Tactical Tangents

Offices come in a variety of shapes and guises, from a room with desks and whiteboards to the front seat of a squad car. In this solo episode, Jim sounds off on his favorite topic: Management is not …

Sometimes bad training passes down information that might once have been good, but garbles it. Take “Shooting to Stop the Threat”…please. This episode sees Mike and Jim discuss the nuances of using l…

For a person in a first responder line of work, being caught with an inadequate skill toolset in a critical incident can lead to the sort of feelings of helplessness that are a greased rail to PTSD-l…

In a short episode inspired by a listener question, Mike dives into the art of noticing abnormalities. An EMT instructs his trainees to put every patient on the EKG, whether the complaint is cardiac …

What is a professional? The dictionary says, at its simplest, that it’s someone paid to perform a task, as opposed to an amateur. But there’s more to it than a paycheck. In this episode, Jim and Mike…

Can you weaponize a positive mental outlook? In this short episode, Jim talks about positivity and optimism and how they can be cultivated and employed by leaders. When your job is basically to fores…

In this short episode, Jim talks about the benefits he finds in taking the time to get outdoors. If you’re listening to these podcasts, you’re probably a pretty outdoorsy person, but take the time to…

While gear is expensive and important, humans are even more so. When you’ve found the people with the right aptitudes and trained them with the right skills, how do you keep them achieving up to thei…

For the first episode of the New Year, Mike and Jim tap one of the podcast’s most important resources: You, the listeners! We asked the members of the Tactical Tangents Facebook Discussion Group for …

The A-Team couldn’t have pulled off a caper with four B.A. Baracuses , U2 never would have been a hit with four Bonos, and nine Legolases couldn’t have gotten the One Ring to Mordor. Putting together…

In this episode, Mike sits down for a discussion with Ross Hick. In addition to his career supervising violent felons as a Probation Surveillance Officer, Ross works as a trainer with Citizens Defens…

Nobody wants to put on a show that’s all war stories. It sounds like you’re trying to fluff your resume and can bore others who’ve also been there and done that. Plus you don’t want to talk out of sc…

For all its chaos, the stereotypical active shooter situation is fairly straightforward: There’s a bad guy killing people, and the good guys need to close with him and stop him as quickly as possible…

There are people who believe that inserting the police in a situation makes things worse. Are they right? In this solo episode from Mike, he looks at the perils of the “fear biter” and the negative e…

America's largest mass killer attack revisited by retired LVMPD Lt. Will Huddler and Sgt. Ashton Packe, who share their accounts of the Route 91 Country Music Festival shooting with audio and video f…

Whether it’s a former significant other who just won’t accept the end of a relationship, or a semi-stranger from the internet who imagines a relationship where there never was one, dealing with a sta…

In a crossover episode of Tactical Tangents, Mike sits down with Danimal of The Thin Brewed Line to talk about setting up a training program to keep officers alive on the streets…and in the training …

What are we doing here and why are we doing it? With an assist from Mike, Jim lays out the secret; the keys to the whole mission of Tactical Tangents. These are the key concepts to helping the Doers …

It’s easy to find yourself thrust into a position where others regard you as an ”expert”, but what really constitutes expertise? Do you have it? Can it be acquired? When will you feel like you have i…

A lone gunman killed 5 Dallas police officers and wounded several others in this 2016 attack following a series of contested officer involved shootings throughout the country. Lessons include ambush …