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Behind the Badge provides interviews and news from a law enforcement and public safety perspective. We interview officers, investigatiors and even reporters who work within the law enforcement community.
9 OCT 2024 · Retired Homicide Detective Dan Salcedo talked to Behind the Badge about meeting Kraft and other cases in his career as homicide detective.
The frail old man shuffled into the interview room. Shackled by the arms and legs he was escorted into the cell off the interview room. He was small, shrunken, much less than his listed 5-foot-10, 170 pounds. Gone was the hair, the 1980s mustache, and any trace of the smirk he occasionally flashed in court decades earlier.“It’s weird, when you look at him there’s nothing memorable,” said Dan Salcedo, a retired homicide detective with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, who interviewed the notorious Randy Kraft in 2012. “He’s not the prototypical media version of what a killer looks like. If you put him in a room filled with people, he’s the last one you’d pick.”Monsters are rarely what you expect and this guy was a definition of the “banality of evil” description that has been applied to some of the worst serial killers and rapists in U.S. history. Banal, boring, and unoriginal, hardly the stuff of nightmares.
Randy Kraft was known as the Scorecard Killer. He committed the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder of a minimum of sixteen young men between 1972 and 1983, the majority of whom he killed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California. Kraft is also believed to have committed the rape and murder of up to fifty-one other young men and boys.
3 SEP 2024 · Dr. Heather Williams, founder of Premier First Responder Psychological Services, came of age professionally in an era when increased attention - and resources - was brought to mental health and wellness for members of the emergency response professions as well as victims of crimes.
Williams spent more than 20 years working in crisis and trauma from differing perspectives, both with the Orange County Sheriff deputies in peer support and victims of crime with the Community Service Programs (CSP) Victim Assistance Programs.While the connections between the two may not be apparent at first, Williams says, “When you think of crime and victimization, it’s like a ripple effect. When you throw a rock in a pond, the ripples spread and many people are affected.”While working with the sheriff’s and victims’ programs,
Williams said she was “peer pressured,” to go back to school and earn her doctorate. In 2019, she created Premier, which offers counseling, consulting, peer support, crisis response and wellness resources to criminal justice personnel and first responders.
Since Williams entered the field, shocking statistics such as the rate of suicide among police have been researched and discussed with solutions hard to come by. Between 2016 and 2022, 1,200 law enforcement and corrections officers died by suicide according to First HELP, an organization that tracks first responder suicides.Officer-involved shootings, child abuse, vehicle accidents, death or serious injury of co-workers, line-of-duty death, and gruesome homicides are just a few examples of such events, referred to as critical incidents that police are regularly exposed to.
While members of the public may be exposed to two or three critical incidents in a life, by the time a police officer retires that can easily be subjected to 200 or 300, Williams said.Williams sat with Joe Vargas, a retired Anaheim Police Captain and columnist, content editor with Behind the Badge, to talk about trauma, PTSD, and mental issues responders face, the realities and myths, and strategies to handle and treat them.
For more information about https://www.premier1stresponder.com/.
16 AUG 2024 · It’s said it’s hard to prove a negative.
When an event is prevented from occurring, that statistic is rarely reported and the public doesn’t know what might have been.
Mike Succi spent 23 years as a member of the Secret Service and in the Oval Office with the George W. Bush and Barack Obama teams. During that time the goal was to keep the protection of public officials out of the news by stopping threats before they happened. And the Secret Service is very good, which is why attacks on political figures are so rare.
“For every attempt, there are hundreds that look for an angle, that look for a weakness,” said Succi, who now runs https://www.succiinvestigations.com/, which offers an array of services from personal protection, surveillance, and site surveys, to digital and forensic investigations. “We train for that one percent,” he said of the Secret Service and stopping those who carry out an attack on a public figure.
The greatest successes of the Secret Service are from the attacks that never occur.Thomas Matthew Crooks, who wounded former President Donald Trump on Saturday, July 13, with a rifle shot in rural Pennsylvania, was that exception.
“What failed,” Succi said of the Secret Service and law enforcement protection, “was the advance work.”
Succi sat down with Behind the Badge to discuss the Secret Service, how it operates, its strategies and tactics in protection and also what failed at the farm near Butler, Pa.
Violence as old as politics
As long as there have been governments and politics, there have been attacks and assassinations. In the United States, presidents have been in the crosshairs ever since house painter Richard Lawrence attempted to shoot President Andrew Jackson with two pistols that misfired. Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy were shot to death while in office. Ronald Reagan was the last sitting president wounded in 1981.
While there have been countless attempts, plots, rumors, and contemplated attacks in the intervening years, the Secret Service remarkably has kept every President and presidential candidate from harm. It is a testament to the agency’s scrupulous training, procedures, and policies over the years. The best sign of its effectiveness was in how little it was mentioned.
And then came the attempt on Trump.
Succi notes that with better planning during set-up of the venue, equipment and banners could easily have been shifted to eliminate the line of sight from the building where Crooks fired to the stage. There was also a failure to react to the sightings of the assassin and his suspicious behavior before the event.
Succi noted another factor was the Trump campaign’s tendency to favor outdoor settings, rather than arenas and stadiums. Such venues are less expensive to set up, but harder to protect.
Regardless, Succi says the Secret Service had the needed assets to do the job.
Although he praises the counter-snipers for quickly reacting to Crooks, he notes that they are a last resort not the first.
“We have a policy of prevention,” he said, rather than engage in shootouts. “We’re trained to get the protectee out and safe.”
In the aftermath, Succi says the Secret Service will learn and be better.
“We’ll be studying this case for years,” Succi said. However, he says the fault is with his former agency, not the police.
“This was a Secret Service site,” he said. “The finger pointing comes back at us, as it should.”
30 JUL 2024 · By Greg Mellen
Happy Medina didn’t set out to become one of the foremost experts on human trafficking in
Orange County, or the country, for that matter. But as he learned more, the father of four girls found his purpose and passion.
Medina was 20 years into his career when the chance came to join a task force investigating
and prosecuting human trafficking. Despite being illegal everywhere, human trafficking is one of
the least understood crimes among law enforcement and civilian populations. Estimated as a
$150 billion criminal enterprise worldwide with upward of 40 million to 50 million victims, human
trafficking is often thought of as prostitution — a so-called victimless crime that is anything but.
“I didn’t know what human trafficking was,” Medina admits. “I was in the last third of my career
and I really wanted to do something I felt that I would be passionate about.”
Once Medina saw how vulnerable and exploited the victims were, he said, “it opened my eyes”
to a world far removed from the mythologized portrayal in popular culture.
For the final eight years of his career with the Anaheim Police Department, Medina was
attached to the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force as an investigator and provided
training on human trafficking across the state.
During that time, the O.C. Task Force became lauded as a trailblazer in prosecuting human
trafficking. The Task Force literally helped rewrite the book in understanding and helping treat
prostitutes as most often victims rather than perpetrators of crime, and partnering with social
service groups to help the victims.
Since he retired in 2022, Medina has provided lectures, workshops, and training on the subject
to law enforcement, prosecutors, social service groups, victim advocates, medical professionals,
and the general public. Learn more about his work and services on https://www.linkedin.com/in/happy-j-medina-0777b797/.
Medina sat down with Behind the Badge to talk about the still shadowy and misunderstood
world of human trafficking.
25 JUL 2024 · Hear from the journalist who spent four decades trying to provide ‘suicide’ was actually murderBy Greg MellenIn a bit of reporting tenacity that is hard to envision, much less execute, former journalist turned true-crime author Larry Welborn chased a story from early in his career into a 40-plus year pursuit for justice for a murder victim, her family, and the unpunished perpetrator.
In https://www.amazon.com/MURDER-SUICIDE-reporter-unravels-betrayal/dp/B0D7TJ4HW1 now available on Amazon and other book retailers, Welborn details the enduring quest undertaken while he was also the “Dean of Courtroom Journalists” in Southern California.Welborn was a reporter with the Orange County Register for 44 years and covered, by his estimation, anywhere from 500 to 1,000 jury trials during his award-winning career. Larry Welborn spent 44 years as a staff writer at The Orange County Register, much of that time on the courthouse beat, where he covered more than 500 trials and chronicled the 60 most notorious criminal cases in Orange County history. As a college student, he covered the Tate-LaBianca murder trial of the Manson Family for the Der Spiegel German newsmagazine.
But the one case that stuck with him longer than any others, was the 1974 murder of Linda Cummings, sloppily staged to look like a suicide. It is a story that tells of a staggering miscarriage of justice, a truth plain to see had anyone cared to look, and a system aligned against the victim. Only 46 years later, when the cause on Cummings’ death certificate was officially changed to “homicide,” was the final — and admittedly incomplete — justice delivered.On the Behind the Badge podcast, Welborn takes us through the twists and turns that led to his debut book.
Behind the Badge provides interviews and news from a law enforcement and public safety perspective. We interview officers, investigatiors and even reporters who work within the law enforcement community.
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