly reacting to Crooks, he notes that they are a last resort not the first.

    “We have a policy of prevention,” he said, rather than engage in shootouts. “We’re trained to get the protectee out and safe.”

    In the aftermath, Succi says the Secret Service will learn and be better.

    “We’ll be studying this case for years,” Succi said. However, he says the fault is with his former agency, not the police.

    “This was a Secret Service site,” he said. “The finger pointing comes back at us, as it should.”
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    38 min
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