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Heroes Behind the Badge

Citizens Behind the Badge

From the front lines to the final call, Heroes Behind the Badge brings you the untold stories of America's law enforcement community. Led by Craig Floyd, who spent 34 years working alongside police officers across the nation, alongside veteran facilitator Dennis Collins and law enforcement expert Bill Erfurth, this podcast cuts through misconceptions to reveal the true nature of modern policing.

Our dynamic trio brings unique perspectives to each episode: Craig shares deep insights from his decades of experience and relationships within law enforcement, Dennis guides conversations with meticulous research and natural flow, and Bill adds engaging commentary that makes complex law enforcement topics accessible to all listeners.

Each episode features in-depth conversations with law enforcement professionals, sharing their firsthand experiences, challenges, and triumphs. Drawing from extensive research and real-world experience, we explore the realities faced by the over 800,000 officers who serve and protect our communities every day.

From dramatic accounts of crisis response to quiet moments of everyday heroism, our show illuminates the human stories behind the badge. We dive deep into the statistics, policies, and practices that shape modern law enforcement, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of what it truly means to serve in law enforcement today.

Whether you're a law enforcement professional, a concerned citizen, or someone seeking to understand the complexities of modern policing, Heroes Behind the Badge provides the context, insights, and authentic perspectives you won't find anywhere else. Join us weekly as we honor those who dedicate their lives to keeping our communities safe, one story at a time.

Presented by Citizens Behind the Badge, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and advocating for law enforcement professionals across the United States. Join over 126,000 Americans who have already signed our Declaration of Support for law enforcement at behindbadge.org.

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#68
Thursday · 36 min
Frank Pegueros — Answering D.A.R.E.'s Critics, and What the Job Costs | Part 2
Part 1 covered what D.A.R.E. teaches now. This half is about the people who teach it, and about the criticism the program has carried for forty years. Frank Pegueros — retired LAPD captain, President and CEO of D.A.R.E. America — starts with something simple and easy to miss. For most parents, the officer in their child's school is the first police officer they have known as a person rather than as a uniform arriving on the worst day of their life. That officer becomes a known quantity in the community, and Pegueros argues that is the whole mechanism. He describes officers who took the school assignment expecting a soft landing before retirement, and who report seeing a positive reaction to their work for the first time on a daily basis. Bill Erfurth tells his own story from that world: a burglary case, a set of latent prints, and the discovery that they belonged to the son of one of his first sergeants. What that sergeant said when Bill came to arrest his kid is the part he has never forgotten. The conversation moves through fentanyl and why Pegueros refuses to call 80,000 overdose deaths a year progress, online bullying and what social media platforms could stop if they chose to, the genuine decline in teenage drinking, and what COVID did to a generation of students. Asked by a reporter to name the most dangerous drug on the streets, his answer is alcohol — the one nobody counts. It closes with the thing that makes this episode worth recommending. In 2000, D.A.R.E. convened the people attacking it and asked how to build a better program. The first day went badly. By the second, the room had turned. One of those critics, Dr. Dick Clayton — who authored much of the negative research from the 80s and 90s still circulating online — asked to go through the training as a participant rather than an observer. He now sits on D.A.R.E.'s board of directors and chairs its scientific advisory board. Contains discussion of suicide, including officer suicide, and some strong language. If you're struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 in the US — call or text 988.
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#67
August 25 · 35 min
Frank Pegueros — What the D.A.R.E. Program Actually Teaches Now | Part 1
Francisco "Frank" Pegueros spent 26 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, retiring as a captain, and has spent the 30 years since as President and CEO of D.A.R.E. America. He has now been with the program longer than he was with the department. He told Dennis Collins, Craig Floyd and Bill Erfurth he has never had three bad days in a row — the standard he set when he took the job. Most people's memory of D.A.R.E. is a T-shirt and an officer at the front of a classroom talking for 45 minutes about the evils of drugs. That version is gone. The original curriculum ran 17 lessons and worked as what one educator called "the sage on the stage." Today it runs ten lessons licensed from Penn State, the officer speaks for six to eight minutes, and the students work in small groups applying a four-step decision-making model to situations from their own lives. New topics arrive as enhancement lessons that slot in without breaking the sequence — which is how vaping, online safety and suicide prevention entered the program. The threats have changed as much as the teaching. Pegueros describes a vaping industry that he says engineered its devices so illicit substances could be substituted in, then marketed bubblegum and soda flavors to children. He describes websites that publish dosing guidance for minors. He describes foreign actors extorting kids online, and a teen suicide crisis that D.A.R.E. now addresses in partnership with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. What holds it together are two stories he tells almost in passing: a student who had not spoken in six years of school, who read her D.A.R.E. essay aloud at a full assembly; and an officer whose students' older siblings quietly decided to put themselves between her and a gang's retaliation plot. Every D.A.R.E. officer, he says, has one of those every semester. Part 2 covers what police work costs the people who do it — and the academic whose research built the case against D.A.R.E., who now chairs its scientific advisory board. Contains discussion of teen suicide, self-harm and online exploitation of children. If you're struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 in the US — call or text 988. Learn more at https://behindbadge.org.
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#66
August 13 · 34 min
Morgan Wright — What the JonBenét Ramsey Crime Scene Actually Says | Part 2
Morgan Wright is the founder and CEO of the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases, a nonprofit that works cold cases toward resolution rather than commentary. A former detective who went on to teach interview and interrogation, he now trains a team of volunteer case analysts in structured investigative method. This is the second half of his reconstruction of the JonBenét Ramsey homicide. Part 1 ended with the intruder hypothesis failing on the physical evidence. Part 2 asks the obvious next question: if nobody came in, what does the scene itself tell you? Wright starts with the forensic claims that have carried the case for years and takes them apart one at a time. The touch DNA recovered from JonBenét's clothing produced a partial profile at ten or eleven markers, where a positive CODIS match requires twenty and a partial requires thirteen. At eleven markers, as he puts it, you are no longer identifying a person. He then turns to the ransom note. It demanded $118,000, almost exactly John Ramsey's employment bonus. Ramsey stated he read it on the spiral staircase at around 5:45 in the morning without turning on a light. Wright ran the astronomy: the sun was still seventeen degrees below the horizon, a full moon delivers at most 0.3 lux outdoors, window glass removes seventy to ninety percent of that, and reading requires roughly fifty lux. The gap is three orders of magnitude. It is not a claim about what happened, only about what could not have. The reconstruction rests on two physical details. The blunt force trauma resembled the end of a flashlight, and the room where JonBenét was found required reaching a wooden clasp mounted high on the door. And in the autopsy, the urine had dried on top of her clothing rather than beneath her, with more found on the carpet outside the room. That points to a death face down in a hallway, and a body moved afterward. Wright also explains the legal wall the case runs into, and closes on the fourth category of knowledge — the things that are now permanently unknowable, because the scene was never controlled. Learn more at https://citizensbehindthebadge.org.
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#65
August 11 · 37 min
Morgan Wright — Reinvestigating JonBenét Ramsey From First Principles | Part 1
Morgan Wright is the founder and CEO of the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases, a nonprofit that takes on cold cases and works them toward resolution rather than commentary. He is a former detective who went on to teach interview and interrogation, and he now trains more than thirty volunteer case analysts in structured investigative methods. He returns to Heroes Behind the Badge for the case he has spent the longest on. Boulder, Colorado, December 26, 1996. A 911 call before six in the morning reporting a kidnapping and a ransom note. Six hours later a six-year-old girl is found dead in a basement room of her own house. Thirty years and a shelf of books later, the JonBenét Ramsey case remains open. Wright's approach is deliberately narrow: he refuses to argue about suspects until he has answered a prior question. Was there an intruder in that house, or was there not? Part 1 covers ground most listeners will not have heard. In 1999 a grand jury indicted both John and Patsy Ramsey on two counts each. District Attorney Alex Hunter declined to sign, and it took fourteen years and a series of Freedom of Information Act suits before the public learned the indictments existed. Wright walks through the morning itself, the ransom note found on the spiral staircase, and the decision he considers more consequential than any forensic test that followed: leaving the family inside an uncontrolled crime scene. He then tests the intruder hypothesis against NOAA weather records, Locard's exchange principle, the measured dimensions of the basement window well, and a cobweb that was never disturbed. What makes this different from most true crime is the discipline behind it. Wright works from a documented archive and is careful throughout to separate what is established from what is contested, and both from what can never be known. It is a working investigator's method applied in public. Part 2 takes up the ransom note that, by Wright's analysis, could not have been read in the light available that morning, the $118,000 figure that matched a bonus, and what the autopsy says about where JonBenét actually died. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at https://citizensbehindthebadge.org.
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#64
July 30 · 25 min
Bill Buford — He Owed It to the Men He Lost at Waco | Part 2
In Part 2 of this two-part conversation, retired ATF agent Bill Buford takes listeners back inside the gun room during the February 28, 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. He walks through the exact sequence of the firefight: the moment a rifle round came up through the floor and hit him, the two AK-47 rounds that followed, and the fellow agent bleeding out beside him from a severed femoral artery. He describes climbing off the roof of the compound with no memory of how he did it, and the ATF medic, Ken Chisholm, who covered him with his own body while starting an IV under continued gunfire. Buford also shares a story from his time as a Green Beret in Vietnam, a moment when an enemy soldier's rifle failed to fire at point-blank range, and the bullet he has kept ever since as a reminder of how close that day came to ending differently. The conversation turns to the origin of ATF's first Special Response Team, formed in the raid's aftermath, and closes with Buford's own explanation, in his words, of why he chose to go back to a job that had nearly killed him. This episode honors the four ATF agents killed in the line of duty at Waco: Robert J. Williams, Steven Willis, Todd W. McKeehan, and Conway C. LeBleu. Heroes Behind the Badge is a production of Citizens Behind the Badge, telling the real stories of the men and women who serve.
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#63
July 28 · 41 min
Bill Buford — Surviving the Waco Raid as an ATF Agent | Part 1
Bill Buford spent nearly three decades in federal law enforcement, first as a Green Beret in Vietnam, then as a Special Agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In 1993, he led the ATF Special Response Team out of Little Rock, Arkansas, and was one of a small group of agents who made it inside the compound at Mount Carmel during the raid on the Branch Davidians. On February 28, 1993, Buford's team lost the element of surprise before they ever reached the compound, but the order to go in came anyway. What followed was one of the deadliest days in ATF history: four agents killed, dozens wounded, and Buford himself shot four times before he was pulled off a roof and rushed to the hospital. Buford walks through what it was like inside the compound's gun room during the firefight, the moment a fellow agent gave his life to save him, and what he's carried with him in the more than 30 years since. He also addresses head-on the persistent theories about how the siege ended on April 19, sharing what independent arson investigators actually found. This conversation is a rare, unfiltered account from one of the few agents who was inside the building that day, someone who lived through both the raid and the decades of public criticism that followed it, and who chose to go back to the job anyway. In Part 2, Bill takes listeners back inside the gun room for the full, moment-by-moment account of the firefight, a near-death encounter half a world away in Vietnam, and the reason he says he owed it to the men he lost to keep serving. New episodes drop every other week. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at citizensbehindthebadge.org.
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#62
July 16 · 33 min
Jim Freeman — Inside the Unabomber's Cabin | Part 2
Jim Freeman spent 32 years as an FBI Special Agent, rising to Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau's San Francisco field office. In the final two years of the 17-year hunt for the Unabomber, Freeman took direct control of the UNABOM Task Force. In Part 2, Freeman picks up moments after Ted Kaczynski's arrest outside his remote cabin near Lincoln, Montana. With no electricity and no safe way to enter overnight, investigators waited nearly a full day before executing the search warrant. When they finally got inside, portable generators and an x-ray machine revealed what was hidden there: a typewriter used to type Kaczynski's manifesto, carbon copies of the document itself, and — underneath the cot where he slept — a live, fully assembled bomb. Freeman recounts the physical evidence that made the case airtight, the journals in which Kaczynski described his own motives, and a chilling detail: Kaczynski had addressed one of his undelivered bombs to return to an FBI office, so that whoever opened it would be killed instead. Freeman also reflects candidly on what he sees as a more divided FBI today than the one he served in. This is the story of how physical evidence, not just investigative instinct, closed one of the most notorious domestic terrorism cases in American history — and a firsthand account of what it took, and who it took, to get there. This concludes Heroes Behind the Badge's two-part conversation with Jim Freeman on the Unabomber investigation. If you haven't already, go back and listen to Part 1 for the full story of the 17-year manhunt and Kaczynski's capture. New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at citizensbehindthebadge.org.
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#61
July 14 · 42 min
Jim Freeman - Leading the FBI's Hunt for the Unabomber | Part 1
Jim Freeman spent 32 years as an FBI Special Agent, rising to Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau's San Francisco field office. In the final two years of the 17-year hunt for the Unabomber, Freeman took direct control of the UNABOM Task Force — reporting straight to FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno. This episode centers on the case's most consequential turning point: the decision to publish Ted Kaczynski's 35,000-word manifesto in the New York Times and Washington Post. Freeman walks through the internal FBI debate over whether publishing would help catch a killer or simply give him what he wanted, and the moment Reno and Freeh personally authorized the risk. From there, Freeman recounts how Kaczynski's own brother, David, recognized the language in the manifesto — and how that tip led investigators to a remote cabin outside Lincoln, Montana. What followed was a 40-day covert operation, culminating in Kaczynski's arrest by agents who, until hours before, weren't convinced the reclusive hermit in the woods could really be the man they'd been hunting for nearly two decades. It's a story about a calculated gamble that worked — and about the ordinary caution, doubt, and bureaucracy that almost got in the way of catching one of the most notorious domestic terrorists in American history. Part 1 ends the moment Kaczynski is finally in custody. In Part 2, Freeman takes us inside the cabin itself — and the evidence that sealed the case. New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at citizensbehindthebadge.org.
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#60
July 2 · 32 min
Rick Harcrow — Inside Attica: The Stats, the Families, and the Hidden Cost | Part 2
Rick Harcrow spent 37 years as a correctional officer at Attica Correctional Facility — home of the deadliest prison riot in American history. In Part 2, the conversation goes deeper: from the daily realities of working inside one of America's most dangerous institutions to the political decisions that shaped how officers and their families were treated for decades. Rick opens the episode with a story that sets the tone for everything that follows. Three days into a law library assignment, an inmate told him he planned to murder him when he got the chance. Rick turned around and said: "Nah, that's not gonna happen." That response — measured, unflinching, rooted in experience — defines how he approaches every subject in this conversation. The numbers are hard to hear. Around 300 inmate-on-inmate assaults per year at Attica — nearly one per day — were quietly suppressed by a department more concerned with appearances than accountability. The families of officers killed in the 1971 Attica riot were pressured into signing away their right to sue in exchange for six months of workman's comp. Two decades later, those same inmates received a $12 million settlement while widows were waiting for roof repairs. Rick helped organize the Attica Forgotten Victims group as a union leader and credits Governor George Pataki with ultimately doing right by those families. The conversation covers ground that rarely gets an honest treatment: the debate over reopening Alcatraz and what 40,000 released New York inmates actually means for crime, the Jeffrey Epstein suicide watch and the systemic failures that made a 14-minute window possible, the CO strike that put 10,000 officers on the picket line, and what unprocessed stress quietly does to the men and women who spend careers inside those walls. Rick closes with a warning a psychologist gave him as a rookie — one he credits with saving his life. This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation with Rick Harcrow. Part 1 covers his early years at Attica and the assault that nearly cost him everything in the law library. Both parts are available now.
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#59
June 30 · 44 min
Rick Harcrow - Inside the Attica Prison Riot: What Really Happened | Part 1
Rick Harcrow spent 37 years as a correctional officer in the New York State prison system — 30 of them at Attica Correctional Facility. He wasn't there on September 9, 1971, when the riot began. But he worked with the men who were. He heard their stories, sat with their families, and spent three decades living in the shadow of the deadliest prison riot in American history. This is what he knows. The Attica Prison Riot lasted four days. When it ended, 43 people were dead — seven of them correctional officers. What's less understood is that 39 of those 43 died not during the riot itself, but during the state's retaking of the facility four days later. Approximately 1,500 rounds were fired into a 100-by-100-yard yard packed with hundreds of people, hostages included. A judge later ruled it excessive force. Rick walks through the conditions that made it inevitable: 2,200 inmates crammed into a prison built for 1,200, one roll of toilet paper a month, and a bureaucracy that refused to hear its own officers. He covers the warning signs — multiple supervisors went to the superintendent weeks before the riot and told him it was coming. He refused to act. On the morning of September 9th, a group of veteran officers called in sick. Everyone knew. The riot started because of a worn-down gate key that opened the wrong lock. When that lock popped, an officer said, "Oh damn, we're in trouble." He was right. Rick also describes what it means to work inside a facility where nearly half the population is serving time for murder or manslaughter — and how that shapes the daily reality of corrections work in ways most people never consider. He talks about CO William Quinn, used as a battering ram by rioting inmates and left to die. About Sergeant Edward Cunningham, who spoke directly to a film crew in the middle yard — warning the governor that people were going to be killed — and was killed days later. About what the four-day standoff looked like from the perspective of the men who worked those walls afterward. In Part 2, Rick Harcrow takes us further: the inmate who looked him in the eye and said he'd be dead before the day was out, the violence the department tried to bury, and what 10,000 corrections officers finally did to force the state to listen. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
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#58
June 18 · 34 min
Tom Lange — The OJ Simpson Case: What the Jury Never Heard | Part 2
Tom Lange was the lead homicide detective for the Los Angeles Police Department assigned to the OJ Simpson murder case — one of the most watched criminal trials in American history. In this second part of a two-part conversation, Lange picks up where Part 1 left off, going deeper into the evidence, the decision-making, and the failures that defined the case. The interview opens with OJ's first interview after returning from Chicago. Within 30 seconds, Lange had his read: he was dealing with a sociopath. OJ never asked about his children. He never asked what happened to his wife. Not on the phone from Chicago, and not in the formal interview. Lange also walks through what he found at OJ's Chicago hotel room — thick drinking glasses he personally tested, proving OJ had deliberately staged a cut on his finger before loudly announcing it at the hotel front desk. There were 25 pieces of evidence like this that never made it to trial. The sharpest revelations involve the prosecution. Lange learned — 27 years after the verdict — that limo driver Alan Park had told Marcia Clark he saw OJ standing by the trash cans the night of the murders. Clark never shared that with Lange, her own lead investigator. "She lied to me," he says. "I had more problems with Marcia on direct than I did with Johnny on cross." The episode also covers the Bronco chase from inside the command center: the brass demanding a perp walk, OJ vanishing from Kardashian's house, and Lange on the phone with a man holding a gun to his own head while SWAT was already staged at Rockingham — with orders to shoot if OJ stepped out armed. Lange closes with the clearest account yet of why this case — the most evidence-rich murder case of the century — was lost. The wrong courthouse. Cameras in the courtroom. A prosecution that believed DNA alone would win it. And a jury that was played to instead of persuaded. The trial wasn't about two people who were murdered. "This is all about showtime," Lange says. "It wasn't about two young people who got slaughtered."
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#57
June 16 · 38 min
Tom Lange — Lead OJ Simpson Detective on the Evidence the Jury Never Heard | Part 1
Tom Lange was the lead homicide detective for the LAPD on the night of June 12, 1994. When a call came in about a double homicide on the west side of Los Angeles, Lange and his partner Phil Vannatter were the detectives the department trusted with its highest-profile cases. What they were about to work would become the most watched criminal trial in American history. In this first of two parts, Lange walks through the night hour by hour: arriving at Bundy Drive at 4AM, assessing the crime scene, and then making an unusual decision — ordered by brass — to leave Bundy before the scene was fully processed and drive to OJ Simpson's Rockingham estate. At that point, Simpson was not a suspect. He was the estranged husband with two sleeping children. What Lange found when he got there changed that calculus entirely. The moments Lange describes are precise and unhurried: Fuhrman scaling the estate wall, the unanswered front door, the conversation with Arnelle Simpson, Kato Kaelin's three thumps in the night, and the walk down a dark corridor behind the bungalows that ended with a right-hand leather glove in the middle of the path. A match to the one already bagged at Bundy Drive. Then comes the detail that still sits uncomfortably even three decades later: a witness at LAX watched OJ Simpson dump items from a small duffel bag — the same one Kato tried to carry and OJ refused to let him touch — into an airport trash container at 11PM. The witness didn't come forward until nine months into the trial. The trash was long gone. The bloody clothes, the shoes, the murder weapon — none of it was ever found. Three pages of investigative evidence that never reached a jury. Part 2 picks up with the OJ interview, the moment Lange realized he was talking to a sociopath, the Bronco chase, and why a case this strong was never going to be won.
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#56
June 4 · 30 min
Sheriff Mike Neal — The Walmart Shooting and What He Brought Home | Part 2
Sheriff Michael Neal was a wildlife officer with no business being at a West Memphis crime scene the afternoon of May 20th, 2010. He was over an hour away when two police officers were shot and killed during a traffic stop. He drove there anyway. Part 2 of this conversation is the story of what happened when he got there — and what he carried home from it. The episode opens with Neal describing his wife seeing his bullet-riddled truck at the National Law Enforcement Museum for the first time, and the conversation about why he chose to get married on the anniversary of the shooting. From there it moves into the drive itself: running his Game and Fish truck at 140 miles an hour, stopping for gas at the Horizon Shell Station at Mile Marker 275 — not knowing it was the same exit as the crime scene — and looking down on the bodies of Brandon Paudert and Bill Evans from an overpass before pulling back onto the road. What followed was a two-hour manhunt that failed because of a bad vehicle description. The killers were hiding in the Walmart parking lot in a battered white Plymouth Voyager while every officer in the area searched for a church van with "House of God and Prayer" written on the side. Neal explains the communication breakdown in plain terms: that's what gets cops killed. He was on the other end of the parking lot when the shooting resumed. He describes the moment gunfire started, the decision to ram the van at 55 miles per hour rather than risk a mobile firefight, shooting through his own windshield while taking 12 rounds of AK fire, and the first thought he had walking up on scene after it was over: that he was going to jail. The episode closes with why he stayed in law enforcement — a friend told him cops want to hear from cops, not has-beens — and what he wants people to feel when they see the names of Brandon Paudert and Bill Evans on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.
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#55
June 2 · 34 min
Sheriff Mike Neal — 16 Years of Survivor Guilt After the West Memphis Ambush | Part 1
Sheriff Michael Neal is a law enforcement officer, a combat veteran of one of the most dramatic police incidents in modern American history, and today the elected Sheriff of Lee County, Arkansas. In May 2010, he was a wildlife officer who drove over an hour, lights and sirens, to respond to a cop-killer ambush in West Memphis and ended it himself in a Walmart parking lot with dozens of rounds hitting his truck. The first interview told the story of what he did. This one tells the story of what it cost him. Sixteen years of carrying a date - May 20th - that alternated between the worst day of his life and, eventually, his wedding anniversary. He got married on the anniversary of the shooting on purpose, to give the day something else to hold. This conversation covers the year of fog that followed the shooting. It covers the 42 awards he received that he didn't want while the colleagues who died received nothing. It covers the National Law Enforcement Museum in Washington D.C., where his bullet-riddled wildlife truck is one of the two centerpiece displays, and how the first time he visited he kept his back to it and greeted visitors rather than look at what he called, without hesitation, "a casket." And it covers the conversation he wasn't ready to have for years: what it meant to take a life, why it's nothing like Hollywood, and what it actually takes to get right after you do. The mental health piece lands differently coming from a sitting sheriff. Neal doesn't preach. He talks about the stigma in plain terms, the colleague who "went to see the quack" and got avoided, the broken analogy between a broken leg you can see and a brain injury you can't. And he talks about Dr. Gray, a retired injured officer who broke his back fighting a suspect and conducts his therapy sessions from a bed in his office. He was the one who finally helped. Part 2 goes to the Walmart lot. What Neal saw when he got there. What he did. And what he brought home from it.
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#54
May 21 · 39 min
Rafael A. Mangual - The Data Behind "Criminal [In]Justice" | Part 2
In Part 2 of his Heroes Behind the Badge conversation, Rafael Mangual opens with the story that drove him to write his book. In July 2019, Brittany Hill, 24 years old, holding her one-year-old daughter outside her home on Chicago's west side, was shot dead when a car pulled up and opened fire. She turned, shielded her daughter, took the bullets, stumbled three steps, and collapsed with the child still clinging to her neck. The man arrested had nine prior felony convictions, including murder. He was free on parole. That case is the emotional and intellectual center of "Criminal Injustice," and it frames everything Mangual argues in this half of the conversation. He explains why Democrat-run cities consistently produce higher murder rates and why the red state murder narrative collapses when homicide data is broken down by city rather than state. He presents NYPD fatal force statistics spanning 50 years, showing a 90% decline with no public acknowledgment from the police reform movement. He responds directly to the systemic racism narrative in policing, citing peer-reviewed research from scholars across the political spectrum, including left-leaning researchers whose own data undercuts the claim. Mangual closes with bail reform, a policy he has genuine sympathy for in principle but argues has been catastrophically misapplied in states like Illinois and New York. His reasoning is precise, his evidence is sourced, and his conclusion is difficult to dismiss: the people paying the highest price for progressive criminal justice policy are the people progressives claim to protect. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at citizensbehindthebadge.org.
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#53
May 19 · 33 min
Rafael A. Mangual - Why Killers Walk While Cops Go to Prison | Part 1
Rafael A. Mangual is a senior fellow and head of research at the Manhattan Institute's Policing and Public Safety Initiative, and the author of "Criminal [In]Justice." He is one of the most data-driven and unsparing voices in the national debate on criminal justice policy - a lawyer by training who chose research over the courtroom. In Part 1 of this conversation, Mangual opens with the two New York cases that frame his entire body of work. NYPD Sergeant Eric Duran was convicted of manslaughter for throwing an empty cooler at a fleeing drug suspect during a buy-bust operation. In the same city, a man calling himself Lucifer slashed three elderly strangers at Grand Central Station despite 13 prior arrests - including a previous knife attack - and remained free. Mangual explains these outcomes are not contradictions but the predictable result of an ideology that treats police as agents of corrupt power while extending unlimited leniency to violent offenders. Drawing on peer-reviewed research, Mangual walks through the Pareto distribution of criminal offending, a finding replicated in every jurisdiction worldwide, showing that a tiny fraction of repeat offenders commit the vast majority of violent crime. He examines New York's Clean Slate Act, its effects on recidivism data, and the research linking single-parent household rates to criminal offending. Each argument is specific, sourced, and delivered without sentiment. This is a masterclass in how to win the criminal justice argument with data. The conversation continues Thursday. Part 2 picks up with what Rafael calls the case that drove him to write the book: Brittany Hill, 24 years old, shot dead on a Chicago sidewalk while shielding her one-year-old daughter, by a man with nine prior felony convictions including murder who was free on parole. Learn more at citizensbehindthebadge.org.
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#52
May 7 · 28 min
Blake Boteler — The Bounty, the Arrests, and the Funeral That Never Happened | Part 2
Blake Boteler is a retired ATF Special Agent and former petroleum geologist whose two-year undercover infiltration of the Sons of Silence outlaw motorcycle gang stands as one of the deepest and most successful operations in ATF history. His 1963 Harley Davidson and undercover jacket are preserved at the National Law Enforcement Museum. Craig Floyd, former head of the National Law Enforcement Officer's Memorial Fund, named him Officer of the Month in July 2002. This is the conclusion of his story. Part 2 opens with Blake freshly out of an Iowa jail cell — bonded out by the club, carrying no weapon, and walking back into a world that was growing suspicious of how aggressively he and his partner were making buys. The episode follows his final weeks as a patch-wearing member through the operation's most dangerous moments: ordered by a national vice president at a biker rally to assault a stranger who had been photographing the club, Blake hits the man's whiskey bottle rather than his face and talks his way through the aftermath. He describes snorting gunpowder as a prospect hazing ritual. And he walks through the confrontation in a Colorado storage unit — national president J.R. Reed snorting methamphetamine off a Civil War sword, then turning to Blake and asking what federal agency he's buying guns for. Blake laughs and invents a fictional board name. The operation lasted days more. The final numbers tell the story: 230-plus weapons seized, including over 40 machine guns, hand grenades, pipe bombs, and 21 pounds of methamphetamine. Eighty-five defendants ultimately charged. Blake also covers the aftermath — a federal trial he expected to win that ended in acquittal when a jury decided undercover agents should expect to get punched, and that same man shooting four people across two incidents in Colorado within months of his release. He talks through the $50,000 contract placed on his and his partner's lives, his family evacuated overnight from a Tampa home with Christmas presents still under the tree, and years of living under fictitious names in Virginia. The episode closes with a story Blake told after the camera stopped rolling — the arrest plan ATF headquarters never approved: a staged car bombing, a real cemetery plot purchased in Colorado Springs, and a fake funeral designed to draw every outlaw biker in his network to a single location for mass arrest. Headquarters said no. What they did instead had its own complications. The Sons of Silence are still active. Blake is still watching. A future episode will bring him back for Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the day he stood three feet from a fallen agent whose name is now on the National Law Enforcement Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. Learn more at citizensbehindthebadge.org.
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#51
May 5 · 39 min
He Spent 2 Years Undercover With the Sons of Silence (Part 1) | ATF Agent Blake Boteler
What does it actually cost to go undercover for two years with one of America's most violent outlaw motorcycle gangs? Blake Boteler knows. He's the retired ATF special agent who spent two years as "Bo" — a prospect, then a patch-wearing member of the Sons of Silence — in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His 1963 Harley Davidson and undercover jacket are now in the National Law Enforcement Museum. Craig Floyd, who ran the National Law Enforcement Officer's Memorial Fund, named Blake his Officer of the Month in July 2002. In Part 1, Blake breaks down what deep cover really looks like — and it's not nine to five. Before a word is spoken about the Sons of Silence, Blake describes the moment that set everything in motion: a gas-station robbery in Oklahoma City, a class ring taken at gunpoint, a dumpster search with his father, and a suspect tracked down through a girlfriend's white dog. That letter from the DA ended up in his ATF interview. ATF offered him a job before anyone else did. From there: how you cold-call your way into a motorcycle gang when you have no informants. How you pass a girl test that isn't about what you think it's about. How you manage the three dilemmas — violence, drugs, and women — when you can't blow your cover and you won't compromise your ethics. And how you live when you're actually living three lives: Bo the outlaw, Blake the ATF agent, and Blake the husband and father of three children who once watched his kids play tee-ball from a parking lot — and had to let a police officer question him for it without saying a word. Bill Erfurth — retired Miami-Dade detective who infiltrated the Genovese and Bonanno crime families in South Florida — joins the conversation to compare notes. Same world, entirely different approach. It ends on the Fourth of July. Blake is in jail. He watches fireworks through his cell window. In Part 2: 230 weapons seized. A $50,000 contract on his life. And an arrest plan built around a hearse, a fake funeral, and a cemetery plot in Colorado Springs. Citizens Behind the Badge supports law enforcement officers and their families. Learn more and donate at CitizensBehindTheBadge.org.
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#50
April 23 · 31 min
CPR on "Superman": The Partner Rick Rossman Couldn't Save — Part 2
Part 1 ended on the Thanksgiving 1983 murders of Rick Rossman's Metro-Dade partners Richie Boles and David Strzalkowski — shot with their own service weapons by ex-con Charlie Street — and Rick's admission that in more than four decades since, he has never spoken to anyone professionally about that night. Part 2 opens with Rick off-duty at a Miami nightclub when the radio erupts: a chase, shots fired, an officer down. The officer was Joseph "Superman" Martin — Rick's friend since they were teenagers, a power lifter known for wearing a Superman costume to take his kids trick-or-treating. By the time Rick arrived on scene, Joey had been shot three times by a teenager the squad personally knew. Rescue got lost. Rick performed chest compressions alone as Joey bled out on the pavement. Back at the station, Bill Erfurth walked him fully clothed into a shower stall and watched "Joey's lifeblood" swirl down the drain. Four cops dead in four years, all on midnight shifts. Rick's public push for minimum staffing made him "like a cancer" to command. Thirty-two years into the job, he reflects on carrying the weight, what Miami looked like in the Scarface era, and the one thing a third-generation cop won't recommend anymore — law enforcement as a career for his own kids. 👍 If you support law enforcement stories told with honesty and context, like, subscribe, and share. 🔔 Turn on notifications so you don't miss future episodes.
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#49
April 21 · 28 min
He Called It Suicide. By 2:14 AM, Two Partners Were Dead | Part 1
Thanksgiving weekend, 1983. Only five officers were assigned to cover an entire Miami-Dade, Florida district that night. Before his first call, Rick Rossman told his sergeant it felt like suicide going out that short-staffed. By 2:14 that morning, two of his partners were dead. Richie Boles and David Strzalkowski responded to a disturbance call — the same call Rick couldn't take because he had a robbery suspect in his back seat. The man waiting for them was Charlie Street: a violent ex-con whose criminal history never surfaced in a records check because the system was down. Street overpowered both officers and shot them multiple times with their own weapons. Rick arrived on scene to find both partners lying in the road. He drove to a highway overpass and waited alone — betting he could cut Street off before he reached I-95. Broward County caught him first. When Rick arrived to make the identification, Street looked at him and smiled. Rick says he doesn't remember much of what happened next. Part 1 covers that entire Thanksgiving night shift — the systemic failures, the murders, and the long weight that followed. Part 2 picks up with a third line-of-duty death Rick was first on scene for: the murder of Officer Joey Martin. 👍 If you support law enforcement stories told with honesty and context, like, subscribe, and share. 🔔 Turn on notifications so you don't miss Part 2 — it's already in production.
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