#154: I Didn't Want To Be It - Leading Through The Boston Marathon Bombing - Boston Police Chief Daniel Linskey

Targeted violence, domestic terrorism and international terrorism are changing. In the past, America has been the victim of large scale coordinated attacks. Today, acts of mass violence are as simple as cars, fireworks and household items. On April 15, 2013 two terrorists blew up homemade bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three innocent people were killed. Hundreds were injured. Boston Police Chief Daniel Linskey https://www.linkedin.com/in/danlinskey/ immediately found himself in charge of a mass casualty event and a multijurisdictional manhunt through the streets of Boston. Chief Linskey joined Fran Racioppi https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisracioppijr/ to share how he overcame fear, panic and the realization that in an instant the entire city was looking to him for guidance and direction. He shares how preparation and training between law enforcement and first responders in the years leading up to the attack was critical in their response. And he explains why in emergency response, there’s no place for egos or credit, just action and results. Join our conversation from the shores of Plymouth Harbor. Follow us on social media https://www.instagram.com/jedburghpodcast/, read the full episode on our website https://greenberetfoundation.org/the-jedburgh-podcast/, then head over to our YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@jedburghpodcast channel or your favorite podcast platform https://pod.link/1558608802 to catch Chief Linskey talk about Team Maureen, an organization he founded to honor his late cousin focused on preventing cancer in our Veterans. HIGHLIGHTS 0:00 Introduction3:32 Becoming a US Marine8:47 Joining Boston Police15:05 Public Perception of Law Enforcement Today25:12 Are we prosecuting enough crime?31:07 Immigration policy effect on policing35:47 You’re It at the Boston Marathon49:05 The bombing1:00:20 Standing guard over the victims1:19:37 The Manhunt1:35:29 Boston Strong1:39:04 Mental Health Mechanisms1:43:00 Biggest Lesson1:45:44 Thank you QUOTES “If you leave a place the same way you found it, you’re not leading.”"If you want to learn leadership, lead.”“Cops hate change. The other thing cops hate is the way things are.” “If you think there’s a problem with policing and leadership…ok…join and see what you can do from the inside.”“I would like to see any politician who is making policy on law enforcement to make them have to do a two week basic in-service class in law enforcement.”“If people think there’s no accountability for assaulting a police officer…they’re gonna do it.” “You can’t just say you’re training. You can’t just pretend you’re training. You can’t just say bang bang you’re dead.”“Leadership is putting your team to the task.”“He essentially said “Tag, you’re it boss. And I didn’t want to be it.”“Along with the devastation was a wave of shame and guilt that washed over me.”“I froze. I’m a United States Marine. I’m a cop. I’m the chief. I froze. I want to go home. I want to go home with my kids.” “In crisis there are 5,000 things you got to do, but you need to focus on the five most important right now.”“If you tell the troops what you want them to do and why they should do it, they’ll do it.” The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are an official program of Green Beret Foundation https://greenberetfoundation.org/, supporting US Army Special Forces of all generations.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Fran Racioppi?

  Welcome to the Jedburgh Podcast. I'm the creator and host, Fran Rychob. Each episode, I speak with transformative leaders, visionaries, drivers of change, and those dedicated to winning no matter the challenge. The Jedburgh Podcast is founded in the lineage of the special operations Jedburgh teams of the past and is an official program of the Green Bray Foundation, supporting our nation's US Army Special Forces and their families. Targeted violence, domestic terrorism, and international terrorism are changing. In the past, America's been the victim of large-scale coordinated attacks. Today, acts of mass violence are as simple as cars, fireworks, and everyday household items. On April 15, 2013, two terrorists blew up homemade bombs at the finish line of the

• 0:45Fran Racioppi?

  Boston Marathon. Three innocent people were killed, hundreds were injured. Boston Police Chief Daniel Linsky immediately found himself in charge of a mass casualty event and a multi-jurisdictional manhunt through the streets of Boston. Chief Linsky joined me to share how he overcame fear, panic, and the realization that in an instant, the entire city was looking to him for guidance and direction. He shares how preparation and training between law enforcement and the first responders in the years leading up to the attack was critical in their response. And he explains why in crisis, there's no place for ego or credit, just action and results. Join our conversation from the shores of Plymouth Harbor. Follow us on social media. Read the full episode on our website. Then head over to our YouTube channel or your favorite podcast platform to catch

• 1:28Fran Racioppi?

  Chief Linsky talk about Team Marine, an organization he founded to honor his late cousin, focused on preventing cancer in our veterans.

• 1:38Fran Racioppi?

  Danny, welcome to the Jedburgh Podcast. Well, 28 years in law enforcement, after a career in the Marines, you led the Boston Police Department, I would argue, and I'm sure you would too, one of the finest institutions in law enforcement in the world.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm proud to have been associated with the Boston PD. I think it is one of the best in the country. And I think, you know, they're constantly looking at, you know, what we could do better, right? And that's, that's what makes you best is not accepting that you're, you know, hey, we're good. Let's just leave it alone. That's not what leaders do, right? If you leave a place the same way you found it, then you're not leading, right? You should actually have a wake of leadership behind you where better leaders than you are coming up and doing greater things than, you know, what going on when I was there.

• 2:21Fran Racioppi?

  So you say that and I immediately start thinking about the Marine Corps, which is where you actually started. Because when you look at a Marine Corps recruiting poster, right? It never says something like, hey, come be a follower and then one day we'll make you a leader. Great organizations talk about leadership and they instill leadership from day one. Leaders exist at every level of an organization and people conflate leadership with management and they think, oh, well, once you're at this level, well, now you're a manager and a leader. And what I argue is, no, you may be a manager after you're in charge of a couple of people. But the reality is, is even an individual contributor, the lowest level, private, the entry level, police officer is a leader in their job.

• 3:06Fran Racioppi?

  But I gotta ask you before we get into all that, why the Marines?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Um, my grandfather. So my grandfather was a United States Marine. He fought at Belleau Wood. So, you know, I want to be a cop. And I pretty much thought I needed to get veterans preference to become a cop because that's what you needed at that time. So that was my plan. I was gonna fly F-18s for the Marine Corps and do six years and then become a cop. My grandfather said, oh, you're gonna go to Quantico and be a Marine officer? You should probably get your behind down to Paris Island. Fun is like to be a Marine before you lead Marines, right? That was kind of his attitude. He always, you know, found that, um, Marine leaders that he kind of thought were most effective were leaders who had actually been grunts before, who had been, you know,

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Mustang officers in the Marine Corps that went from enlisted to sworn. And, um, that was his thought. So I said, okay. So I joined the reserves too. And I, uh, it was September of my high school year. I went in, joined the Marine Corps reserves. My mother was like, oh, my God, what are you gonna do? What, you know, why aren't you gonna do whatever all the other kids do? I said, Mom, my entire life, you said, you know, if the other kids jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge, right? I said, so I'm a Linsky. You told me to do what Linsky's do. So I'm gonna join the Marines. So graduated high school, uh, coming up now. So June 10th, I graduated high school. On June 12th, I was standing on the yellow footprints at Paris Island. Finally, I know what my grandfather thought I should. Understand it was great. It was a bunch of other good kids, free food, free clothes. It was a

• 4:36Fran Racioppi?

  Can you call it food?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:38Fran Racioppi?

  Sustenance.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was. It was great. And then, you know, what do people pay for a personal trainer today? I had three personal trainers, uh, running me through the

• 4:47Fran Racioppi?

  Motivational speakers.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were great, you know? Uh, so it was a really good experience. I matured, right? Found out, you know, what I needed to do. And you're right, it starts there. And, you know, my leadership probably started in high school, like on teams, like if someone had to be the captain, it's like, all right, I'll do it, right? Um, school, politics, I stepped up and I was a school treasurer for my senior class. So, and you might know who said this, but there's a famous saying about leadership. If you want to learn leadership, lead, right? Do you know who said that?

• 5:21Fran Racioppi?

  Don't know who said that.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Well, I'll give you a hint, it's a Marine.

• 5:24Fran Racioppi?

  Okay, well, I won't hold it against him.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Okay. Any, any, any guesses on who it could be?

• 5:30Fran Racioppi?

  Uh, was it, uh,

• 5:34Fran Racioppi?

  it wasn't Mattis?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  No, no, I think General Mattis wished he'd said it, but he didn't say it. No. And a lot of people think Chesty Pollard, it wasn't Chesty Pollard. Obviously, a mentor of mine, somebody I've looked up to and respect and I've seen and just saw how he operates and how he works is General Dunford. His dad was my commanding officer when I was a young detective in the drug unit. First I met him, he called me in his office. He didn't go in and talk to a deputy like they were God. And he called me in the office. I was in the unit about a week. I thought, oh, you know, he must have wanted, he must have heard about that undercover buy I made and want to congratulate me. And, uh, he was chewing my ass out for screwing up, right? And, um, yelling at me. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, first time I meet this guy and he's already, you know, up one side and down the other. A week later,

• 6:18Speaker 01

  I got called back to his office and oh my God, God, what do I do now? And I had done a case that, uh, he, a lot of complaints had come in and no one could kind of get a case against this guy. And I just went and knocked on his door and convinced him to sell me a bunch of cocaine and, you know, it worked. And, um, we got the guy. The deputy found out about it, brought me to his office and then gave me a pat on the back, told me what a good job it was and how effective it was. So, that's a leadership lesson. I learned like, okay, he had a standard and I hadn't met it. And he wanted to make sure that I knew what I was supposed to do there, right? And that disappointment was not an option. And then When I did something that he thought was right, he had the ability to say, hey, great job, keep up the good work, you know, I appreciate it. And I'm like, wait a minute, this guy's reading my reports and like actually knows what we're doing out there.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  So kind of a lessons and I'm, I've been on that lesson leadership, learning lessons of leadership my entire life, right? So whether it was Paris Island and what it was like to be an enlisted Marine down there. I went to college, went to Northeastern University. I know we've got an intern who's going to be going Northeastern, so congratulations. So I hope, I met my wife there. So, you know, good luck to you. Went to Quantico that June again and was, you know, do the platoon leaders class program. I was going to go out for two different summers and get commissioned and that's it, right? Hopefully they're going to give me a chance to go to flight school and it's up to me whether I fly a F-18 or I fly a PAC for six years, depending on how I do in flight school. But I got hurt down

• 7:44Speaker 01

  at Quantico, tore a ligament on a, on a run. Not bad, but bad enough that I couldn't finish. So, you know, Marine Corps has to keep you for a little while. So they kept me for like two weeks and then let me go home. First time I ever failed. It's the only thing I ever set out to do that I didn't complete it, right? And I was like a little downtrodden. But I had taken the police exam for practice. I got a, you know, really good score on the police exam and they kept calling me for interviews and background checks. And I'm saying, no, I'll go through it, but I know I'm not going to get hired because, you know, I'm a 19-year-old kid, no veterans preference, I'm not going to get the job. And Friday night, I got a call. I report to the academy Monday morning. At that time, I was 20 years old.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Graduated from police academy, was 20 years old. I could seize alcohol as evidence, but I couldn't drink. Went to some ethical challenges for a young cop on Friday nights, but I got through it, right? So, you know, I went to the police academy. My brother was in the academy with me. Was 180 recruits in the class. Someone had to be top of the class. It was not my brother and I've let him know that his entire law enforcement career.

• 8:50Fran Racioppi?

  Competition always exists.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it does.

• 8:52Fran Racioppi?

  At that level.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  It does. And I was really good academically studying wise. So I got the law pretty quickly. So I topped with the Hogan Award winner in the academy class. And that came with a, where do you want to go? The hottest work in busiest district was District 2 in Roxbury. That's where I wanted to go, right? That's where I'm going to learn to be a police officer.

• 9:11Fran Racioppi?

  Has that changed?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  No, two is still a busy district, probably now there's 11 and three are kinda vying for first place.

• 9:22Fran Racioppi?

  It's 11 and 3.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  A Dorchester and Matapan. But 2 is, you know, a good place to learn to be a young cop. I still remember my first day, I screwed up so many times in the first 3 hours, unbelievable. Like, I was so early that I check in, I put my stuff in the locker, and it's like, I had a 7:30 roll call and I'm there at like 6, right? And I check in and put my locker, close it up, and go out and I realize I don't have the citation box that I'm supposed to have, so I go back, now I can't open the locker. And I'm like, what the hell, you know, what's going on here? So there was a tire iron near there, so I popped it and found out that it wasn't my locker.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  So I committed a burglary my first day on the job. And I'm like, what am I, geez, what the, they're gonna fingerprint this, like I'm gonna get fired, you know? But my locker was the one next to it, I was trying to open the wrong locker. So that was the first half hour on the job. Then I, they put me out with a guy who started earlier, just because, hey, instead of hanging out, you go out with him for an hour, and we have a motor vehicle accident, and, you know, kid crashed a motorcycle, and I'm trying to get him to take medical care, you know, like, hey, sir, you need an ambulance, he could be hurt, you don't realize, you know, you could be, and the old cop's like, hey, kid, you know, so if he gets medical care, there's a report involved, we have to write a report. If he doesn't get medical care, it's just, hey, we came, we saw, see you later, right?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  And the old time, I doesn't wanna do a police report, and I'm, you know, on the job an hour, trying to convince myself to get paperwork, and he's like, we get back in the car, he goes, hey, kid, don't push the paperwork shut, okay? We're not gonna do that. And I'm like, all right, step 3. And then I got my, my training partner, and we were about 3 hours into the call, and we get a call for an alarm at a house. And we show up, and the house was inside a fence, it was like a 6-foot-high fence with barbed wire all around it. And, um, you know, he looked and he's like, ah, I don't see anything. Nothing's broke. Kind of looked around the perimeter and he's like, I don't see anything. I'm like, oh, no, we, we gotta check the house, right? So idiot me climbs over the fence and I'm trying to climb over the barbed wire and I get stuck halfway up, but I'm, it's like my new pants

• 11:36Speaker 01

  are getting ripped and Eddie.

• 11:38Fran Racioppi?

  They still got the, they still got the crease for being folded.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, they're brand new. It's the first time they're worn. And Eddie, uh, all of a sudden realizes that, you know, there was a, a lock on the gate, but it wasn't locked. And he opens it and pushes the gate open with, with idiot spinning on the gate and says, oh, we could do it this way too, kid, you know? Why don't you climb down from there? So that was my first day. Thankfully got, got better from there, but as a young cop, when you get to a scene, you know, if you didn't have a supervisor there who was in charge, or sometimes even when you had a supervisor there who, you know, has the rank, but not the ability to lead, sometimes, you know, you want to be a leader, lead, right? If you had to step up and bang that door, make that arrest, or jump in on that interview, or make a decision to search the car and, you know, I would do that. And I kind of

• 12:25Speaker 01

  had that leadership my entire career. So I had the privilege of working with some great cops and became a sergeant and ran some really effective teams, teams that worked well together. We just lost one of my guys. I just went to his funeral last week and we got, posted a thing on LinkedIn. We got a citation from the police commissioner. Six years that crew was working and, uh, we were running undercover narcotics squad. We had done 1,000 search warrants. We arrested 3,000 people. We took 650 guns off the street. We took tens of millions of dollars of money and ill-gotten gains. And I think we took a hundred million in, you know, coke, heroin and other various drugs off the street in that six months. Amazingly,

• 13:08Speaker 01

  all those, you know, times, not everyone wants to go to the, easily with the police. There's some challenges sometimes. I'm not a single internal fear complaint for anyone in that squad. So that kind of spoke volumes for the squad and, you know, I had the privilege to lead them.

• 13:23Fran Racioppi?

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• 13:57Fran Racioppi?

  You've seen an evolution over your career of, we'll say, support. Right? Support to the profession of law enforcement. And, you know, I often will equate law enforcement as this, it's a service. You're serving, whether you're a first responder and you're in the, you're in the fire department or EMS, or you're a police officer, you know, just like military who goes out there, you know, they answer a call. You know, they answer a call to the nation and our law enforcement answers that call to the community. Cause at the end of the day, that's their job. They're there to protect, serve, and help the community in many ways, in ways that they, you don't even think about. Often we'll talk even about, you know, think back to COVID, you know, and you have an entire

• 14:42Fran Racioppi?

  profession of folks who, and I think you guys were a lot of that at the front lines here in Boston, and you're especially at odds with some of the political leaders here during that time, where you still gotta go out there and take action at a time when the rest of society is being told to do nothing, except one demographic. And so I bring it up because you've seen an evolution of levels of support. Where are we as a society? And how do, does our law enforcement view their role as we've seen support for law enforcement go down and scrutiny go up?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the men and women I worked with, you know, it wasn't a job they did. Most part, the teams I was on and the teams that I was able to put together, it was a vocation that people had, right? It was something, it wasn't that they were a cop and that they did police work. It's that they were somebody who was dedicated to public safety, to the job, to getting the mission done, whatever assignment it was. And that's what they did. It wasn't a job they did, it's who they were, it's how they lived. Obviously, a lot of it has changed. And some of that, you know, was police's fault, right? We had challenges in Boston, we'd have violence, and, you know, some of it is communication from the community. What do you want? I remember a young girl was shot, 12-year-old kid, and I was looping the block and saw

• 16:01Speaker 01

  a bunch of gang kids that I know were gang-involved, and this little girl, sitting on a mailbox, and she was swinging her feet. And I'm like, geez, I don't like that, because the kids that were on the corner, I know were rival gangs of the gang that's, you know, six blocks that way. And at some point, they had shot them up, you know, a couple of days ago, and I knew at some point, they were gonna return and shoot these guys up. And I was just thinking to myself, I don't want this kid, like, hanging out with these guys. So, I get out of the car, and I broom the kids off the corner, and tell them, hey, get, you know, guys, head out, you know, go someplace else. They go around the corner, actually, one of them throws a bottle at me once they get around the corner. And I had enough time on the street that I was smart enough, now that I didn't run

• 16:42Speaker 01

  over, because they were all gonna be in the apartment, through the back doors, you know, I was, however, I'm gonna see these kids six hours later, one of them's gonna have a beer, or, you know, smoking a bone, and, you know, they're not gonna get a pass on it, they're gonna get arrested, right? And I'm gonna say, hey, remember the bottle you threw? You know, tell whoever threw the bottle, you know, you can thank them for tonight's day in jail, right? But I said to the little kid, um, you know, hon, what are you doing here? You gotta get out of here. Like, this is a bad neighborhood. And she said, oh, I'm visiting from the south, and I met a friend here yesterday, and we played, and I was just waiting for her to come back, so I could play with her. And I'm like, oh, okay, but, you know, those guys that were out here, you know, they're not somebody you wanna be hanging out with. You should probably go back home to your aunt's house, and, you know, see if you can find your friend there.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  And then, you know, I ripped the block three or four times, didn't see the kids who threw the bottle, so I said, "Okay, I'll just go grab some food." I ordered my food, I got the pizza, put it in the car, and a call came in for Humboldt and Ruthven. And when I got there, the kids had come back. So the gang kids had come back after I left. Unfortunately, little Tiffany Moore came back too, and she jumped back on the mailbox, and she just wanted to play with another little girl that she was hoping was gonna come out of her house and be someone she could play with. And as I had feared, a rival gang came and shot up the corner, and as often is the case, they missed the people they were shooting

• 18:04Speaker 01

  at, and they shot Tiffany in the head. And she died. So, the whole city was outraged, right? A 12-ville kid is shot dead on a mailbox. Our bosses came in and told us the next day, you know, "Go get 'em. Get 'em." So we got 'em. We did. We put a bunch of cops up there. We arrested all kinds of people, you know, if you were driving without a license. And you went. Everyone was going to jail, right? And if you wanted to fight, well, we'd fight you. But we went up and arrested everyone. We flooded the place. We had bodies lined up in the police station. But who we were arresting, right? So, we get kinda told, "Just go get 'em." And who's "them," right? And we start arresting everyone under the sun.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  And we're arresting Ed the electrician, who's got a, you know, driver's license is suspended because he's working hard to, you know, keep his kids in a private school, and he hasn't had money or time to go down to the RMB and get his license done. But he gets arrested, right? Now, he wasn't the shooter, or he didn't know who the shooter was, but he gets his car towed, and, you know, we take him to the station, and he's gonna take a day off work. And we're asking him, "Well, you know, help us find who sho-" "Why should I help you?" Right? "You just treated me like, you know, a jerk and arrested me." "Yeah, was it legal?" "Sure, it was legal. But do we need to arrest people for driving without a license?" "No, we need to find the kids who were involved in gang activity." And they knew we were coming, so they put their heads down and kept low for the three or four weeks that we had saturated patrols.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  And we didn't police the community, we occupied it, right? And we created tensions. And then, you know what? If there's tensions, there's gonna be feedback. So, some of our problems in policing are things we did ourselves. And some are, you know, out of our control that others did. But, you know, we saw a change in the last couple of years where law enforcement was basically the target of everyone's anger. And, you know, we've got a new media that has no editor in the Twitter guardroom, and no one verifies the information. And it spreads like wildfire. And we saw, you know, I worked for the Department of Justice. I went out to Ferguson after the Michael Brown shooting. And, you know, "Hands up, don't shoot"? Never happened.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  But, it happened to people who lived in that community. And, you know, there was a no comment given on what happened with the shooting. And when the police and the DA are saying, "No comment", and the other side is saying, "He had his hands up and said, 'Don't shoot'". Well, I call it the third, the third, and the third, right? There's a third of people will say, "Well, you know, the police shot a guy in the crosswalk because he was jaywalking." Well, I don't teach them, won't jaywalk anymore, will he, right? And we, like, they're always with us. And then there's a third that, you know, there's a video of a cop getting shot in the face in Boston, and I people going, "Well, why didn't you, you know, why'd you have to shoot him? We just shot a cop in the face at point-blank range." Yeah, but still, aren't you guys trained for that? And like, this kid was a Harvard Law student who was arguing with the then superintendent,

• 20:59Speaker 01

  uh, chief of police, Willie Ross at the time, right? It's like, we're never gonna maybe win everyone over, right? People just don't like the police, don't like authority for whatever reason. But then there's a third in the middle who just want the information, the facts. And if you tell them what happened, and it makes sense to them, then they're gonna support you if the cop was doing the right thing. And if the cop is doing the wrong thing, they're gonna want accountability. They lost that in Ferguson, and then we saw, you know, and I'm not saying Ferguson burned that day because of no comment, I think, my own opinion. It was gonna burn eventually because of the way policing was going on out there. They were policing for dollars in the community a lot, and it was, you know, not a way to build trust with the community. So, we had a, you know, I know your, your wife's in marketing, and if we had a CMO

• 21:42Speaker 01

  for the police department, well, they, they should be fired. Because, you know, we weren't getting our image out, and we weren't doing a good job messaging what we were doing. Lots of good police work was going on, but we weren't sharing that. What was getting shared is where cops were doing the wrong thing, and we had to come back from that. Where we are now, the long answer to your initial question, the pendulum's coming back. See, more people who realize that the police are trying to do the right thing, that in fact, in the justice system, police has probably been some of the more progressive changes than any other folks, right? And I, you know, we look for diversity in police departments, and then I have reporters who write stories about, you know, lack of diversity in police departments and what have you, and then I go to their newsroom, and guess what?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Have you looked in a mirror, right? I've had academics who talk about, you know, we need to do this in police departments, and I go, have you looked inside the university system? You know, how many diverse people are at your table when you're having discussions? So, police has actually taken a pretty good step towards that and worked to diversify with men, women, different ethnicities, genders, race, religion, politics, and tried to get, you know, the community to actually reflect, the departments to reflect the communities they serve. So I think we've done a better job with that. We're holding cops accountable. I think body cameras are great. Originally, cops hate two things, let's just be clear, cops hate change. Any change, they hate it.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  So if you want to put body cameras in, cops hate change. The other thing cops hate is the way things are, right? So they hate all those two things, and they'll argue with it. But I think now, they've actually, they've seen where body cameras have helped tell their story, right? What happened before the 30-second Twitter video happened where, you know, the guy was pulling a gun out and, you know, out of control and trying to hurt somebody, and the officer did what he had to do, right, to save lives? So, I went to a Medal of Honor celebration at the Boston Police Awards about a month ago, and I have, you know, friends that I worked with who were telling me, I don't want my kid on the job. I don't want my kid in the job. I'm telling my kid not to take the job. And they were angry when their, their son or daughter took the job, because they're like, it's not, the job's changed. It's not the same job.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  It's the same job, you know why? Because I think 13 of the cops who walked across that stage and got Medals of Honor, Medals of Valor, saving lives, being shot at, shot, they were sons and daughters of cops I banged doors down with. And those kids are doing what their mothers and fathers did before them, and, you know, I'm glad to see that. It's not just that, though. We are seeing different folks coming into policing who are looking to see if they can, and it's a great time, right? So, if you think there's a problem... Be a leader. You want to be a leader? Lead. If you think there's a problem with policing and leadership, and okay, join. And see what you can do from the inside and see if you can change it because you're not changing it from outside on Twitter, but you can change it if you actually put some

• 24:39Speaker 01

  skin in the game. And some of that is you understand what's actually going on and not just your thoughts of, you know, how police should do things.

• 24:47Fran Racioppi?

  How are you seeing and how do you react to changes in policy? So there's a lot of discussion now out there about, okay, well, you have district attorneys who, you know, don't want to prosecute crimes, soft on crime, you know, police officers are doing a lot of work arresting folks for mid to low level misdemeanor crime and then people are back out on the street within, you know, 12, six hours, 12 hours, 24 hours. How do you balance that and how much effect do you actually have over going after that type of crime at a baseline level if it's not being prosecuted?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yes, so I think-

• 25:22Fran Racioppi?

  Complex question.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. It is. And I'll go back to what we were doing, right? So we were trying to stop violence, right? So we targeted those who engaged in violence. And if you were doing other things, but it wasn't violent, well, that wasn't the primary focus for our resources, right? Ed the electrician, I didn't need him arrested because he didn't have a license. Let's have Ed pull the car over, park it, and then if, you know, he doesn't fix it, well, then that's Ed's problem, right? We started focusing on impact players who we knew were engaged in violence. And by doing so, we lowered crime like 30 plus percent. And we lowered arrests and incarcerations at the same time because we're going after the violent players. So that was our model at the time.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  We had a school program where we had school resource officers that went and made relationship with kids and did non-typical police things with kids and took kids fishing and took kids to, you know, tutoring programs after school and hooked them up in the community center with, with coaches and- We had a very successful program where a kid would be going off the rails. He'd start hanging out with a gang. The teacher knew it, we knew it. He's using gang graffiti on his covering of his book. He's wearing the, you know, Tar Heels hat. And it isn't because he likes the team. It's because that's the gang color that the kids are flying in his neighborhood. And mom and dad are working a bunch of hours and, you know, they're not seeing this, right?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  So we would go with the school police officer, one of our school cops, community leader, clergy sometimes. We would go with social services. We'd go to the house, knock on the door and have a conversation with the parents. "Hey, how you doing? Your kid's in trouble. This is what's going on. How can we help you? Can we get him onto a sports team? Can we get her into a dance program? Can we get them a coach? Can we get them a mentor? Can we help do this, that, or something? Do we need to get the court system on them, right? Sometimes that's the best response for a kid who needs the sort of Damocles hanging over their head. But we were not charging kids. We were diverting them. We weren't arresting them for stuff. And it was successful. And, you know, some folks came in and said, "Get rid of school police. It's horrible."

• 27:30Speaker 01

  And then we're starting to see violence back in school. So I would like to see any politician who is making policy on law enforcement to have to do like a two-week, basic in-service class in law enforcement. I had a use of force where one of our officers unfortunately had to shoot a guy. This guy had a machete and he was attacking a woman. And then the officer took action and he started attacking the officer. He shot and killed a guy. It's unfortunate for everyone involved. The officer was hit with the machete. I think he got 67 or 87 stitches in his leg. And I had a reporter who said, "Why didn't the officer just shoot the gun out of his hand?" Now, I'm a United States Marine. I was on a Marine Corps pistol team. I was a police officer.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  I've shot and killed every paper target I've gone up against, right? When I've had to use my weapon in work, I don't know where those rounds went and I'm happy because, you know, I still got the bad guys and didn't have to, you know, deal with, you know, taking someone's life. But that's just not the world, and you know it, right? That's not the world we live in, right? We're not all a sniper with the ability to take that shot and, you know, we get time. It's, you're backing up. So he wanted to know why the officer didn't shoot him in the hand and why he didn't give him commands in Spanish. You know, the officer wasn't Spanish speaking and he probably didn't know that the guy with the machete who just attacked the woman and him was speaking Spanish at the time, right? So I invited that reporter over to our academy and I said, "Hey, why don't you put your money where you mouth this? Let me run you through the training scenario and why don't you see

• 29:00Speaker 01

  what it's like to do this? And then if you want, stand by your article, have at it." So he come over, to his credit, he came, he did it, ran him up and down the stairs, put him in the fat simulator training room, he shot everyone but the bad guy, he killed his partner, he killed the neighbors, and I'm just going like, "Hey dude, why didn't you shoot it out of his hand? You were only six feet from him, what, what, come on." And he's like, "All right, lesson learned," right? And to his credit, he wrote an article saying, "You know, in last week I had an opinion, this week I walked a mile in the shoes of the officer who might have been there and I realized that my opinion maybe wasn't informed." And, you know, here's my experience at the police academy. So I would like to see everyone who's making a decision on use of force policies and police policies to have, look, have an

• 29:44Speaker 01

  experience. And if you, if that's what you, you've gone through it and you think that's we shouldn't have tasers or we should have tasers, then you can be informed as you make a decision and advise me and tell me how to do the job. I wouldn't go in and tell a neurosurgeon how to do the job. And they're not conflating what neurosurgeons know and cops know, but, and you don't have to be a cop to understand what's good policy procedure in policing, but having that familiarization when you're making decisions is helpful and also gives you some credibility, right? If you walk that walk and you still decide you want to go with this policy, that's great.

• 30:14Fran Racioppi?

  Over the last couple of years, we've seen massive influx in immigration and there's a lot of different opinions on national and federal policy on immigration, but a lot of the burden of those who are coming into the country is being borne by local police and local law enforcement. And then we have policy decision makers, as you've talked about, you know, elected leaders who are at kind of all ends of the spectrum as in those different jurisdictions as to how they're handling those situations, everything from, you know, nothing to, you know, massive amounts of resources going into supporting them. We've seen that in New York, we've seen that here in Massachusetts, we've seen that even

• 30:57Fran Racioppi?

  out on the islands, you know, Nantucket Martha's Vineyard, you have even had their share of dealing with an influx of that population. How much more complex does that make the job of local law enforcement when you start to add now a demographic into the population that is kind of in a no man's land?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's definitely made it harder for sure, you know, and resources are stretched thin and it's a strain.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  There's a lot of good folks who are probably here for good reason, right? I just trained a bunch of police officials out in New Mexico. And one of the leaders of the state police there was human trafficked. His mother was beaten by his father and actually the father wound up killing an unborn baby girl that she was carrying. She beat the mother, he beat the mother because she was pregnant with a girl and he wanted another boy. They came from a communist country in Central America, you know, the police were all powerful. The mother had some family here and she ran with the kids. And he talked to me about being trafficked across the Mexican border and waiting for his uncle to pick them up.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  And he had a flashlight and was flashing it and of course they went into the border patrol and they get picked up and at that time they took them right back and sent, you know, the mother had hid her passport from, I think it's Guatemala and they put them back in Mexico, thinking that they were from Mexico. They eventually got re-trafficked across the US border. The mother got a job, met a gentleman, married him and moved and this, you know, he's the commander in the state police at the time. He joined the Navy and he was on the USS Kennedy and he was deployed all over

• 32:44Speaker 01

  the world on the Navy and at one point he went to, I think it was Singapore and he got off the ship and they, he had a passport for Guatemala and he also had a US passport, but he has the Guatemalan passport and they deny him entry. "How'd you get here?" He's like, "That big ship out there?" And they're like, "Yeah, you can't come in." Now, he's a leading official in law enforcement, right? So, that's probably somebody that we want here, right? He joined our military, he went and contributed to our safety and security and I'm sure there's lots of stories like that, but there's also, because it's so wide open and there's no control, we're seeing lots of dangerous folks coming across

• 33:27Speaker 01

  who are using our system to create crime and to victimize people and, you know, if we know people are committing, so I'm a cop, I do comp stat and we problem solve, right? What's the problem? Well, we got criminals coming in this area doing this, why and say, "All right, well, let's not do that. How do we change that?" There's all kinds of ways we can change it, right? But, you know, we're putting our teams in bad places and then if there are no consequences for your action, we see what the crowds were doing to the New York cops there, where they were assaulting the police officers and, you know, creating crimes because, hey, no one's being held accountable. So, why not? And if people think there's no accountability for assaulting a police officer or doing

• 34:10Speaker 01

  anything, well, guess what? They're gonna probably do it if that's how they're inclined. And we have to go back to where, you know, we don't need everyone in jail all the time for every crime, but we need to have discussions about this person and their actions and whether they should be in jail or on probation or on an ankle bracelet or, you know, diverted out of the court. And I'm all for diverting somebody, like, they were for the grace of God, go away. Everyone makes mistakes. So, if you made a mistake and you don't need to go to jail, great. But if you commit crimes and hurt people and you're a threat, no, that's what jails are for. And, you know, we have to make sure we're giving our cops the tools so that they can actually keep us safe.

• 34:50Fran Racioppi?

  It's easy to be a leader when everything's going well. Right, and whether you're a police officer, whether you're in business and your company's making money, and you don't have an enemy to face, you don't have people conducting crime, anyone can be really an effective leader. But we live in what's called a VUCA environment. You study in law enforcement, you study in the military. But what's volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. This VUCA world where we wake up in the morning and anything can happen. Our job as leaders in military and special operations and law enforcement is to be trained and prepared to find ourselves in any one of these complex situations and then have to actually respond. We were introduced by Eric McNulty, my guest on episode 70.

• 35:34Fran Racioppi?

  Eric wrote, a co-author of the book You're It. He's part of the National Preparedness Leadership Institute. And we have that moment when an event happens and all of a sudden, you're it. You're the person in charge. Monday, April 15th, 2013, 2:49 PM. You were it.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I didn't want to be it. It's like when you're a kid and you were it, you didn't want to be it when you were a kid. And I definitely didn't want to be it that day. But we looked at challenges and threats that we could face prior to that day. And we trained and we prepared and we put plans in place. And we, more importantly, putting plans in place, we taught and trained people how to plan, right? I had a 146-page plan for the marathon. We had an alternative finish line that, God forbid, there's a fire on Boylston Street. We would pull some barriers and we actually had a second timing mat down Commonwealth Avenue, right at 26.2, so that, you know, we'd still have an official marathon. It was that level of planning. But that plan had to get thrown out the window.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  And now I had a terrorist bombing with three dead people, 259 maimed citizens, and, you know, a city under attack. But it was the training and preparation and the learning we did on a couple different training episodes and you gotta, you know this, you can't just say you're training, you can't just pretend you're training, you can't say bang bang, you're dead, right? We were doing that and how I realized we had a problem, I was in New York when Mumbai happened and I was on a family vacation and Mumbai's playing out and I'm asking, you know, okay, well, what do we do in Boston? What are we doing here? Could we be a target?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  They're attacking the entire city. Could we, could we be one of those targets? We didn't have a plan. There was no plan to stand up, you know, tactical teams to protect critical infrastructure. We made it up on a hotel notepad in a hotel room in New York with me talking to people back here in Boston and we didn't get hit, but we realized we were flat footed. So I brought my team together and, you know, this leadership is putting your team to the task. And I said, what do we gotta do? And they're like, oh, we gotta do this, we gotta do that, we gotta do this other thing. And we took a program called Urban Shield in California, which was a 36-hour SWAT operation where SWAT operators went from 36 different locations and scenarios. They had real-life role players with Milaje

• 38:04Speaker 01

  that looked like Hollywood special effects and sometimes it was a shoot situation, an no shoot situation, it was on an airplane, a hotel, you know, all kinds of things. Our SWAT team said, this is the best training we ever had. So I brought that guy out and I said, hey, I want you to make this team for us. And he said, okay, yeah, well, he said, you know, it's not about training your teams, right? It's about training your leaders. And I go, what are you talking about? My team said it was the best SWAT training they ever had. He goes, yeah, yeah, they'll, they'll have a good time and they'll get good training. But how did you train people to be the incident commander for events? We didn't, right? You were the guy. You sat in the chair and that's it. That's your incident commander training. Well, you need incident commanders for each one of these sites, you need a safety chief for every one of these sites, you need a logistics person for all of these sites. And what are you worried about?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  What happened is we debriefed with Mumbai and they told us, you know, the Taj Hotels is on fire, they're shooting people in the hotel, and they've ringed the place with IEDs. So the fire department and the police department have a discussion of who's going to go first. Right, right. And the fire department's saying, "Not us," and the police department's saying, "Well, we can't go in with fire," and the bomb squad said, "Hey, fellas, figure it out, and we'll take care of those bombs once no one's shooting and the place isn't a raging inferno." That conversation was going to occur between me and the fire chief in the city of Boston if it would have happened. So, fire was training, police were training, EMS was training, docs and nurses were training, home and security was training, we were all in silos, we weren't training together for the big day. So we brought in eight cities and towns, all the federal agencies that would show up on a bad day, and we trained. And they did eight

• 39:30Speaker 01

  hours of scenario training, and then it was a three-hour terrorist attack, 16 active shooters, full automatic SIM weapons, 150 role players. I blow up a police car when the officers go through the gate of the training scenario, and there's a guy, former Iraq vet, who's got a missing leg, and we've got a prop foot with a boot and pants that are on fire next to him. The cops think it's a real training accident, that the bomb, something happened, and they're trying to stop the training because they think they need a real ambulance, it was that realistic to them. And we're telling them, "No, train through it, train through it." The kid hits a blood pack, and now arterial blood is squirting up on the vest of the cop, right? We freaked them out. But if the first time you see a human being missing their leg is on Boylston Street, you're probably going to do whatever a human being

• 40:13Speaker 01

  does, you're going to freeze. And if you haven't trained it, and you haven't had that muscle memory to go to a tourniquet on your belt, or if you haven't put a tourniquet on your belt, that person's going to die. So we did every first responder, I think 5,000 in all, with two separate trainings prior to the marathon. So we had trained and prepared for it. But Marathon Day is, this is my seventh time as the incident commander.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  And I get out early and I do a couple of things. I walk that route. I walk that route for two reasons. One, I was a real cop at one point, like I actually did police work. And now I'm a chief and I do PowerPoints and meetings, right? But I had 834 of my cops out there that day and I get to get out and like shake the hand and thank them. Hey, great arrest last night. That kid was gonna kill someone if you hadn't stopped him. Hey, the DA called me and the judge called me. Your testimony in that child sexual assault case was phenomenal. You put that person away. The judge personally said how professional your investigation was and wanted to let me know about it. So, thank you. Hey buddy, you okay? You back okay? You know, I know you've been out injured. He's like, "Yeah, yeah, I'm getting better." Yeah, it's the third police guy. You crashed on me. You're gonna be walking a beat if you keep smashing police cars up. But I literally shake every one of those cops' hands.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  The other reason I walk that route is because I'm terrified of bombs. I don't think any law enforcement leader in America was as afraid of bombs as I was before April 15th. My dad had lung cancer and died fairly young and when he was recovering from his surgery, you know, there was a lot of stuff going on and my best friend's dad was a cop. And when I had to go get my license, Jerry took me to go get my license, right? And Jerry was, I spent more time in his basement as a kid growing up than I did in my own house. And he had a cop bar and I used to like listen to the cop stories and I wanted to be a cop like Jerry early. That's never wanted to play for the Red Sox, didn't want to catch balls with Tom Brady. I wanted to be a Boston cop.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  So, I got to do that and I graduated, like we talked, 20 years of age and I'm a young cop. And October 28th, 1991, there was a call for two officers down in Rosendale, Massachusetts. My partner and I, Bobby Pierrot, we responded to it. And when we get there, we find out that Jerry and his partner were examining a device and it went off. And they are badly injured. And Jerry was screaming.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  There's a secondary device, leave me. There's a secondary device, leave me. And no one left him. Young woman Denise tied tourniquets on his legs and stemmed the flow of blood. We get there with the ambulance. I remember when the ambulance pulls up, my wife is an emergency room nurse at the hospital at that time, and I knew like, anyone, like her docs were good. If anyone could save Jerry, it was gonna be Michelle and her nurses. And they worked for six hours. But unfortunately Jerry died in that bombing, October 28th, 9091. And I want to make sure our EOD team had all of the training, all of the support, and that they were doing things by the numbers. Because I saw what that bomb did to Jerry physically, and I saw what that bombed to the Hurley family for the time he's been

• 43:17Speaker 01

  gone, right? And I'm walking with the EOD team and saying, "Hi, is that your bag? Is that your bag? And how long's that dog been out?" You know, EOD dogs are not infallible, right? You don't just keep, "Oh, this dog's gonna smell any bomb for the next six hours." They're like pro athletes. They need water, they need rest. So we can do it and pretend we're sniffing, or we can say, "Is that, how's your dog?" Alright, let's bring in other, like, let's pay the money and make sure we get other resources and do it the right way. So that was my mentality. So as I'm walking that route, I'm checking to make sure we're doing our job. We do it. I go out one mile, I cross the street, I go back, shake everyone's cop's hand. We swept that first mile of the race two times. And we were good. On my way

• 44:00Speaker 01

  there, you know, these cops are getting younger, I'm getting older, and I forgot this kid's name, and I can't think of it, and I apologized to him, and I'm like, "Ah dude, your last name because of the letter of the alphabet?" And he's like, "It does." And I'm like, "Of course it does." And I tell him Happy Patriot's Day, and I tap him on the shoulder, and he says, "Hey boss, I just bought the house five houses up from you." I'm like, "What? I didn't even, you know, I spent too much time at work. I didn't know the house was for sale." And I'm like, "Isn't that Carol Clunin's house?" Because Carol is a cop, and we lived in a section in Boston where there was a lot of cops, firefighters, and teachers. And I'm in front of the Forum Restaurant, talking to this young cop. And I'm like, you know, "Where are you gonna send your kids to school?" "Put my kids at St. Mary's." My amen had just gotten into Harvard, so I had to brag with him that my kid could get into Harvard.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  "St. Mary's is maybe a good place to send your kid, right?" "Buffalo wings at Branley's, that's the coldest Budweiser and best buffalo wings in town." "And by the way, where are you gonna get your uniforms done?" "'Cause I go to Jimmy the Cleaner, 'cause the guy's name is Jimmy the Cleaner, he knows how to clean a cop's uniform, right?" 20 minutes I spend BSing with this kid, my new neighbor. "He's a Bud Light drinker, I'm gonna drop a case of Bud off to him when he moves in." Bud Light, when he moves in. And then I go back to doing my job and looking for threats. And I thought they'd hit us when the Hold Willows was watching those lead runners come down Boylston Street, and we were on high alert. I had, in addition to the cops assigned to the marathon that day, there were probably another 200 that were from my other units that supplemented. And we were standing on our toes, looking at the crowd. "Is that your backpack? Is that your bag?" Just like the president got out of motorcade, right?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  We're looking at hands. The winter winds, there's national anthems played, the governor, all the VIPs are leaving now. And Billy Ridge, one of my planning chiefs, looks at me and says, "Just a road race now, boss." And I said, "Yeah, you got that, Billy." And now I gotta deal with my biggest problem is drunken college kids. Goes right by all the college universities, the kids enjoy the marathon, they go up on the roofs, they fall off the roofs. My cops don't like doing alcohol enforcement. The community kills me, 'cause we're not doing alcohol enforcement. You know, I go to a power, I go to a meeting and they ask me about it. "Oh, we take alcohol enforcement very seriously." And the woman puts up a PowerPoint picture of, you know, five cops with 10 coeds, and the cops' hats are on the coeds, and they all get red solo cups.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  And it's apparent that everyone is probably drinking alcohol. And I say, "Well, I believe that's an undercover sting to find the kid with the keg, ma'am. I don't know, but we, we take it seriously." But I go out and I wanna shake all those cops' hands, too, 'cause the marathon is a mile and a half finish in Boston. We have another mile of it when it comes in by Boston College, out at Newton. And then we lose it to Brookline. So I went out to Newton, and I shook all those cops' hands, crossed the street, shook those cops' hands, thanked them, got in my truck. Actually, it's kind of important. My kids and my wife, whenever, my wife, I ran the marathon one year, and she got the bug. And she, whenever she's gone, she cheers. And she's not cheering for Cousin Austin and Daddy. He touched me out and won the marathon that year. I just, I literally saw him finish though.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  I was close enough behind him. He had a course record, but I saw him finish. Yeah, I think it was 2:14 was his time? No, I was close enough behind him that I saw when he crossed the finish line and broke the tape. Now, I was at Wellesley at the halfway point and saw him on a Jumbotron. Just two hours behind him, but I saw him cross that finish line. My wife and kids have been coming for the seven years and I didn't arrange this, but when my wife and kids show up, somehow they wind up in the front row in the VIP viewing stands, right? And my wife got a promotion. She works at Tus hospital and she couldn't go. So she said, "Take the boys with you and, you know, I'll meet you down there. I'll come down at 3. We'll get something to eat and then I'll..." She's a cowbell ringer. I'll ring the cowbell for a little bit and cheer for the runners for kids with cancer

• 47:41Speaker 01

  and Down Syndrome and all the charity runners. That's who she's cheering for. So she gone to work and I went to my then 18 and 15-year-old sons and said, "Guys, do you want to just stay home and sleep in? It's a day off from school. Or do you want to go out in the blazing sun and sit in the VIP viewing stands that your mother makes you do every year?" And they're like, "Could we please sleep in, Dad?" I'm like, "Yeah, absolutely." "What does Mom think?" And I said, "I'm the chief of the Boston Police Department. I don't need to know what Mom thinks. I can make a decision on this. I got you covered." So I let the kids sleep in that day. And I was gonna meet Michelle for dinner. I went to the other side of Fenway Park. I had to come in from the Brookline Line to Kenmore Square, probably another 200 cops' hands to shake. And then I was gonna go back, get on my uniform, meet my wife,

• 48:26Speaker 01

  and we were gonna go over a nice dinner. It was another marathon in the books. That's when I heard the Delta 984. Delta 984, Sergeant Detective Dan Keeler. Danny is a former homicide cop and a level-headed street cop, former Marine. We've had some bad days at the office together and I've never seen Danny. Not 100% in control. And Danny is screaming into his mic and I can't understand a word he's saying. And all these cops are clicking their mics and radios and everyone's cutting each other off. And I don't know what we had, but I knew we had a problem on Boylston Street. I ran, got up to Kemmo Square. One of my deputies was there, Stevie Whitman. His brother was a firefighter in an incident command post who said that there was two explosions

• 49:10Speaker 01

  at the finish line and that they thought it might be electrical, but they're not sure. And jumped in the car. I went to Channel 5, which is our slowest police channel. And I said, "Look, I don't know what I got, but I need mutual aid, anything we can get. I don't want it coming to Boylston Street." I sent the commander to the Boston Common and I had all the mutual aid go to the Common because, you know, the good news is if you get hit, like I got hit, everyone's coming. Every cop, every sheriff, every deputy, everyone's coming. The whole cavalry is coming to help you, right? You're not in this alone. The bad news is every cop, every sheriff and deputies comes, you don't control that. It could actually make your problem worse, right? So I sent any mutual aid to the Boston Common and I got out on Boylston Street.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  And Danny Keeler, who did an amazing job running that scene before I got there, came running up and said, "Boss, they hit us twice. They blew a device and as people run away, they blew a second device. They hit us twice, boss." And he stopped talking and he was looking at me because I have five stars on my shoulders and I guess somewhere it says, "I'm in charge," right? And he essentially said, "Tag, you're it, boss." And I didn't want to be it because what Danny had told me they hit us twice, boss, was the Farm Restaurant where that young cop, my new neighbor, was on duty.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  He had a leg injury, pretty bad leg injury, and was being treated out of the scene. And there was a little boy, an eight-year-old little boy, next to a young woman on the ground in front of the farm. They destroyed him. They destroyed that baby. And I've been a cop a long time. I've seen a lot of stuff. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. And along with the devastation...

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Was a wave of shame and guilt that washed over me. That I spent 20 minutes talking to that cop. And I might have missed that bag. And that that family's loss and destruction and the family of the young woman next to him. Might be my failure. And that I was supposed to keep him safe that day. And then I might have failed. And I'm a pretty action oriented guy. And I hear somebody scream secondary device and I'd heard that once before in my life. And that was a horrible experience. And I froze. I'm, you know, I'm United States Marine, I'm a cop, I'm the chief. I froze. I want to go home, I want to go home to my kids. I'm looking at backpacks all around me and I'm waiting for a bright light to come out

• 51:54Speaker 01

  and just to, to die. And, um. She appeared. This woman was on the sidewalk and, and her leg was jammed up, she was bleeding. And I've been doing first aid since I was a Cub Scout, right? So I, I grabbed the napkin off one of the restaurant tables, I bent down and like, ma'am, I got you, I got your leg. And I lifted her leg up and I was telling her how I had a leg and how I was lifting her leg to keep her from going into shock. And I put that napkin around it and medic, fire. And a medic and a firefighter came and they're like, chief, we got her. And they, they wrapped the pressure dressing, like an actual pressure dressing on it, the way you're supposed to. And I was holding on to her foot and I wouldn't let it go. And they're like, chief, we got it. And I'm like, no, I know how to do this. I don't know how to do that. So I'm going to stay here and do this.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  And a Massachusetts state trooper, a Massachusetts state trooper came over to me and grabbed me by my jacket and pulled my jacket and said, chief, I, I need you in the middle of the street, chief, I need you in the middle of the street. You know, there's some tension sometimes between us and the troopers. Shut the fuck off of me. And he said, Danny, I'm just, and I said, Mark, I know what you're just, Mark, give me one second, Mark, give me one goddamn second, Mark.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  It popped. I didn't even know what the hell I was doing. I just took three deep cleansing breaths. I shook that tension out of my body that I was pissed about. And it popped. My file cabinet popped. All the all the training I had done to prepare for Urban Shield was there. Every crime scene I ever worked was there. Every leader, the Joe Dunfords of the world that I saw as great leaders, those lessons were there. Every idiot that I said, "I'm gonna study and be a boss," because they're never listening to that person tell me what to do again. It was all there, right? I just had to open it. So my file cabinet opened, and I was pissed. I I wasn't pissed at Mark Hogan, who's a lieutenant in the Mass Ave Police, who's a buddy of mine, for telling me to be the boss and knock it off. I was pissed at myself for having to be reminded.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  And I just started pulling through files. And I said, "Okay, assess your situation." Shitty. Define it. "Okay, it looks like someone's dead. That's a murder. We usually have detectives do detective stuff when that happens. You should probably have your detectives do detective stuff." This is the self-talk that's going in my head. And I see Kevin Buckley, my investigative superintendent, and I say, "Buck, get an investigative command post up here at Ring Road and Huntington. I want Huntington to Newbury Street. I want Mass Ave to Arlington. Shut it down. Lock this scene. Stop pulling video. Go." I don't have to tell Kevin Buckley how to do an investigation. I just had to tell him it was okay. "Buck, go do your job," right? He knows

• 54:35Speaker 01

  how to do his job. I just had to give him the mission. One of my deputies, Colm Lyden, come running up to me, "Chief, no ambulances. We got no ambulances. I have all kinds of people. I need ambulances." We had learned in Urban Shield that we weren't gonna have enough ambulances if we ever had a mass casualty event, and we were gonna have to use police cars. And I said, "Colm, we got 10 wagons in this plan. I want those wagons down here right now. You put three patients in the back of each wagon with a medic. Get them off this goddamn street." Colm gets that plan in place, gets the wagons down. We transported 33 people in wagons, three people in police pickup trucks. They were in the tent, being treated by a doctor, in the medical tent, an ER or an OR, within 22 minutes. Everyone who left that scene alive is alive today, with the

• 55:17Speaker 01

  exception of one young woman who survived the marathon and then died in a tragic car crash. We had planned it, we trained it, we executed it. And, you know, it was police, fire, EMS, medical, the whole, the whole system was ready for it because we all trained together for that bad day. I then realized that I had gone through some training at NPLI and I had spoken, I remember an Israeli military official who talked about in crisis, there are 5,000 things you gotta do, but you need to focus on the five most important right now. Like, what are the five things you need to do right now, right this minute? And, you know, if you screw it up, fine, you screw it up, you change them going forward. But more important than what you tell your team to do with the five priorities is the

• 56:02Speaker 01

  manner and method in which you tell them to do it. And that if you've got a lectern and you're gonna make a presentation in front of the team, you better have that uniform squared away and those boots shined, and you better look like you're in command and control of that and convey that somebody up there is in charge and you're quarterback in this plan. And if you don't have that and you got a radio and that everyone in the region is gonna listen to that radio transmission and that's how you're gonna get your message out, you better write that script in your head and be the calmest and coolest you ever were when you hit that mic. So that's what I tried to do. I said, "Yankee Charlie 2, we're gonna treat and triage these victims here. We will then set up incident command at the firehouse. We know that's a secure location.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  We will then conduct a sweep with EOD assets to make sure there are no other bombs out here. We will then evacuate people out of the restaurants and bars once we know there's no more devices on the street. And I need somebody up there to get on social media and tell the world what we're doing here." So that's what I asked my team to do. They crushed it. And, you know, a tragedy and a loss of lives was horrible. But because we trained, because we prepared, because leaders lower down the children pole than me, sergeant detectives, officers, who stepped up in the moment and just, they didn't need someone to tell them, "Hey, go in that crowd and tie your tourniquet," they just went and did it. And, you know, there's a lot of people alive today because of the efforts of those cops,

• 57:29Speaker 01

  those firefighters, those medics, and our citizens.

• 57:31Fran Racioppi?

  And that was just the beginning.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:34Fran Racioppi?

  Because from there, you talked about, now you have an investigation and you have suspects on the loose.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 57:42Fran Racioppi?

  So how do you now transition and start to move from crisis response, incident management into deliberate investigative activity?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  You're taking it one at a time, right? So we realized, hey, we gotta, we gotta get incident command. And I originally said incident command was going to be at the firehouse, but I didn't trust them. So I had an EOD dog there and I said, hey, I'm setting up incident command at the firehouse. Go check it out. I want to make sure it's safe. And that young cop came back with his dog and said, chief, the package, device, front door of the firehouse. And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. It's Mumbai. Like, they knew. In our urban shield training, one of my evil geniuses. And that training wasn't bosses. That was frontline cops, operators in SWAT and K9 and FIRE, who came up with the scenarios to test what they thought they needed to be tested on.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  And one of the, we were going along and he says, hey, I put a device in the incident command truck. I'm gonna blow it. We'll kill the incident command team and then someone else will have to take over. What do you think of that? And I said, that's genius, right? Like, would the bad guys ever think of, you know, taking out the vehicle that says, all senior leadership will gather in this vehicle? And I'm like, wow, that's, that's amazing. You know what? We're not gonna do it this year. Next year, you get to kill the incident command team. We're not gonna do it this year. You know, also I had IED, check his incident search history, see if he'd gone a little too far to the other side. Just kidding, he's a great kid. So they, there was a device found at the, at the firehouse. And I'm like, God, you gotta be kidding me. We had a suspect. We started running that information down. There was a report of an explosion over at the John F. Caden Library.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Initially, it was confirmed that that was another IED that went off there that later turned into, maybe it was a Molotov cocktail that was thrown there. It later turned into, maybe the janitor put a cigarette out in a barrel and caught a fire over there. So all kinds of intel that was coming in and, you know, as people were telling me things, I said, how do we know that? Who saw it? Well, Jones saw it. Get Jones in here. I want to talk to Jones. And then you talk to Jones. He's like, not me. It was Sully. And I'm like, well, get Sullivan in here. And then I'm talking to Sully. He's like, not me. It was Joycey. And I'm like, get Joycey in here. Cause you have to actually verify it, right? You, you know, information's coming fast and furious and people want to tell you what they think. And I, I want to believe it, right? We had an initial Saudi Arabian national suspect who had shrapnel wounds, seen fleeing from the scene and discarding his phone.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  That's a pretty good lead, right? I like this guy a lot. We assign investigators to... What's... Probably should talk about the elephant in the room with the FBI, right? Is there any FBI?

• 1:00:16Fran Racioppi?

  Well, you said everybody's coming. I mean, everybody's coming to help, right?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Is...

• 1:00:19Fran Racioppi?

  So, how do you handle it?

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, do the FBI agents watch your podcast?

• 1:00:23Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah, everybody watches.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, we, um... Technically, uh, the FBI is in charge of a terrorist attack in the United States of America, even in the city of Boston. Those are my cops who are bleeding. I watched that little boy. And I might have failed that little boy and his family. So, um, there's no way they're gonna be in charge of this investigation without us, right? And, um, we had an initial conversation when the FBI lead came. And, you know, I wanted to set the tone with him, exactly how this conversation was gonna go. And you don't know me well, but you make it a sense for how I lead. And I looked into his soul and I said two words. "Hey, Brad." And he said, "Hey, Danny. What do you need and what do you got?"

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  So, I don't care what his guard said, that he was, you know, supervisor, special agent in charge of joint terrorism task force, that's impressive. What was impressive to me is he's Brad Davis. And he was embedded in my narcotic squad when we were banging doors as drug cops back in the day. I respected Brad, he respected me. And I'm like, "Brad, I need everything you can give me." You know, he's like, "You got it. It's coming." So, there was no FBI were in charge. But we decided to do is to have a Boston police officer, a trooper, and a FBI agent follow up on every tip and lead. That way, the feds were fully plugged in, we were fully plugged in, and we were all sharing information, and we were working together. So, that's kinda where I think Eric and the work in meta-leadership and swarm intelligence

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  comes from, because we truly were skating in each other's lanes and with each other pretty seamlessly. And it was, you know, you go to conferences and people say, "Oh, before the crisis, you need to, you know, exchange business cards." Well, I know a bunch of guys who the top right draw, there's a bunch of business cards. They don't know who those cards are from, why they ever took it. They never called them back, they don't know those people. It's not about business cards. It's about, before the bad day, sitting down, having a beer, having a coffee. "Hey, what are you guys thinking? What are you doing? What equipment are you working with? How would you deal with this problem? What are you dealing with?" And getting to know people, so that when they show up, it's not a face and a business card, it's somebody that I've actually covered their six and they've covered my six. And we're gonna just work together and get the job done. So, that's... That was some of the magic we had, and we started running that.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  And... In the command center, so you gotta lead your family before you lead the crisis, right? And I might have told you that I had left my 18 and 15-year-old kids sleeping at the house, contrary to the thoughts and plans of my wife, who thought they were with me at the marathon finish line. My wife's a nurse, and when we had an initial suspect, they told me he was going to Tufts. And I realized, I have yet to effectively communicate to my wife that my kids are not here. And I've consulted with some subject matter experts on this, and apparently, mothers who've been able to evaluate my efforts that day are critical in what I did, and find failure

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  in my lack of communication. And I realized, oh shit, I didn't tell Michelle about the kids. My youngest, Colm, texted me, "Dad, are you okay?" And I'm like, "Oh, God, thank Christ." Because I didn't have time to make the calls, right? We literally, I have hundreds of bags around me, any one of them could have went off any minute. We're trying to figure out what we've got and how we're doing this. So I'm like, "Colm, I'm okay. Call Mom, let her know we're all safe." Right? So at least I had gotten that message out. We, you know, I didn't have to deal with that, right? Because if my wife ever heard of a terrorist bombing at the marathon, and her kids were there, and she didn't know that they weren't there, that's going to be a problem that I'm going to have to deal with. So thankfully, I didn't have to deal with that problem. We didn't go to the firehouse because there was a bomb there. We went to the hotel instead, and just started incident command was, "I need tables, I need..."

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  My cellphone was running out. We didn't have mophies at the time, wasn't a thing. And we just, "Hey, this table is investigation, this table is bombs, this table is crime scene, this table is this." I had to get up and scream at people, "Shut up." I named people who were going to be the commanders at the table, whether it was an FBI agent, or a Boston police leader, or a trooper. As you said, they're in charge. They're going to tap you, tell you to sit at that table. If they don't tap you, get the hell out across the hall. We can't hear ourselves thinking here, we've got plenty of shit to do, but we've got to get some order in here. And we kind of threw them out and put security on the door. We're chasing all kinds of bad information down. Frust, you know, I'm trying to figure out how many of my cops are at hospitals. Yeah. Hipper, I'm calling, saying, "Do you have a police..." "We can't release information to you on the phone." I'm like, "Are you kidding me?

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Like, Hipper should be thrown out the window for this, right? Just because..." I had families who were trying to find family members, and, you know, we were trying to work with public health, so we had to work with public health to get that. We had to shut the race down. 8,000 runners. Have you ever run a marathon? No. Did I tell you about the time I was one? Yeah, no, I was two hours behind him.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Usually people go to the start of the marathon and they put their cellphone and their keys and the keys to their car and their hotel key and their sweatpants and their water bottles in a bag with a number on it and they put them in a truck and the truck takes them where? To the finish. Finish line, yeah. So now I'm looking for any bags that could possibly go bang and everyone's bag is at the finish line. We have to stop the race. Those runners are tired, dehydrated, they don't have dry clothes. They're not leaving because they want to meet their family. The family's not leaving because they want to find their runner. They now know there's been explosions at the finish line and they're worried, is my family hurt? Oh, by the way, our cellphone system melted. Couldn't text, couldn't get calls, nothing, just melted. For like four and a half hours, the cellphones didn't work in Boston.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  Wasn't something we did. People thought we did it for, you know, electric countermeasures. We didn't. It's just, it's like 9/11, just overwhelmed it. And so people couldn't communicate. So we had to set up shelters for people, food, get them clothing, all things that have nothing to do with the marathon, nothing to do with police response to a crime scene, but stuff we just had to throw our minds into and, you know, we were just dealing with crisis for crisis for crisis.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  It was, I think it was like 10:30, 11 o'clock Congressman Steve Lynch called me.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  He's a Congressman, good guy, and he was good friends with the father of the little boy and he was with him at the emergency room. Father was hurt, his wife. Part of our effort to get people to the hospital so effectively was we triaged what the injury was and we were putting people where they had to go. Unfortunately, that meant that Denise Richards was at one hospital, they were trying to save her eye. Her husband was at a second hospital, he had a pretty significant leg injury. His oldest son was with him, he was cinched but not physically harmed besides being traumatized and I think his ears were hurting him. Their daughter's leg was severed at the scene and an off-duty firefighter used his personal belt to tie a tourniquet on it and that seven-year-old little girl was fighting

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  for her life in Children's Hospital by herself. And because of the rules of law in Massachusetts, once Martin and Lindsey Lou were declared deceased, we couldn't move their bodies. The only one who can remove that body is the medical examiner. And obviously, the medical examiner can't get in there until we've made sure there's no other bombs. And then we have to document evidence that's there. It's a long process on a slow day. It was taking a long, long time. And I was very aware and very much wanted to get, you know, Martin and Lindsey Lou off that street. Mr. Richards found out that his son was still on Boylston Street and was not happy, rightfully so. And the congressman was telling me that he just signed himself

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  out against medical advice, and that he is headed over to see Denise, who was apparently coming out of her operation and in recovery. And that he told the congressman after he sees Denise, he's going to get his son's body. I explained to Stevie what we were doing and why. And he said, Danny, I know what you're doing. I know why you're doing it. I'm just letting you know. He's very upset. So I had ordered all the cops out of that scene, except for our EOD teams to sweep for bombs and the FBI EOD. I called the commander, who was in charge of security on that end of the scene, and said, hey, Frank, we got a problem. You know, the father is very upset. I'm told he's headed over to the hospital

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  to see his wife. And he's possibly coming your way. Two things are not going to happen, right? One, we can't let him get in that scene. And two, no cop is going to arrest him, should he show up and try and get in that scene. Because I've been to unfortunate events where family members come into a crime scene, and they want to see their loved one who's a victim of a homicide or a horrible crime. And they push and shove. And, you know, now you have a cop arrested in the NANA for, you know, AM being a PO when they're they've lost a loved one. That's never good. And I could just imagine that that happened here. And I want to make sure that didn't happen. And Frank Armstrong told me he disobeyed my direct order. You want to be a leader lead, right? He disobeyed my direct order.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  He and four men decided that they weren't going to leave, and that instead, they were going to perform an honor guard over Lindsey Lou and Martin Richards. They covered the body with tablecloths from the restaurant, and two at a time, they stood half hour tours, left and right of the two young kids. Had attention. He said, "I don't know if it'll help, but can you tell the dad, we didn't leave? We're going to take these kids home. I'm not leaving these kids on this street alone." So, I got that information to Father Sean, who's our chaplain. He happens to be the family's parish priest. He was at Denise Richards' hospital recovery room, and he saw Bill when he came in. And he said, "Bill, I know you're upset.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  I've just spoken to Captain Armstrong. This is what's going on down there. They're going to stay with him. They're going to take him home." And he went into her recovery room, and the first words out of her mouth when she woke up is, "Where is my baby?" And I think initially, he thought maybe she was confused and didn't realize the extent of Martin's injuries. And I believe he, something to the effect of, you know, Denise Martin's gone. And she said, "I know Martin's gone. Where's my baby now?" And he looked at Father Sean and said, "There were..." The word had got back that there were Marines who were doing it. That there were Marines and police officers, because two of the cops were Marines, who were guarding him and going to take him home.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  And she reached out and grabbed his hand and said, "I told him before I left, I wouldn't leave him alone. I just don't want him alone on that street." So, I'm going in my house, probably 2:30 in the morning, after we kind of exchanged commands, and...

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  I'm walking up the steps and my wife and two beautiful kids come over and give me a hug. And my oldest hugged me so hard, he actually hurt my ribs a little bit and um, I'm, I'm not the chief, right? So I, I was in the command center, I was thinking five steps ahead and playing chess, right? I'm ready for tomorrow and, but I was bawling the entire way home, thinking of failing that family and causing that destruction because I missed that bag. And I'm trying to explain that to my wife that I, I might have failed and I might have missed it. And she's telling me, "It's okay, it's okay." And I'm like, "No, you don't understand and I, I, you know, he's a little boy. I, I, I might have, I might have missed it."

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  And she's like, "No, I love you. I love you. It's okay. It's okay." And she was hugging me and kissing me and telling me how much she loved me. And then she said, "I love you. I love you, goddammit. But goddammit, why? Why didn't you tell me the boys weren't with you? Why?" And I went, "I, I, I texted Cullum and I told Cullum to tell you. Cullum, why didn't you tell your mother? Why didn't you?" He's like, "Dad, you never texted me." And I'm like, "Yes, I did. You little son of a bitch." And I took the phone out and I'm like, "Right here. Call mom, tell her we're okay. Did you see that? Did you see that text? Did you see the goddamn red exclamation point where the fucking text never went out?"

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  The text never went out. Our cell system had melted. I didn't know it. I thought I was covered. My poor wife was in surgery with a patient when she was told there's a bombing at the marathon finish line and her two kids were sitting in the front row, right? She does what cops' wives do. She tells her nurse friend that's outside the operating procedure, "Go to my phone, hit ICE. See what Danny needs me to do." Danny isn't picking up. Danny's not getting texts. Call Aiman. Aiman's not picking up. Call Cullum. He's not picking up. For four hours while she's dealing with a critically ill patient, she was putting an ICD, maternal defibrillator device in the, in the person's heart with some doctors. She didn't know where her kids were.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  And finally, found out where her kids were, that they had stayed home. So, what I thought I had done to not get in trouble, I am still paying for this date, because I didn't effectively communicate, and, you know, I blew that one, big time. I went home, lied down upstairs, cried, decided, "I'm not going to sleep, what am I trying to do?" So I, instead, got a uniform on, went back, started, you know, just showing at the scene, thanking people, telling them to, you know, "Hang in there, I need everything you got, we're gonna get these guys," and trying to motivate the cops, the National Guardsmen, and the agents that were there working the scene, and, you know, we still

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  have a city to run, right? Crime's still, crime's still crime, and we're dealing with that, but, pretty actively working with the agents, and running down information here, there, and everywhere, and making sure we got resources, and, at some point, I get a call, that they need me in the command center, at 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning, and I see the video of White Hat putting the bag down. It was there for six minutes. It shouldn't matter, the instruction was the same, I didn't miss it. However, for me personally, not missing it was something I needed, to kinda know that I didn't fail that family. I made a vow to my wife and kids that night, we were gonna go wherever we had to go, and do whatever

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  we had to do, we were gonna find them, we were gonna get them, and I made a vow to my cops, that morning, that we were gonna do that, too. And, the good news now is that, you know, we're exhausted, we're overwhelmed, we're hunting these guys, everyone is working 16, 18-hour shifts, and the President of the United States decides to come, and that takes very little resources, to protect the President in five locations, when he's going to five hospitals, and, you know, we are crushed, and...

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  One of my leadership things, I call it peerage. So, you know, your buddy's in a crisis and you can go over and just, you know, hand him coffee, or hand her tea, or, you know, give advice and guidance that's maybe outside their chain of command and outside their sphere of influence and just be that calming voice that you should do that. So I was getting a lot of text messages from my colleagues in the National Academy, police chiefs that I've dealt with, "Hey, you know, have you thought of this? You know, make sure you're getting some sleep, make sure you're, you know, you're taking care of this, well, you know, watch your stress levels, you know, you look good on TV, you should, you know, have you thought of this?" And it was great, one guy, Air Force guy, Colonel in the United States Air Force. "Danny, thoughts and prayers, and do you let me know." Colonel Tom Minor.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  So, President's coming, my EOD dogs, there were no other bombs on Boylston Street, our dogs were compromised, so they were hitting and alerting on all kinds of things that didn't exist. There was a bag under the grandstands that we x-rayed, there was a bunch of batteries, a bunch of cylindrical tubes, bunch of wires, picture-perfect device, we hit it with a water cannon, and the AP photographer will probably never leave his camera lenses around like that, and probably cost them $100,000 in equipment. There was no other devices that day, there were other devices later in the week, but we were just dealing with all kinds of crazy stuff, and I said, "Tommy, President's coming, any chance, you know, my guys are spent, our dogs are spent, any chance you can get

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  me some EOD support, some dogs and some handlers to come help me?" I know we have some Air Force personnel in the studio today. I got a text message from Colonel Tom Minor of the US Air Force who said, "Dan, it's a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act for the US Air Force to support local law enforcement." Yeah, up, up and away, I'm sure you're pretty proud of your Air Force guys there, right? Now I'm a Marine, he's Army, tween, if we did the service, the two of us probably couldn't spell Posse Comitatus, but that's what I got, Posse Comitatus, we can't support local law enforcement, because that's a procedure in the military, right? Military has lots of procedures, right? And procedures are good, except in crisis, you don't need a procedure, you need a solution.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  And the next text that came 15 seconds later was, however, there are 50 dogs and 50 handlers leaving five air bases. They'll be on post at 04 tomorrow morning for the protective mission of the commander in chief of the armed forces, President Barack Obama. Semper Fi, brother, you go get these MFers. So Tom Miner had a solution for me that went around the procedure, pass it to me, right? And they actually deployed. I actually told that story at a conference and the head of Mima, who oversees the emergency management, the National Guard from Massachusetts, says, well, that answers the mystery because I said to the general for the National Guard, did you order active duty air force? And he said, no. And he said, how the hell are they here? Like, don't we have to order? Like, hasn't he? He's like, someone did. I don't

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  know what they're here. So Dan Linsky from the Boston Police deployed the air force to Marathon. So that was the solution, right? And that's, you know, you want to be a leader? Lead. Hey, look, I need dogs, right? And Tommy, help me get dogs. And if he could, he would have got on a plane and probably stood up post if we needed them to. So President comes to town. I now know what white hat and black hat look like. We haven't released the pictures yet. A lot of people don't know this, but we had suspects at MIT that we were looking at. And we had an entire FBI surveillance team over there along with a bunch of Boston cops. And while we were looking at these subjects and ruling them in or ruling them out, the terrorists, the bombers. So they went to MIT and murdered

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Sean. And that led to a carjacking and a car chase and, you know, another wild night. I think 1,500 cops came with me from the city of Boston. The entire Watertown Police Department fired their guns. The police chief is trying to get 9/11, you know, notices to people to shelter in place. And he's got, all of his cops have fired. He's trying to figure out how to deal with that. Cops are running around crazy. It's like the Benny Hill show and no one's in charge. You want to be a leader, lead. So I'll just explain jurisdiction. I'm the Boston police chief, so I have full jurisdiction of the city of Boston. Walpole, Watertown is in another county. So there, my jurisdiction is, I guess it's a Latin term for nil or

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  none. But I watched them kill a baby on my street, right? Someone had to get these guys. And I wasn't gonna let confusion stand in the way of our mission. So I started screaming and yelling at cops who didn't work for me. And thankfully, a reporter had posted on Twitter that Chief Linsky's unseen. He's in charge. So that's all I needed, I guess. And maybe, I think the police chief might have asked for mutual aid, which made everything I did legal then. So we got a bunch of cops running around, and it is mass confusion. I go to the police chief in Watertown, and I say, hey, listen, I have a plan. How about we divide this up into five, you know, different sectors? We'll search it with the five SWAT teams we have. We'll put a big ring around this guy. And we're gonna go house to house.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  And, you know, if we find him, great. And if we don't find him, we just keep bringing that net in, right? And we'll go from where he was. So we're doing that. By the way, I missed the part of the gun battle with the elder brother. So one of my cops is a Marine. I hear him on the radio, and he's screaming that he's in a gun battle with these guys, and explosions are going off. They deployed five bombs, three of which exploded, two that did not explode. And then we get a cop shot. And Ricky's begging for help, to get this cop some help. And I'm on the radio saying, Rick, I need to know where you are. I need to know where you are. Tell me where you are. And he finally, the dispatcher tells us. And I run down the street, and I see Moriarty with two state

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  troopers, a state trooper, two Harvard cops, and another Boston cop, trying to treat the transit cop that shot. And there's nothing I could do to help him, right? I knew that they either had it, or they didn't have it. But over to my left... Was, um, Tamlin's and I have, and he had, um, just been shot by Jeff Puglisi, and he'd been run over by his brother. He is still, he's handcuffed, but he's still fighting them. And he is, um, he's a big kid. He's, he's a tough kid. I was pretty convinced that he had a suicide vest on, and I know he remote detonated the bombs on us on Marathon Day, so as Puglisi and Jared Giraud, one of my gang guys, are trying to cuff him up, I run over and say, you know, let's strip him. I want to see what he's got on him.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  And I'm looking for a cellphone. I'm looking for a dead man's switch. I'm looking for, uh, you know, a vest on his, on his body. And I drilled my Glock into his temple, and I had a solution. If I saw any of those, I was gonna kill him. And, um, he didn't have anything in his with. So I holstered my gun and got on a radio and called for an ambulance, and we did first aid on a terrorist who murdered a little boy and two beautiful women, named 259, and my citizen just murdered a cop and tried to kill a bunch of other guys and with bombs and guns. I, uh, did look into his face when we loaded him into the ambulance. I told him he was gonna burn in hell for what he did to Martin. I'm pretty confident my prediction's coming

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  true now. And he went on his way. Uh, that's how we identified him at the hospital. We rolled his thumbprint. He died pretty quickly thereafter. And now we're hunting his brother. And it was just mass confusion. And that's when I said to the chief of Watertown, "Hey, how about if we do this?" And how about, I went to the SAC of the FBI and I went to my commissioner and said, "Hey, how about this plan?" And they're like, "Yep, sounds good." I said, "Is it okay if I take it?" They said, "Go ahead." So I, you know, I just channeled George Bush, I don't know why, because it was all kinds of cops. And there was a megaphone there. And I go, "I got this." And I grabbed the megaphone, jumped on the hood of a cruiser. And I said, "This is what we're doing. You're doing this, you're doing that, you're doing this, you're doing that, you're doing this, you're doing that. Go."

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  And, uh, we started hunting and hunting and hunting and hunted all day. All kinds of fake calls coming in, you know, reports of this, reports of that, reports of the other thing. At one point... I knew I hadn't communicated effectively with my wife on Marathon Day, but I wanted to, I knew she probably was seeing this stuff on CNN, and I wanted to, you know, let her know I was safe. So I called her, and I said, babe, I got one of them. I got one more to go. But I'm not doing my usual shit. I'm not, I'm not in the Bearcat with, with the team. I'm actually in an incident command post. And I go, babe, there are literally a hundred men with rifles protecting me. I have a ring of security around me. I am protected. And she goes, oh, okay, good. You have a hundred men with rifles protecting you? That's great. How come you have a hundred men with rifles protecting you? And my nephew

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Jamie, so her nephew Jamie is one of my SWAT operators. And as I was talking about the protection I had, CNN was showing a Boston Police SWAT team going into a house that there was a report of a LaRocca found in the basement and footsteps in the attic. And I knew about that call, and I dispatched the SWAT team to it to take the call. And I look up, and there's my nephew Jamie leading the team into the house. And I go, oh, shit, I just not gonna communicate effectively with this poor woman this week. So I said, cuz he's well trained, well equipped, and I gotta go. Bye. Click. Jamie's a good SWAT operator, really good kid. He's also a good dad. Tried to spend some time with his kids, you know, coaching. He coaches baseball. We, you know, like assistant coaches a lot, too, cuz he's got a tough schedule. But, um, his kids played baseball with Martin

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  Richards. His kids went to school with Martin. So he knew the family. So he had a personal stake in finding this guy, too. So at some point, we need to get resources to, uh, UMass Dartmouth. We get some intel that he might have gotten out, and that he's possibly in an apartment down there. And I gotta get some resources there pretty quick. It's pretty far down from where we were. I remember the commissioner, now we're talking, the general from National Guard said, um, do you want a Blackhawk? And we said, has anyone ever said no to the question, do you want a Blackhawk?

• 1:24:51Fran Racioppi?

  The answer's always yes.

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  No? He said, how many, you know, we said, how many you got? He said, as many as you want. So we flew some equipment down there that we needed. And then we flew a state police SWAT team, a Boston Police SWAT team, an HRT had just taken off from Quantico. It was gonna start, it was gonna finish the way it started, right? Boston, FBI, and state, kept the whole thing, right? I could only send one SWAT, SWAT team. So I sent Jamie's cuz I wanted, if anyone on the team kicked the door, and I wanted Jamie to put eyes on that guy. So, um, with that, I hadn't slept all but maybe...

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  Forty-five or fifty minutes, a little bit, on Thursday night, when I got woken up about the murdered police officer over at MIT. And I was not in a good position. I'm, you know, we're making decisions to land helicopters in a mall without a lot of preparation, and there's some challenges with that. And someone snapped the picture of me, basically, kind of like, almost asleep at the switch with my eyes open, but definitely... And Ed Davis, my boss, came over and tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Hey Danny, I think I gotta ask you to step down. I think you're exhausted." And I knew he was right, and, you know, I said, "Yep, boss, I think you're right. I got it. I'm gonna, I'll call somebody, I'll get somebody else in here."

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  And I knew my nephew was on his way down in a Blackhawk to run a tac ops and bang a door, so I could run that from my cellphone on my couch. I didn't need to be in the command center for that. And I came out of the command post, I fell down the stairs, was having a hard time walking, and Eddie Kelly, who's the president of the firefighters' union, at the time he's the president of firefighters for Mass., but he's now the international president, is a buddy of mine.

• 1:26:34Fran Racioppi?

  Greg Kelly's brother.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Greg Kelly's brother.

• 1:26:36Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah, friend of the Jedburgh Podcast.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 1:26:39Fran Racioppi?

  And all SOF and firefighters.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, Greg Kelly's rescue truck is probably better trained than, you know, half-hour SWAT teams in America.

• 1:26:48Fran Racioppi?

  Episode seventy-five.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  They'd come with their pickup trucks off-duty and their grills, and were cooking hot dogs and burgers and sausages and feeding the troops, right? Because we shut down the city, nothing was open, there was no food, no restaurants, nothing. And those guys, he said, "Danny, you okay?" I said, "No, Eddie, I'm being relieved of duty." He said, "You're not driving, are you?" And I said, "No." And I threw Eddie Kelly the keys to my police car, and I said, "You are." And Eddie Kelly drove me home, and I allowed him to turn the blue lights on, and he got to live every firefighter's dream and drive a police car. We got home, and he literally helped me up the steps.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  Got in, he dumped me on the couch. Michelle was there. She said, "Are you okay?" I said, "Yeah, you know, I'm relieved of duty, but I'm okay. We think he's in New Bedford or down U.S. Dartmouth. We just landed some birds at New Bedford. We're gonna get them." And she says, "Where's Jamie?" And I didn't want to tell her their nephew was gonna lead my SWAT team in that operation. So I said, "He's in Watertown." I didn't want to have any more communication issues on that day because it had been bad. And then Jamie said something on the goddamn tac op mic and I, you know, I had on speaker and she goes, "That sounds like Jamie." I go, "Michelle, it's a SWAT guy in a helmet. They all sound the same, right?" And they do their thing and they say, "Hey, we got three subjects in this residence." And I'm like, "Oh, thank you. We got them. We got them."

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  And about 10 minutes later, like, "Yep, target not in residence. Repeat, target not in residence." And I'm like, "This kid's a 19-year-old punk. I have every cop in the goddamn region. I had cops from Chicago, cops from New York, cops from Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, every federal agency that was, you know, at our disposal, and this kid's just beaten us." And I was like devastated. So we're pulling out of Watertown and the call comes in for, you know, a lot of the cops had left, but some of my guys were still there, still searching because they hadn't done all their houses and they weren't gonna leave until they did it, right? So they get a radio call. They go to 57 Franklin Street. One of the homeowners saw a guy in his boat, reported, you know, "Hey, see something, say something. If you've

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  been chasing a terrorist all day and you find a guy bleeding in your boat, you should probably call the police." He did. We get there, we find him, you know, we run an impression he had an M4 and we knew he had prior explosives. We got his vehicle with an IED in the vehicle. It looked like a V-bed when we first got it. So we were expecting the boat to maybe, maybe go. And Billy Evans called for one tactical unit and asked everyone else to hold their position. And we're, you know, paramilitary organization in Massachusetts, very well-trained, and all the cops... circled the boat and what we believe happened was Zainiaf was sticking the boat hook through the plastic so he could see what was going on around him to poke a hole in it. Someone obviously saw that as potentially a rifle being poked through. We don't know who that

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  was because they fired a round and then everyone fired rounds and there was kind of a circular ambush at the boat. I don't know how. We didn't shoot each other. He was shot or injured before he went in the boat. We know that. I think he got injured again in the boat. No police officers were shot. One did require several stitches on his Coolies Maximus that the report somebody wrote was from a flying rock, I guess, because a bullet would have been like a 26 page report. A flying rock's like a one pager. So he got a flying rock that caused stitches. Billy called me and he's like, I hope it's him. I don't know if it's a homeless guy. The cops are shooting. So I grabbed my radio and I said Yankee Charlie

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  2, do I have a Tango Sierra unit on location in 57 Franklin? And Tango Sierra is my tactical snipers. And I wanted one of my tactical snipers to answer that call. I didn't want someone else's sniper. I wanted one of mine. Because if you're one of our snipers and you need to take a shot, you're going to take a shot and you're probably going to effectively deliver that shot. More importantly, if you're one of my snipers and you don't need to take a shot, you're not going to take that shot. So yeah, Tango Sierra 301, I'm up and running the second deck. I have the superintendent six. And I'm like, all right, Yankee Charlie 2, I don't need anyone else hurt here. Relieve yourself in that scene. If you're not tactical, relieve yourself in that scene. And they backed up. Billy was running it. HRT come

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  up. I flash banged him and finally got him to come out of the boat. And I don't know if you saw it. Did you see when the cops were coming back into town and the kids were out with American flags? And yeah, that was a great thing to see, wasn't it? I wish I saw it. I didn't see it. I fell asleep. I was waiting for them to get him out of the boat. And now I wake up at like 4 o'clock in the morning. My TV's off. I'm on my couch. I was in the biggest case in my entire life, like, a couple hours ago, and what the hell happened? I start screaming, "Michelle, Jesus Christ, Michelle, what'd you do? What'd you..." She's like, "It's okay, it's okay." "It's not okay, my God, you have a chief of police, you can't let me go to sleep." "Biggest freaking case in my entire career." She's like, "You didn't go to sleep? You haven't slept in a week?

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  You're unconscious. Look at your phone. The governor called you, the mayor called you, Murph called you, like, everyone in your brother's called you. Amen put cold compresses on you. I gave you a finger stick because you haven't taken your medicine, and I don't know what you were. You just collapsed, you had nothing else to give. You weren't sleeping, you were out. We got him? You got him. Cops okay? Cops are okay, except for the guy who got, you know, the flying rock, right? So I went over and I put out a tweet, sent the fideleus, "We got him for Martin," and I called the Secret Service agent, Rob Buster, who ran the president's team, he was a friend of mine, he used to be the ASAC in Boston, and I said, "Hey," told the president I was gonna make this call, but can you tell him we got him? He's like, "Yeah, he's aware."

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  I'm like, "I get it, I fell asleep, I owe him one, but I let Rob know that we got him." He was gonna make sure the president told him I called, and I went down the scene, and I shook every cop and every agent's hand, and I said two words to him: "Thank you." And at 11 o'clock that day, I met with the family of Martin Richards. They were all in one room now, and I went in with Police Commissioner Ed Davis, and I said, "My name is Dan Linsky, I'm the chief of the Boston Police Department." He said, "I know who you are, you're nephew Jamie, you know, coaches my kid." And I said, "Yep. I can't understand the horror that came your way, I can't understand, you know, why this

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  happened, but I made a promise to my wife and kids when this happened, I made a promise to my cops when this happened, and I'm here to tell you, I made a promise to the President of the United States. Mr. Richards, the men who did this to your family will hurt no one ever again, I can guarantee you that." I cried with that family for, like, 45 minutes an hour, one of the most transformative moments of my life, and then... You know, I had to go back out and put the mask back on, right? Because I'm running an organization. I'm not going to the Super Bowl. I'm not going to Disney because I won the Super Bowl, right? We still have police work to do. We got an investigation to do. Who else was involved with this guy? You know, can we prove it? How do I help my cops who saw things they should never have seen, right? Who are going to be dealing with this for the rest of their lives?

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  And I don't want my cops to wind up like some of the first responders in scenes like Oklahoma City and elsewhere, where the horror overwhelmed them and then, you know, self-harm started creeping into it. So I had to try and figure out a way, how do we get resources to protect our team and help them with the emotional trauma that they saw? And I, you know, just going to tell you, the community, our victims, their families, were such class and such strong forces and such role models that, you know, it came... I wound up going to... I didn't want to go. My boss basically wanted me to go to the Red Sox game. He said, "I need 50 guys at the Red Sox game." And I go, "I'm not going for a dog and pony show at the Red Sox game. I haven't slept like I... I want to hug my kids." He's like, "You know, I hear you, but I need you and 50 guys.

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  You got to get in uniform at the Red Sox game." I go, "Look, I'm not going. I'll get you 50 guys, but I'm not going." And he said, "Yeah, Dan, I hear you. I got you, but I need you at the Red Sox game." And I go, "I'm not going to the Red Sox game. I'm not going to do it. I haven't seen my kids. I'm going to hang out with Michelle and the kids." He goes, "I get it, and I know what you're saying. Chief, I need you in 50 minutes at the Red Sox game." And I'm like, "Fuck." Like pissed. So I called Michelle and the kids. I go, "Look, I got to do this thing at the Red Sox, and I don't know what it is, some dog and pony show or something, but grab jeans and a shirt for me. Bring the boys. At least we'll see a Red Sox game."

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  And, you know, the community didn't know, but I had to go to an event that night, and I'll talk about that after the game, but my kids and wife came down and... We go through the tunnel. You know, we're in the locker room with all the spo- and my kids are like amazed, right? Because they're seeing Red Sox stars. And we go up to the tunnel, to the dugout, and there's a thing, Boston Strong is on a wall of the, you know, the symbol. And I'm like, oh, you said one of my cops, what the hell's that? Chief, it's Boston Strong. What the hell's Boston Strong? Boston Strong! It's like, everyone's come together, so we're raising money for the victims. I was so focused on the case, I hadn't read a newspaper, or like, I didn't know that Boston Strong was a thing.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  And what I thought was a dog and pony show, and I realize now why my boss made sure I was there and ordered me to go there, it wasn't a dog and pony show. It was the city of Boston saying to the terrorists, "We won. You know, you hurt us, but you're not going to change us, you're not going to make us afraid. We won." And then I realized they had victims, and the victims were there, going to throw out the first pitches, and we had docs, and nurses, and volunteers, and cops, and firefighters, and like, everyone who was kind of there in the crisis that came together was, was being on it. And they had tributes to all of our victims, and it was really... Then I'm like, okay, I get it. This is like us.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  You know, that 9/11 baseball game after 9/11 happened, right? Hey, we're back. And it was an amazing experience to see it, and I realized, okay, this is a thing, this is a powerful thing. And that night, I had to go to a fundraiser for one of my cops who had taken his life, unfortunately, in front of his wife and two children, and a suicide. And we were having a fundraiser to try and pay off their debt. And I had to go represent the department that night, so, you know, it's back to doing, doing the job. So...

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  It was a amazing week. So proud of the team I worked with and what they did. And I think the lessons are that you train for that bad day and prepare for the challenges that's going to come your way. And if you want to be a leader, lead. Like it just if it's wrong, if it's screwed up and it's wrong, you can talk about how big a cluster it is and whose cluster it is and why it's a cluster, or you can uncluster it and fix it. And I hopefully have left a bunch of leaders behind me at my department who will uncluster and fix it and are better leaders than I ever was as they bring the department going forward through the challenges they go through today.

• 1:37:59Fran Racioppi?

  You brought up mental health, the mental health challenges. And we, over the last 20-plus years in society, have certainly here in America spoken a lot about the mental health challenges our veterans face. And so many times, we put a tremendous amount of resources behind that. I always quantify it in that veterans certainly have been exposed to a lot. But it's always over there. You know, it's an ocean away. You know, it's an 11-hour plane ride, you know, somewhere else. When you're a first responder, when you're you, you know, when you're your team, and you see this up front in your home, a

• 1:38:42Fran Racioppi?

  couple of blocks from your house, and you have to drive by that every single day for the rest of your life, and you have to interact with the population, you have to relive this constantly. You talked about putting mechanisms in place and putting things in place to address that proactively. What did you do? And how do you do that for our first responder community? Because just like this incident in the Marathon bombing shows, that our first responder community sees the same things that our veterans see in war.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  One of the things I had to do was admit that I was screwed up, right? I can't go to the debrief that the cops are going to because they need to be able to be in there and talk about how bad the chief screwed shit up and, you know, how bad the day went, right? And they need to be able to talk freely and they need to say that they've got challenges and not have to get back to the boss, right? So I called my peer support team and I said, "Hey, Brian, I can't go down to the peer support meeting, but I'm..." I'm in trouble here. And he sent a guy who does a lot of work with folks in the special operations community. And he sat and talked to me for an hour, hour and a half and kind of got me to a place where, you know, I could, okay, let me go out and finish this mission.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  And then a couple of weeks afterwards, I was having some issues and brought in, they brought in a doctor, Roger Solomon, and I wound up doing some EMDR and some other treatment programs. And then I was honest with my team about, hey, look, I'm broken. I need some help and I'm not afraid to ask for help. And we got a ton of resources. New York, someone, I know we got a New York Yankees fan here. Tuesday, my secretary comes out and says, hey, NYPD's here for you? And I said, NYPD for me? What are you talking about? So I go in the hallway and there's 43 guys from NYPD, New York Port Authority and New York Police, right? I go, what do you got? Like, we're from the peer support team of NYPD. I'm like, okay. Did Brian call you?

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  He's like, no. I'm like, why are you here? No one called you guys on 9/11. You showed up and helped us out. We're here to help. Where do we go? So I put him in touch with my team. Was trying to figure out where they were staying, right? Because they, they were, I'm like, are you just here for a day? And they're like, no, we're here until this, you know, until you need us, right? So there was a report of a hotel, I won't mention the hotel, but this hotel was going to charge like 450 a night for rooms. And I knew a buddy of mine who's a reporter and he also knew somebody at the hotel. So I called him, I go, hey, dude, you know, NYPD just showed up to help our guys out here. And I'm hearing it's like 450 bucks for rooms because hotels are tight in the city with everyone. I go, can you call your buddy?

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  So my, the reporter calls up and says, hey, how you doing? NYPD's come up to help Boston with their mental health. I, it's two stories going on. One is that you guys are donating the rooms to them so they can help. And the other is that you're charging 450 bucks. So I'm writing a story on it. Which, which, which is it? So they got the rooms and they were there for two plus weeks. They did 900 diffusions and conversations and talked to guys and gals who needed to talk with folks and, you know, some folks needed to come offline and get treatment with other folks. So we did that fairly quickly. I had to wear a Jets hat and take a picture with them when they left.

• 1:41:58Fran Racioppi?

  That was the trade off.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  I paid for, but you know, that they were right, right there with us, right? So then my team, peer support, Brian, reached out and Commissioner Davis, and they got a relationship through McLean Hospital and started a program where basically it's for police, fire, EMS, military personnel to go and get mental health treatment inpatient where you're not stigmatized because, you know, hey, wait a minute, I'm in with someone else who's in the military or someone that first responder. And that has been successful. We put a lot of clinicians in play to do some extra counseling and we're always looking

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  for, you know, opportunities to make sure we're taking care of people's mental health and providing the resources we can. July 4th was coming, right? Right after the marathon and cops were going to smell gunpowder again for the first time. And we prepared them for, hey, you're going to, you're going to smell it. You're going to, you're going to maybe be, you know, you're going to see what the scene is on Boylston Street when someone throws an M80 and you're responding to a call. So, so far, you know, it's been good.

• 1:43:07Fran Racioppi?

  What's the biggest lesson?

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  Train the way you respond and train hard and train constantly and to take care of your team. I gave a speech about my team. I don't know what the hell I said. I didn't write it out. I didn't think about it. I just spoke from the heart, told them how proud I was, told them how much I needed them and I needed them to look out for each other. I don't remember exactly what I said. Two years later, I got a text from a cop who said, hey boss, just wanted to let you know, that speech you gave that night, we still talk about that. And all I remember talking about was the theme of it was, you know, I love and respect you guys and I need you to, to do everything you can for each other right here, right now, right? One, one team, one fight.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  And that obviously made an impact. And if you, you tell the troops what you want them to do and the why they should do it, they'll do it. We screwed up. I said to my planning team, hey, I want cops on every corner. When people come out of the train station or get out of a cab, I want them to see a cop. I want them to feel safe until we get these guys. I want office friendly on those corners. Flood it. And then I got a call from the president of the union. He's like, why do you have these kids on traffic posts? They don't have a traffic post, Tom. What are you talking about? So get these kids on traffic posts. It's not even traffic. And I'm like, that's BS. We don't have them on traffic posts. So get down and I say to my, you know, planning team, okay, we don't have kids on traffic posts, do we? Yes, sir. You said you wanted cops in every corner. That's how we put cops on corners. We put them on traffic posts.

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  We never had a conversation with the cops to say, listen, here's your mission today. I want you to talk to each other and figure out how you're doing, right? And then I want you to talk to the community and let them know, we're here, we're safe, right? And cops said, so we had to bring them back in. And I said, listen, this is, I'm sorry, there's some confusion. I don't need you waving your arms at traffic that doesn't exist, right? This is what your mission is, and this is what I need you to do. And they were like, Roger that, boss. I get, I'm with, all day long. I'll do 19 hours, you know, if that's the mission. I believe in that. So sometimes I think we as leaders tell people what to do, like really quick in crisis. But if you can let your team understand the why, man, they'll crunch it for you.

• 1:45:18Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah. Yeah. I talk about purpose. You gotta have purpose. You gotta have autonomy, you know, the ability to do it in a way that you feel is valuable. And then efficacy, where can you, where can you see the result? And that's about choice, right? People choose to take action and do things they want to do if they have purpose, autonomy, and efficacy. And we as leaders have to instill that and show that to our teams. And they'll go out there and run through walls all day long.

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:45:50Fran Racioppi?

  Well, thank you. Thanks for your leadership. When this happened, I was actually in Africa, in Djibouti, and saw it from a world away. And, you know, you want to talk about an event that shut a city down. I'll tell you that that event shut a lot of the world down. Because, you know, being from Boston, my mom lived off Kenmore Square. That was all I watched for four or five days. Hard to focus on anything else. But we got to know, you know, we got to see and know what it takes to lead in crisis. And now, having had the opportunity to, you know, speak with you, speak with Eric,

• 1:46:35Fran Racioppi?

  and really understand what was going on at that, at that ground level. You know, yes, all the tactical stuff is important, but success comes from leaders. And success comes from leaders who stand up and take charge and lead when they're it. And we're all going to have those moments that you had when you realized, hey, I'm it. And that's okay, because we actually need that. We need to go through your process of your three deep breaths and someone having to pull you out to then clear your head, because everything there from that point forward is about your preparation.

• 1:47:17Fran Racioppi?

  Did you put the work in before to be successful now? Hope's not a course of action. We can't rely on someone coming to save us and get us out of difficult situations. We just have to take action, and that action will be the byproduct of how much we thought about it before we got to that moment. Thanks for everything you've done. Thanks for your service to the country, to the city, to the state, and thanks for inspiring a whole generation of leaders in law enforcement, who I know every single day they're looking up to you and they're remembering everything you did throughout your whole career, not only in that moment, but through your career. And they're trying to be just like you and emulate you as that leader who was out there day in and day out, setting the example.

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  Thanks. Thanks for having me.

• 1:48:09Speaker 02

  American Jedbergs went on to form the foundation of the United States Special Forces and the Special Activities Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thanks for listening to the Jedburgh Podcast, an official program of the Green Beret Foundation. I'm your creator and host, Fran Richo. Join us next week for a new episode on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check us out on YouTube for full episodes, highlights, and other long and short form content. If you like what you heard, give us a like and leave a review. Follow the Jed Burke Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, extra threads. Send your comments and inquiries to [email protected]. As former members of Special Operations Forces, the Jed Burke Media Channel and the Green Beret Foundation remain committed to supporting all generations

• 1:48:50Speaker 02

  of US Army Special Forces and their families. Thanks for joining us on this episode. How you prepare today determines success tomorrow.