Assistant Sheriff Michael Hillmann joined the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in September 2008 after serving for nearly 42 years with the Los Angeles Police Department. His name is well known in law enforcement for his leadership skills. Chief Hillmann received the prestigious Sherman Block Award shortly before joining the Sheriff’s Department. That citation said in part: “Michael Hillmann has dedicated his life to raising the standards of the law enforcement profession, and the entire Los Angeles Police Department has benefited from his presence among their ranks. As a pillar of the Los Angeles Police Department, and the entire Los Angeles community, as well as being the personification of excellence in police work, Deputy Chief Hillmann is highly worthy and deserving of receiving the Sherman Block Law Enforcement Professional of the Year Award.”
In an effort to familiarize the Department and the Orange County community with the background of Assistant Sheriff Hillmann, the Department blog will feature a three part series on his law enforcement career. The first part will cover his time as a police officer, the second his record as a supervisor and manager with the LAPD and the third part his role with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
Mike Hillmann’s 21st birthday was one he will always remember; it was the day he entered the Los Angeles Police Department Academy as a Recruit Officer.
Raised in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Los Angeles and educated in Catholic schools, he found his loving family bewildered, yet proud, of his decision to become a law enforcement officer.
It was October 24, 1966.
He had wanted to be a police officer since he was a young teenager. A LAPD motor officer saved the life of Mike Hillmann’s younger brother. That officer became Mike Hillmann’s hero.
None of his relatives had been police officers.
“I didn’t know anybody on the LAPD. I wasn’t beholden to anybody. I was going to make my own way. I was going to be myself,” Orange County Assistant Sheriff Hillmann said in a recent interview.
The Los Angeles Police Department had faced the Watts Riots the previous year. The LAPD had to call on help from the California National Guard. The LAPD Chief turned command of the riots response over to a National Guard Colonel, who in civilian life was a motor officer with LAPD.
The riots left 34 dead, 1,032 injured, and 3,952 arrested. A thousand buildings burned.
The recruit class was far different than the classes of today.
“The class was all male, a good majority had been in the military,” recalled Chief Hillmann. “The discipline at the Academy didn’t concern me at all. The Drill Instructor screamed at us but I considered myself in good shape and ready for anything. I enjoyed the challenge.”
What did surprise him was the academic work. [more]
Recruit Officer Hillmann found himself fascinated by search and seizure lessons and studied extra hard to learn the concepts of civil and criminal law.
He had no exposure to the law at all before he entered the Academy.
Mike Hillmann found the academic work difficult. He joined study groups and conquered the material, at the same time making some lifelong friends.
When it got to be December, the LAPD turned out the recruits for temporary assignment: holiday traffic duty. He found directing traffic a bore.
“My calling is to be put in the middle of chaos; I enjoy trying to sort it out. It is the challenge.” Traffic, even in LA, lacked the caliber of chaos he sought.
The Academy had a four and a half month program in those days. One of the things he liked best was combat wrestling. The key to success in the exercise of combat wrestling is to do your best without wearing yourself out too quickly. It tested many of the skills, both mental and physical, that he would hone during his career in law enforcement.
The future Orange County Assistant Sheriff found himself studying incidents where police officers had been killed. He looked for lessons that might save a life in the future. Some of the lessons were the same he brought away from combat wrestling exercises.
From the Academy, he was sent to the brand new Rampart Division.
It was the same area where he had grown up.
“There were a couple of times I had to arrest people I had known,” he said.
A lot of his time in Rampart was spent walking a beat, wearing an eight point hat on his head and swinging a baton.
He walked the beat with a few veteran officers whose influence remains with him still.
“They walked like they were the Mayor of MacArthur Park. I looked up to them. They knew everybody.”
There were no shoulder radios in those days. If the foot officers needed backup, the only link to help was the Gamewell Boxes located along the beat.
It was rough duty. Sometimes people would come out of the local bars and start fighting with the first person they saw wearing an eight point hat. Sometimes the fights were hellacious but Beat Officer Hillmann learned some valuable lessons. One of the most important lessons was that you had a partner and they had to rely on each other.
Hillmann developed a reputation as a dedicated police officer, one who took the job seriously.
He kept his record clean and he put people in jail.
Working Rampart, he felt that he was serving the community that was his hometown, a place he cared for deeply.
He also developed a sense that the more professional his appearance, the more effective he was.
“When you get a police officer who looks like a soup sandwich, the community loses respect for the officer,” Hillmann said.
Nobody yet has accused Michael Hillmann of looking like a soup sandwich.
“He’s a poster boy for any department, he’s so GI,” said Alan Atkins, a former LAPD officer who now serves as executive director of the Los Angeles Police Memorial Foundation. He has known Assistant Sheriff Hillmann for many years and Mr. Atkins said he has long been impressed by his devotion to other law enforcement officers and their families.
“Assistant Sheriff Hillmann has long promoted the cause of the Foundation, to help the families of police officers whether killed in the line of duty or victims of long term illness,” said Mr. Atkins. He has also worked hard to make sure that any time an officer is killed in the line of duty, no lessons resulting from the incident are ever lost. He recreates the events to find whatever lesson can help an officer in the future to avoid death or serious injury.
The idea of recreating events goes back at least as far as Assistant Sheriff Hillmann’s tour walking a beat in the Rampart Division.
His beat included the Ambassador Hotel, where on June 5, 1968, Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Officer Hillmann wasn’t working that day but the incident stayed on his mind. He made repeated visits to the hotel where Kennedy was shot.
“I went to the Ambassador Hotel and studied what had happened and thought of ways it could have been prevented,” Chief Hillmann said.
After 18 months in Rampart, Mike Hillmann was accepted for transfer as a motor officer.
The boundaries of Rampart Division were too confining. The young officer wanted to broaden his experience, and motor officers were called all over the city.
He had ridden dirt bikes as a youngster and he found the two weeks of training on a Harley Davidson to be a lot of fun.
It was 1969 and the LAPD patrolled the freeways. Motor Officer Hillmann was assigned to the Santa Monica and Pasadena Freeways.
He also worked what was developing into a Dignitary Protection Unit, formed after the Robert Kennedy assassination.
There were lots of dignitaries passing through Los Angeles in the late 1960's and it was a time when assassination was too real of a threat to be ignored.
After two years as a motor officer, Hillmann was a Three-Plus One; wearing two stripes and a star.
He applied for and was accepted to the Special Weapons and Tactics unit, which was evolving from a part-time assignment to a fulltime unit in the Metro Division.
“SWAT was not necessarily a choice assignment at the time,” said Daryl F. Gates, a former LAPD Chief who headed Metro Division at the time Officer Hillmann first joined SWAT.
“The officers had to be willing to work dirty jobs and do a lot of training on their own, ” said Chief Gates.
“Mike was always an innovator,” Chief Gates said. “He personally brought the intelligence element into SWAT. He developed various tactics for learning all that could be learned about the hostage takers, who they were, where they were. It was all designed to prepare so that in case you had to make a forced entry there would be as few surprises as possible.”
“He developed the tactics that are now used all over the country,” said Chief Gates.
“What he accomplished at that stage of his career was phenomenal,” recalled Ron McCarthy, who served with Mike Hillmann in the early days of SWAT.
“In those days, hostage negotiation was just a blip on the screen. They were doing some in New York and Mike Hillmann, on his own, went back East to train and learn about hostage negotiation.
“He then came back and implemented hostage negotiation in LAPD SWAT. He took the position that a hostage didn’t have to be a person; the Washington Monument could be taken hostage. It was taken hostage. He wanted us to be prepared for a nuclear power plant to be taken hostage. It became known as crisis negotiation.
“We had crisis negotiation in SWAT for six or seven years before the Department realized it. When they did they wanted to take it over. When they saw that we had success after success, they decided to leave it alone.
“This was all done while he held the rank of police officer. He didn’t let his rank hold him back. He saw a problem and he went about using his ideas and energy to create a solution.”
Three-Plus One Hillman was selected to lead an element of five officers on SWAT, a quasi-supervisory position.
Fullerton Police Chief Pat McKinley was a Sergeant on the LAPD SWAT Team when Three-Plus one Hillmann joined the team.
“He was selected for SWAT because of his energy and enthusiasm,” Chief McKinley said.
“He was part of the new SWAT. New SWAT was all Metro officers. To be selected you had to have skills and enthusiasm and Michael had that. He is full of ideas, whether it was devising ways for better crowd control or using the aero unit to better guard a motorcade.”
There was a lot of training to take, including a lot time at Camp Pendleton. The SWAT members paid their own way when they went off for training.
When not training, his SWAT element was deployed in some of the most dangerous areas of the city. They were selected to take part in high-risk stakeouts and to arrest those the Police Department deemed to be the most dangerous.
Officer Hillmann was often called to draw out barricaded suspects.
Being shot at became a regular occurrence.
Chief McKinley also remembered Hillmann’s part in establishing a crisis negotiation team.
Officer Hillmann helped LAPD develop a procedure to handle a wide range of crisis situations, using SWAT as the primary resource.
He recalled that Hillmann was quick to learn and always thinking of ways to improve what was already being done.
“He constantly came up with ideas.”
When not training or going after the most dangerous outlaws in the city, Officer Hillmann was studying incidents where police officers had been killed, and working on new tactics to protect dignitaries.
He was part of a program that worked at Universal Studios to introduce police officers to the scenarios that had ended with other officers being killed. The program gave the participating officers a taste of what they might expect in a dangerous situation and the lessons were designed to help officers understand the kinds of things that lead to officer deaths or injury. The goal was to retrace the steps of others so that in the future officers face similar situations with better understanding, enabling them to take control of the situation with less risk.
He also worked with the LAPD Air Support Unit to develop better tactics for protecting the motorcades of visiting dignities. He worked with the Secret Service on motorcade protection for Presidents and other heads of state. Some of the innovations he helped introduce are still in use by the Secret Service today.
Officer Hillmann developed a liking for aviation. He learned to fly fixed wing aircraft. He considered becoming a Department helicopter pilot but chose instead to remain with SWAT.
The early 1970’s were a very dangerous time for Law Enforcement in the United States.
Police were targeted for death by revolutionary-style groups, including one called the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and assassinated Oakland School Superintendent Marcus Foster. The SLA was one of the first terrorist organizations to travel by van, often with machine guns on board.
The danger imposed by the van, which is far more dangerous to approach than a regular passenger car, created the need for new tactics. Officer Hillmann worked hard to help devise tactics that would minimize risk to the officers making the stop.
But the SLA continued to terrorize the community.
The SLA became a suspect in the disappearance of LAPD Officer Mike Edwards, who was kidnapped leaving the LAPD Academy and found the next day handcuffed and shot to death. Officially, the Edwards murder is still unsolved.
Around the same time there was a reported extortion attempt against a Deputy Sheriff who was serving as a court bailiff. A revolutionary group called the Black Guerilla Family was reportedly planning to kidnap the deputy’s family to force the deputy to assist in the escape of a terrorist in custody.
In the midst of these two cases, the FBI pinpointed a house they thought was used by the SLA. Officer Hillmann’s team searched the house and found it set up for a siege but nobody was home. A stakeout was set up in case they returned and Hillmann and some of the team were sent home to get some well deserved rest.
Later that night, the call came in that the SLA had been located not far from the first house. Officer Hillmann’s partner picked him up and the two raced to the scene.
They arrived in a hail of gunfire.
Thousands of rounds were fired from the house and even hand grenades were lobbed at the police. Over 400 police and FBI agents participated in the siege, which left six SLA members dead and the house burned to the ground. An FBI scent dog was the only law enforcement casualty.
At least two SLA members attempted to flee, firing at police while they ran.
In the after action assessment it was determined that there would be a good advantage to placing sharpshooters in helicopters.
A team of SWAT officers experimented with the tactic out in the canyons.
Hillmann was on the ground while some of his SWAT colleagues were aboard the helicopter.
An apparent engine malfunction caused the helicopter to crash.
Hillmann helped pull his friends from the downed aircraft. Commander Paul Gillian died in the crash. Commander Gillian is the highest ranking officer of the LAPD ever killed in the line of duty.
It had been 7 1/2 years from the time Michael Hillmann entered the LAPD Police Academy until the tragic helicopter crash that took the life of Commander Gillian. He still had more than 38 years to serve in the LAPD, as a supervisor and a manager. The next installment of the series will cover those years.
To visit the Webpage honoring Commander Gillian click here.
To visit the Webpage honoring Officer Edwards click here.