Foreword

      By Massad Ayoob

      The slaughter of four young California Highway Patrol Officers at Newhall, in 1970, was a watershed experience in the history of American law enforcement. It was the slap in the face that awoke the profession to the fact that its training, collectively, had stagnated. Newhall became the dawn of officer survival training for modern police.

      Many lessons were learned in the sacrifice of those four brave men at the hands of two classic examples of feral homo sapiens. Lessons of risk assessment and tactics. The realization that there is a time to approach and a time to fall back and contain. The importance of adequate weapons and of reality-based training and policy.

      CHP’s honest self-assessment led to sweeping changes in the way police were equipped and in the ways high-risk policing was accomplished. We will never know how many police lives have since been saved by the lessons that grew from the martyrdom of Patrolmen Alleyn, Frago, Gore, and Pence.

      Time went on. Memory dimmed. This writer became a law enforcement trainer two years after Newhall, when the tragedy was fresh in the collective mind of the police establishment; CHP’s training film on the incident was practically mandatory viewing for cops nationwide. By the twenty-first century, though, we had a generation of young officers for whom Newhall had dropped from the radar screen.

      One observer who recognized this was Mike Wood. Not wishing to see the lessons of the tragedy blurred, he began to dig. His fresh eye uncovered details that had not been widely known. Mike reached far beyond the crime scene and into politics and mores of the time. He uncovered salient points that helped us gain a fresh understanding of why four productive lives had been cut so tragically short that night in Newhall.

      Mike Wood’s book is, I think, the best and most comprehensive analysis of the incident yet. It reminds us that the keys to surviving violent encounters