Heroes 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.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 24, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 14, 2026
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Bill Bratton — Sweet Alice, the Bronx, and What the Job Costs | Part 2 (opens the original)
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Bill Bratton led six police departments over fifty years, including the NYPD twice and the LAPD from 2002 to 2009. In the second half of this conversation, the policy arguments give way to the people who shaped him — and to the parts of the job that no one applies for. It opens in Watts. When Bratton arrived in Los Angeles, his community relations sergeant told him to go see Sweet Alice, a sharecropper's daughter from the South who had become the driving force of one of the city's most distresse
Bill Bratton — Broken Windows, Stop-and-Frisk, and the Defund Years | Part 1 (opens the original)
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Bill Bratton is the only person ever to have led both the New York City Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department. He joined the Boston Police Department in 1970 at twenty-three, badge 1190, and over the next five decades he ran six agencies, presided over the largest crime decline in modern American history, and became the most identifiable advocate for a philosophy of policing that is still argued about today. He now chairs the Homeland Security Advisory Council. He does not open
Barry Black — Building the Case Against Timothy McVeigh | Part 2 (opens the original)
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Barry Black retired from the FBI after thirty-one years as a master bomb technician and master instructor. On April 19, 1995, he was one of only two FBI bomb technicians in the state of Oklahoma. Part 2 is about everything that came after the blast. The break was a confidential serial number, stamped on a 300-pound axle thrown into the street by the blast. It came back to Ryder, and Ryder to Elliott's Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas, where a man calling himself Robert Kling had rented a truck
Barry Black — The FBI Bomb Technician at the Oklahoma City Bombing | Part 1 (opens the original)
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Barry Black spent thirty-one years in the FBI. He joined wanting white collar work, having changed his major and his university to get an accounting degree because that was what the Bureau was hiring. He retired a master bomb technician and a master instructor who trained NATO and allied special forces on every continent but Antarctica. On April 19, 1995, he was one of only two FBI bomb technicians in the state of Oklahoma, and he had held the certification for fifty-three weeks. That morning he
Frank Pegueros — Answering D.A.R.E.'s Critics, and What the Job Costs | Part 2 (opens the original)
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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 co
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