Brief History of the Team

Welcome to the website fellas, and thank you for stopping by. Here are a few early photos for you to take a look at and chime in if you have anything to add. There isn’t much here to start but I wanted to get the ball rolling so y'a’ll didn’t find an empty page here when you came by to check it out. Much more to come in the next few weeks! If you have info on any of the pics just write in and reference the Image number I put in the caption.

From the get go, let me say that any errors are completely my fault. If you see anything that is misstated, missing or added, please let me know. I want this to be as accurate as possible. Stay safe my brothers!

Before there was a team (late 1960s–1973)

It starts with the riots. In the summer of 1970 a major riot at UNM in Albuquerque drew somewhere around eighty State Police and local officers, with the National Guard called in behind them on the Governor's order. Out of that mess the State Police formed a Riot Squad, and two lieutenants — M.J. Payne in the south and Raul Arteche in the north — were sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia for riot and mob-control training. By April 1973, men were being interviewed and selected for what was then called the Riot Team.

Forrest Smith's father-in-law, Don Moberly, was one of the roughly fifty officers working crowd control in those years. As Forrest put it: "Shortly after they formed the TACT Team as we know it."

Early Riot Team Training Image 085

The founding (1975)

1975 is the year the TACT Team proper stands up, under the same two lieutenants: Arteche commanding the North team, Payne the South. The early rosters tell two stories — the anniversary book says the team started big, fifty officers and two lieutenants, then slimmed down as the mission shifted from mob control toward hostage and sniper work; Jerry Urban remembers two teams of ten. Probably both are right at different moments.

Nothing about the early kit was purpose-built. The first weapons were the officers' issued revolvers and shotguns. Helmets were the State Police driving helmets. The first uniforms were donated National Guard surplus — and, as Jerry Urban remembered it, "our wives dyed them black."

Getting on the team was by vote — an actual black-ball box with marbles. Around 1977 the department bought fully automatic Ruger Mini-14s (AC556) , and the team had its first real long guns.

Early Team Training Image 093

Original Team List on Plaque Image 389

Original South Team? Image 193

The Pen (February 1980)

The call came in at 0200 on February 2, 1980: the State Penitentiary in Santa Fe was gone. What followed is one of the worst prison riots in American history, and this team was in the middle of it — entering the facility to free hostages while officials negotiated with the ringleaders, then staying on the grounds for three weeks of security and clearance work.

The fallout changed the team permanently. The riot bought a golden era of funding through about 1983 — four week-long tactical training sessions a year — and turned a part-time regional response element into a trained, cohesive unit. Bobby Long, who took the first crisis call as a patrol officer that night and ran as a trailer on the first entry, would go on to give the team twenty years.

Any idea on the year of this bread truck? Image 147

Standards, schools and training (1984–1989)

In 1984 the team got its first physical fitness entrance standards — a mile and a half under ten minutes, bench and leg press against bodyweight, pull-ups, the works. Membership dropped hard, and that was the point. The same year the team started running through the Central Training Academy out at Kirtland, picking up building entry and hostage rescue doctrine from instructors in the LAPD SWAT lineage. The old military open-field tactics stayed in the toolbox; everything else got rebuilt.

The decade closed with the team earning its reputation the hard way. In the spring of 1987 they spent weeks on the coal mine strike north of Gallup, staring down professional strike-breakers. And in July 1987, eleven violent maximum-security inmates broke out of the Pen, and the team spent three weeks on three to four hours of sleep a night, clearing buildings and grid-searching the high country around Santa Fe. Bobby Long lost 23 pounds and, short on gear, borrowed stethoscopes from St. Vincent's ER to listen through storage-unit doors. You work with what you've got.

Looks like DOE with MILES gear. Image 048

APD Tac Range, 2005 Image 195 L to R David Martinez, James Frietze, Joe Madrid, Jerry Saldivar, Mark Umprovitch, Brian Nellist, Mike Quinones, Kevin McPherson, Steve Harvill