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I sat down with four veteran tactical professionals at the National Tactical Officers Association Conference in Nashville to have the conversation that needed to happen two days after that 2022 NTOA position paper on no-knock warrant service dropped.
At the table: Steve Mescan, Director of Training and Education for the NTOA and a 27-year Pittsburgh Bureau of Police SWAT veteran. Chris Eklund, NTOA senior instructor and retired training coordinator and team leader from the Orange County Sheriff's Office in Florida. Matt Smith, Senior Corporal and 21-year SWAT operator with the Dallas Police Department. And Brandon Hernandez, longtime SWAT team leader, TTPOA Region VII Director, and the guy who first wanted this conversation to happen. Between them, these four men have run thousands of warrant services, trained countless officers across the country, and lived every part of this debate from the inside.
What unfolds is one of the most direct and nuanced conversations the Iron Sights Podcast has ever hosted. The group tears apart why the word 'dynamic' means something completely different depending on which team, which region, or which instructor you learned it from. They dig into why the Dallas SWAT data on officer-involved shootings tells a story that the position paper never addressed, and how and why teams across the country interpreted and responded to the position paper in the way they did. Most importantly, they agree on more than they disagree, and that agreement points to the real problem: terminology confusion, broken communication chains, and agencies running operations outside their actual capability with nobody willing to say the hard thing.
This episode is essential listening for anyone inside law enforcement, for the civilians and professionals who want to actually understand the job, and for anyone who has ever watched a news story about a warrant service and assumed they knew what happened. You didn't have the context. Now you will.
In this episode:
• A 'no-knock' warrant is a judicial exception obtained by an investigator, not a tactic: it gives a team options but does not dictate how entry is made. Teams can and should still announce presence, purpose, and authority even when holding that exception.
• The word 'dynamic' has no universal definition across U.S. SWAT teams: some teams use it to mean speed-surprise-violence-of-action with no processing, while others use it to mean continuous deliberate movement with throttle control, and the same team will sometimes split on the term mid-operation.
• The Dallas SWAT team data inverts the assumption that dynamic entry is categorically more dangerous.
• The NTOA position paper was intended to address teams running no-knock exceptions as a direct trigger for immediate silent entry, a practice seen causing 'biblical disasters' nationally, but the marketing and framing created a blanket interpretation that affected capable teams who were never the intended audience.
• A centering step, a threshold assessment, a center step, and pie-ing the door can all describe the same physical movement at different speeds: the failure is not in the movement but in instructors teaching the label without teaching the 'why,' leaving officers to follow a tick list instead of solving the actual problem in front of them.
• Selection is the upstream problem nobody wants to address: tactics get watered down or abandoned not because the tactic is wrong but because leadership refuses to have the hard conversation that a specific operator or team is not capable of executing it safely.
• The LEOKA data used to support arguments about entry method risk is so vague and inconsistently reported, with a five-percent response rate on NTOA member surveys, that drawing hard-line scientific conclusions from it is inherently problematic, and both sides of this debate are operating with incomplete data.
• Announcing presence, purpose, and authority on every warrant, even with a no-knock exception in hand, is compulsory.
Chapters:
0:01 Pre-roll: The Capable Standard and The Brief
1:33 Show intro and mission statement
2:25 Nashville NTOA Conference context and guest introductions
4:59 Steve Mescan bio: Pittsburgh SWAT to NTOA Director of Training
6:44 Chris Eklund bio: Orange County SO to NTOA senior instructor
9:49 Matt Smith and Brandon Hernandez introductions
14:03 What the NTOA is, what it does, and how it fits into LE
24:51 Content without context: how social media distorts incident debriefs
27:44 Terminology breakdown: no-knock, dynamic, and why words matter
30:13 What 'dynamic' actually means across different teams and regions
33:01 Deliberate vs. dynamic: centering steps, threshold assessments, and the tick-list trap
49:29 Selection, capability, and the hard conversation nobody wants to have
Mentioned:
Steve Mescan — Director of Training and Education for the NTOA and retired 27-year Pittsburgh Bureau of Police SWAT operator, appearing as a guest at the NTOA Nashville conference.
Chris Eklund — NTOA senior instructor and retired Sergeant and SWAT training coordinator from the Orange County Sheriff's Office in Florida, appearing as a guest at the NTOA Nashville conference.
Matt Smith — Dallas Police Department Senior Corporal and 21-year SWAT operator who provides Dallas-specific data on warrant service outcomes and challenges the framing of the NTOA position paper.
Brandon Hernandez — Garland Police Department SWAT team leader and TTPOA Region VII Director who initiated the conversation and pushes back on how the NTOA paper affected capable teams.
John Kolman — Founder of the NTOA in 1983, described as having written approximately 200 letters with his wife to gauge interest in a national tactical officers organization.
Ron McCarthy — Deceased LAPD SWAT pioneer and one of the NTOA's original figures, credited with both advocating for hostage-rescue-style tactics as a readiness tool and later raising early concerns about risk mitigation in their application.
