Heroes Behind the Badge

Citizens Behind the Badge
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From the front lines to the final call, Heroes Behind the Badge brings you the untold stories of America's law enforcement community. Led by Craig Floyd, who spent 34 years working alongside police officers across the nation, alongside veteran facilitator Dennis Collins and law enforcement expert Bill Erfurth, this podcast cuts through misconceptions to reveal the true nature of modern policing. Our dynamic trio brings unique perspectives to each episode: Craig shares deep insights from his decades of experience and relationships within law enforcement, Dennis guides conversations with meticulous research and natural flow, and Bill adds engaging commentary that makes complex law enforcement topics accessible to all listeners. Each episode features in-depth conversations with law enforcement professionals, sharing their firsthand experiences, challenges, and triumphs. Drawing from extensive research and real-world experience, we explore the realities faced by the over 800,000 officers who serve and protect our communities every day. From dramatic accounts of crisis response to quiet moments of everyday heroism, our show illuminates the human stories behind the badge. We dive deep into the statistics, policies, and practices that shape modern law enforcement, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of what it truly means to serve in law enforcement today. Whether you're a law enforcement professional, a concerned citizen, or someone seeking to understand the complexities of modern policing, Heroes Behind the Badge provides the context, insights, and authentic perspectives you won't find anywhere else. Join us weekly as we honor those who dedicate their lives to keeping our communities safe, one story at a time. Presented by Citizens Behind the Badge, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and advocating for law enforcement professionals across the United States. Join over 126,000 Americans who have already signed our Declaration of Support for law enforcement at behindbadge.org.

  1. 4d ago

    Dave Hinners — The Arrests, the Trial, and What It Cost | Part 2

    Dave Hinners was a Wichita patrol officer, not quite three years on the job, when he became the first officer to speak with the lone survivor of the December 2000 Wichita Massacre. Today he is the executive director of the United States Deputy Sheriff's Association. In this second of two parts, he picks up with hosts Dennis Collins and Craig Floyd the morning after. By nine o'clock that morning, a 911 caller had spotted a man matching the description dragging a big-screen TV across an apartment parking lot, and the first brother was in custody. Hinners explains that the killers had gone back to the house after the shootings to take what was left, and he still wonders what might have happened if the survivor had seen an unlit farmhouse 200 yards away. The second brother was arrested after his own girlfriend recognized him and made a phone call. Both were in custody within 24 hours. At trial, the survivor testified the way she had spoken to Hinners in the emergency room: strong, credible and unafraid. He explains why he deliberately never spoke with her again before he testified, and why he still thinks about her. Without her, he says, the case would have depended on another witness or DNA, and it would not have moved as fast. He also describes the crime scene work: a lead investigator trained in archaeology who had the scene gridded and every section collected in its own drum. Craig Floyd then asks what the case cost him. Hinners calls it one of his demons. He went back on shift the next night after about an hour and a half of sleep. He credits his department's stress debriefings, a close-knit shift and his wife, and argues that officers have to talk about what they carry rather than lock it away. The episode closes on his work with the United States Deputy Sheriff's Association, which provides free training and safety equipment to underfunded agencies and a $1,000 benefit to the family of every officer who dies in the line of duty. Craig Floyd, who serves on its board, explains how the conversation led to this episode. New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at https://heroesbehindthebadge.com. © 2026 Citizens Behind the Badge. All Rights Reserved.

  2. 6d ago

    Dave Hinners — First Officer at the Wichita Massacre | Part 1

    Dave Hinners was not quite three years into his career with the Wichita Police Department in December 2000. Today he is the executive director of the United States Deputy Sheriff's Association. In this first of two parts, he tells hosts Dennis Collins and Craig Floyd what happened on the night he became the first officer to speak with the lone survivor of the Wichita Massacre. The call came in mid-December, in a foot and a half of snow. Dispatch described it first as an assault, then a stabbing, then a shooting. At the house, Hinners found a young woman wrapped in a blanket, bleeding from the back of her head. She had walked about a mile through the snow after being shot, hiding from passing cars in case the killers were coming back. A plastic hair clip had deflected the bullet just enough to keep it from penetrating. He followed her to the hospital, and she never stopped talking. Hinners calls her the best witness he has ever had. She knew she was the only one left, and the only one who could solve the case. Over the next several hours he filled a case book, relayed descriptions of both suspects and a stolen pickup truck, and eventually had to tell her that none of her friends had survived. An off-duty partner with a broken hand wrote up the stolen-truck report from the hospital. By the next morning, a 911 call about a man dragging a big-screen TV across an apartment parking lot led officers to the first of the two brothers. Along the way, Craig Floyd reads the names of the victims — Brad Heyka, Heather Muller, Aaron Sander, Jason Befort and Ann Walenta — and Hinners describes trying to process what one human being could do to another while still doing the job in front of him. He stayed with her until he was relieved the next morning, then went in to write up the cases. In Part 2, how the second brother was found, the survivor's testimony at trial, and what the case still costs the officer who was there at the start. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at https://heroesbehindthebadge.com. © 2026 Citizens Behind the Badge. All Rights Reserved.

  3. Sep 24

    Bill Bratton — Sweet Alice, the Bronx, and What the Job Costs | Part 2

    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 distressed neighborhoods. She once stood up at a community meeting and told an activist attacking the new chief to shut up. When Bratton left the city in 2009, she told him why her neighborhood had trusted him, in three words he still calls the highest honor of his career. From there he turns to training, and to the difference between the departments he ran. The NYPD he took over in the 1990s was reactive and discouraged; the LAPD was proud, self-reliant and permanently short of officers, working with a fraction of the numbers he believes it needed. His own academy in Boston in 1970 lasted seven weeks. He argues the country still undertrains its police, and that the cost falls on officers first. Asked for his best moments, he describes lowering his gun in front of an armed man holding a bank teller hostage, and the 2007 MacArthur Park crisis he says was his finest hour as a chief. Then the worst. For Bratton it is not a single moment but every officer he had to bury, and one night in 1994 when a young officer's widow arrived at a Bronx hospital still in her waitress uniform. He has carried what he heard in that hallway for thirty-two years. He closes with Steven McDonald, the NYPD detective paralyzed in 1986 who publicly forgave the teenager who shot him, and who rode 235 miles by ambulance to attend Bratton's father's funeral. Across both parts, this is a portrait of a leader who changed American policing and remains unsentimental about what that took. New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at https://heroesbehindthebadge.com. © 2026 Citizens Behind the Badge. All Rights Reserved.

  4. Sep 22

    Bill Bratton — Broken Windows, Stop-and-Frisk, and the Defund Years | Part 1

    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 this conversation by defending the profession. Asked what he would warn his younger self about, he says expectations — and then describes the department he actually joined as one with a lot of corruption, a lot of racism, some degree of brutality and a lot of incompetence. That candor sets the terms for everything after it. The centerpiece of Part 1 is broken windows, explained by the person who was living it before it had a name. In 1978, four years before Kelling and Wilson published their article, Bratton was running community meetings four nights a week in Boston's Back Bay and finding that residents cared less about serious crime than about the disorder they walked past every day. He connects that directly to stop-question-frisk, which he defends without qualification while insisting on the five conditions that keep it from going wrong: policies, procedures, guidelines, training, supervision and accountability. Along the way he recounts the 9/11 intelligence failure, the two federal agencies that were forbidden by law from speaking to each other, and a working relationship with Rudy Giuliani that he compares to a Rubik's Cube. The last stretch is the hardest. Six years after George Floyd, Bratton calls the defund movement one of the stupidest ever inflicted on American policing, and he is specific about the cost — officers who left early, and a generation that never applied, because they had been shown a version of the job in which police are oppressors rather than guardians. In Part 2, the compliment he ranks above every medal he was given, a night in 1994 that has stayed with him for thirty-two years, and what the work took from him and his family. New episodes drop one Tuesday and Thursdays. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at https://heroesbehindthebadge.com.

  5. Sep 10

    Barry Black — Building the Case Against Timothy McVeigh | Part 2

    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. There was no digital imagery in 1995, so a sketch artist produced the faces the country came to know as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2. Fifteen thousand leads followed. A clerk at the Dreamland Motel recognized one of the sketches and remembered the guest in room 25 signing another name: Timothy McVeigh. What closed the loop was a records search. An offline NCIC query showed that a state trooper named Charlie Hanger had already arrested McVeigh — ninety minutes after the bombing, ninety miles north of town, for driving an old yellow Mercury with no license plate. He was hours from bonding out when the federal hold landed. Barry flew up by helicopter overnight and seized the car himself. Terry Nichols, who had seen the arrest, surrendered the following afternoon. Barry is precise about what conviction required: phone records, fingerprints, witness identifications, and a business card wedged between the seats of a patrol car reading "need more TNT at $5 a stick." He explains why three men received three very different sentences, and why that decision belonged to a jury rather than to the agents who built the case. The last third is about cost. Funerals attended while the investigation was still running. Seven-day weeks for two years. A room at the National Bombing Memorial he will not walk into. A rare cancer diagnosed eight years after his deployment to Ground Zero. And a blunt account of what passed for mental health support in 1995, when a team leader told his people that needing a counselor meant they were in the wrong line of work. He now teaches, and tells his students the same thing every time: friends, faith, family — because you are not going to forget it. New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at https://citizensbehindthebadge.org.

  6. Sep 8

    Barry Black — The FBI Bomb Technician at the Oklahoma City Bombing | Part 1

    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 was seven miles from downtown, sitting in an unmarked Oldsmobile with another operator, waiting to arrest a fugitive on a white collar case that had taken him years to indict. He felt the detonation before he understood it — 3.2 on the Richter scale, felt sixty miles away in Stillwater. He drove toward the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building with a small kit bag in the trunk, not yet knowing whether he was looking at a plane crash, a gas main, or a bomb. The response was never abstract for him. His wife was a federal officer who worked in the building; she walked out at nine o'clock, two minutes before the blast, and he would not learn she was alive for ninety minutes. The payroll clerks he handed his check to every other Thursday, women his own age, were all killed. Craig Floyd reads the names of the eight federal agents who died, each of them since added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Barry also explains the mechanics without ceremony: how he determined this was a vehicle-borne device rather than an accident, what ANFO is and why it needed a booster, and how an explosive theft report filed months earlier at a Kansas quarry would eventually tie Terry Nichols to the bomb through a cordless drill and a drilled-out padlock. Part 1 ends where the case breaks open — a 300-pound truck axle in the street, and a reserve deputy who spits on his finger, wipes away the grease, and reveals a confidential vehicle identification number. Part 2 follows that number to Junction City, Kansas, through fifteen thousand leads and nearly nine hundred investigators, to a traffic stop ninety miles north of town for a missing license plate. New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at https://citizensbehindthebadge.org.

  7. Aug 27

    Frank Pegueros — Answering D.A.R.E.'s Critics, and What the Job Costs | Part 2

    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 community, and Pegueros argues that is the whole mechanism. He describes officers who took the school assignment expecting a soft landing before retirement, and who report seeing a positive reaction to their work for the first time on a daily basis. Bill Erfurth tells his own story from that world: a burglary case, a set of latent prints, and the discovery that they belonged to the son of one of his first sergeants. What that sergeant said when Bill came to arrest his kid is the part he has never forgotten. The conversation moves through fentanyl and why Pegueros refuses to call 80,000 overdose deaths a year progress, online bullying and what social media platforms could stop if they chose to, the genuine decline in teenage drinking, and what COVID did to a generation of students. Asked by a reporter to name the most dangerous drug on the streets, his answer is alcohol — the one nobody counts. It closes with the thing that makes this episode worth recommending. In 2000, D.A.R.E. convened the people attacking it and asked how to build a better program. The first day went badly. By the second, the room had turned. One of those critics, Dr. Dick Clayton — who authored much of the negative research from the 80s and 90s still circulating online — asked to go through the training as a participant rather than an observer. He now sits on D.A.R.E.'s board of directors and chairs its scientific advisory board. Contains discussion of suicide, including officer suicide, and some strong language. If you're struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 in the US — call or text 988.

  8. Aug 25

    Frank Pegueros — What the D.A.R.E. Program Actually Teaches Now | Part 1

    Francisco "Frank" Pegueros spent 26 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, retiring as a captain, and has spent the 30 years since as President and CEO of D.A.R.E. America. He has now been with the program longer than he was with the department. He told Dennis Collins, Craig Floyd and Bill Erfurth he has never had three bad days in a row — the standard he set when he took the job. Most people's memory of D.A.R.E. is a T-shirt and an officer at the front of a classroom talking for 45 minutes about the evils of drugs. That version is gone. The original curriculum ran 17 lessons and worked as what one educator called "the sage on the stage." Today it runs ten lessons licensed from Penn State, the officer speaks for six to eight minutes, and the students work in small groups applying a four-step decision-making model to situations from their own lives. New topics arrive as enhancement lessons that slot in without breaking the sequence — which is how vaping, online safety and suicide prevention entered the program. The threats have changed as much as the teaching. Pegueros describes a vaping industry that he says engineered its devices so illicit substances could be substituted in, then marketed bubblegum and soda flavors to children. He describes websites that publish dosing guidance for minors. He describes foreign actors extorting kids online, and a teen suicide crisis that D.A.R.E. now addresses in partnership with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. What holds it together are two stories he tells almost in passing: a student who had not spoken in six years of school, who read her D.A.R.E. essay aloud at a full assembly; and an officer whose students' older siblings quietly decided to put themselves between her and a gang's retaliation plot. Every D.A.R.E. officer, he says, has one of those every semester. Part 2 covers what police work costs the people who do it — and the academic whose research built the case against D.A.R.E., who now chairs its scientific advisory board. Contains discussion of teen suicide, self-harm and online exploitation of children. If you're struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 in the US — call or text 988. Learn more at https://behindbadge.org.

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About

From the front lines to the final call, Heroes Behind the Badge brings you the untold stories of America's law enforcement community. Led by Craig Floyd, who spent 34 years working alongside police officers across the nation, alongside veteran facilitator Dennis Collins and law enforcement expert Bill Erfurth, this podcast cuts through misconceptions to reveal the true nature of modern policing. Our dynamic trio brings unique perspectives to each episode: Craig shares deep insights from his decades of experience and relationships within law enforcement, Dennis guides conversations with meticulous research and natural flow, and Bill adds engaging commentary that makes complex law enforcement topics accessible to all listeners. Each episode features in-depth conversations with law enforcement professionals, sharing their firsthand experiences, challenges, and triumphs. Drawing from extensive research and real-world experience, we explore the realities faced by the over 800,000 officers who serve and protect our communities every day. From dramatic accounts of crisis response to quiet moments of everyday heroism, our show illuminates the human stories behind the badge. We dive deep into the statistics, policies, and practices that shape modern law enforcement, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of what it truly means to serve in law enforcement today. Whether you're a law enforcement professional, a concerned citizen, or someone seeking to understand the complexities of modern policing, Heroes Behind the Badge provides the context, insights, and authentic perspectives you won't find anywhere else. Join us weekly as we honor those who dedicate their lives to keeping our communities safe, one story at a time. Presented by Citizens Behind the Badge, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and advocating for law enforcement professionals across the United States. Join over 126,000 Americans who have already signed our Declaration of Support for law enforcement at behindbadge.org.

Information

  • Creator
    Citizens Behind the Badge
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    76
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Citizens Behind the Badge
  • Show Website
    Heroes Behind the Badge

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