"His expertise in all these areas is just phenomenal," Shea adds. "He can adapt to anything. We're all very impressed."
These days, Cunningham gets most of his excitement teaching classes and volunteering with the Central City Fire Department. He and Michele have been married eight years. "A record," he laughs. "I've gotten a lot calmer, and I don't go away from home for months at a time anymore. Guess that's why she puts up with me."
Cunningham's no longer trying to save the world--just a small piece of it, one cop at a time.
"People tend to think of the bombing of the World Trade Center or in Oklahoma City as isolated incidents," he says. "Arab terrorists or homegrown lunatics. But it's just part of a pattern. You got the militias, the religious fanatics, the gangs, the race fanatics, the anti-tax and anti-government groups, the cults...What's going to happen when they all decide to get together? It won't be because they like each other, but each for their own ends."
The world is changing, he worries, and we're not ready.
Donn Kraemer, president of the Rocky Mountain Tactical Team Association and a 26-year veteran of the Lakewood Police Department, agrees that metro-area SWAT teams don't receive enough training to deal with more advanced weaponry, much less terrorism. The National Tactical Officers Association, a clearinghouse for SWAT organizations, suggests that to be effective, even part-time SWAT teams should practice no fewer than twenty hours a month. "In Lakewood, we get ten hours," Kraemer says. "Most get just one day."
Unlike most jurisdictions in the state, Denver and Aurora both have full-time teams. But unlike Los Angeles, where its full-time teams practice "90 percent of their time and spend 10 percent on missions," Kraemer notes, "Denver SWAT doesn't have the money or the time and actually spend a good deal of their duty hours serving warrants and other miscellaneous duties.
"It's no coincidence that hanging on a wall in the Denver SWAT room is the saying 'Training to minimal standards produces minimal results,'" Kraemer says. "SWAT teams actually shoot perpetrators less than the average street officer. Our goal is to resolve the situation without deadly force. But we have to hit what we shoot at when we do shoot, and the more practice, the better chance there is of doing that."
And the cops have to have the right weapons. Kraemer points out that Denver patrol cars weren't equipped with tactical rifles until after Officer Bruce VanderJagt was killed with an assault rifle last November; today the Denver Police Department has eighty.
While some police departments have in-house experts on combat techniques, including former military personnel working as officers, few have in-house experts who can cover all the bases. Kraemer says that's why a company like Cunningham's fills a vital role.
"The expertise is out there, mostly military guys who served in these elite units like the Navy SEALs or the Rangers," Kraemer says. "Gary is only one of a couple of guys in this area that I know of with his expertise in booby traps. But agencies need to avail themselves of that expertise, and a lot just won't until there's a need, which may be too late."
Increasingly, police are running into situations where military expertise comes in handy, Kraemer adds. Members of the patriot movement and other militant groups are proficient at booby-trapping, as are drug dealers. "A police officer has to be really careful in a 'no-knock' drug raid that you're not going to trip a wire and get a shotgun blast in the face, or pull the pin of a hand grenade, or something as simple as have a bottle of acid tip over on your head," Kraemer says. "The only limits are the imagination of the perpetrator and their willingness to set up and use it."
In contrast, the public seems unable to recognize the threat. "People don't want cops or government intrusion," Kraemer adds. "We go along like lemmings until something goes wrong, then we'll do anything to have someone step in to save us. You would think that what happened in Oklahoma City would have changed everybody's thinking. But really, we just say, 'That's horrible...glad it didn't happen here.'"
Look around, Cunningham says. Terrorism is much closer than you think. It's a booby-trapped militia house in Aurora. Or a couple arrested in Boulder whose van held a couple of dozen guns--half of them stolen--and a collection of newspaper clippings about slain police officers. Or two survivalists on the run in the Four Corners after killing a cop.
Police officers need more training; SWAT teams need better equipment. The ultimate responsibility, Cunningham says, lies with administrations that won't put up the money to equip and train officers--and a public that doesn't think it's necessary. "It's always, 'It's never happened here, so why do we need it?'" he says. "They never get their heads out of their asses until some officer or some citizen dies. It's complacency that kills.
