Iron Sights

You've heard the complaint a thousand times: law enforcement qualifications are a joke. A static firing line, a generous time window, a pass or fail check mark, and everyone goes home. Nothing changes. Nobody improves. Nobody cares. So what actually moves the needle? Joey, an ISP repeat offender guest and the host of the Sketchy Boyz Watch Club podcast, sits back down at the Iron Sights table to walk through exactly what he did at his agency to change that, and the answer is smaller and smarter than you'd expect.

The core tweak: Joey took the same yard lines, the same round count, and the same generous time window his agency had been using for decades, and added one thing. A number. Hit factor. That single change, borrowed straight from the USPSA world and dropped into a law enforcement qualification, transformed a checkbox administrative task into something officers are talking about in the locker room, texting each other about, and quietly trying to top on their own time. This episode breaks down exactly how he built the case, wrote the memo, navigated the chain of command, and earned the trust that made it all possible.

But this conversation goes way beyond the qual. Joey and I dig into the compare and contrast between policing HIS former mega agency, LAPD, versus a sub-100-sworn department, what leadership looks like when you're a line-level officer trying to create change from below, and why the reputation you build every single day, online and off, is the real currency that determines whether your ideas ever get a fair hearing. The pre-academy shooting orientation the agency built, the dry fire retention problem he's trying to solve, and the honest conversation about social media consistency round out one of the most practical firearms training episodes I've dropped.

If you're a firearms instructor, on SWAT, or anyone trying to move culture from the inside, this episode is a roadmap worth sitting with.

In this episode:

• Adding hit factor to an unchanged qualification, same yard lines, same round count, same pass/fail tracking, reduced misses and got officers voluntarily asking to come back to the range, simply because a number replaced anonymity

• Joey's PASO (Pre-Academy Shooting Orientation) program gets new hires to instructor-level standards before their first day at the academy, eliminating weekend remediation calls and freeing up bandwidth for harder classroom material

• The core argument for running with a gun in hand during the qual: body cam from a recent OIS at Joey's own agency showed the officer moving laterally and shooting simultaneously, making the traditional draw-at-the-yard-line approach a training scar, not a safety feature

• Earning administrative trust before submitting a change memo is the actual prerequisite: Joey credits years of visible commitment, personal performance, and consistent behavior online and off for why his proposal got read, considered, and approved

• Mark Smith's framework for why a faster draw matters operationally: an untrained attacker can fire roughly once every quarter second, meaning a 1.5-second draw gives that person approximately six chances to tag you before you fire a round

• The hit factor scoring system creates individualized intrinsic motivation without a public leaderboard: some officers chase the top, some refuse to be last, some just want something new to brag about, and the number surfaces all three without the instructor having to manage any of it

• Social media consistency is a real qualification for making internal change: officers and admin who see someone bashing their agency or their firearms instructors online will not hand that person the trust needed to rewrite policy

• The next planned tweak, transitioning from one target to three targets with two rounds each at the same six-round total, shows how incremental framing keeps the sell easy and the culture shift continuous

Chapters:

0:00 Intro: The Capable Standard plug
1:20 Show intro and guest welcome
4:38 Sketchy Boyz Watch Club: origin story and how Joey got the gig
8:27 Watches, storytelling, and why sentimental value beats safe queens
12:54 Buck Pierson, Staccato, and the people behind the product
18:36 Joey's background: LAPD, Army ROTC, and the path north
21:36 Mega agency vs. small agency: leadership, ownership, and opportunity
35:25 How competitive shooting cracked open Joey's training philosophy
43:15 Breaking down the old qual and the case for changing it
45:10 The hit factor overhaul: same qual, one new number, everything changes
1:18:04 Writing the memo and navigating the chain of command
1:35:24 Social media, reputation, and the trust that makes change possible

Mentioned:

Joey — Police officer, former Army officer, and host of the Sketchy Boyz Watch Club podcast, returning for his third appearance on Iron Sights to discuss his work overhauling firearms qualification and training at his Bay Area agency.

Mark Smith — Firearms instructor and owner of JBS Training Group whose drills, explanations, and tactical framework heavily influenced how Joey teaches officers and built the foundation for Joey's qualification proposal.

Jack Carr — Author of the Terminal List series, mentioned as a recent guest on the Sketchy Boyz Watch Club podcast, recorded around the time Season 2 of the Terminal List show dropped.

Buck Pierson — CEO of Staccato 2011 and Marine Corps veteran, mentioned as a guest on the Sketchy Boyz Watch Club who discussed the sentimental story behind his beat-up SKX007 watch from his time in the Corps.

Meenom — Main figure at Sketchy Boyz Watch Club who noticed Joey's limited recording setup and sent him a new microphone and computer to improve the podcast's production quality.

Eli — Editor at 8482 Media who handles editing for the Iron Sights podcast, shouted out by Scott as the reason the show exists.

Joe Dawson — Friend of Scott's in the Pacific Northwest and a watch enthusiast who gifted Scott a Seiko Arnie and has been encouraging him to go deeper into the watch world.

Chris Kuras — Owner and founder of Good Dude Concepts, mentioned for having a custom watch made for the brand that went viral in the community overnight.

Lieutenant Colonel Phelps — Prior infantry officer and ROTC leader at UCLA whose core leadership philosophy, summed up as 'give a shit,' made a lasting impression on Joey early in his career.

John Constantine — Retired US Secret Service agent with fifteen years on the Counter Assault Team, whose Iron Sights episode dropped the same morning this conversation was recorded and whose discussion of Pete Blaber's hierarchy closely mirrored themes in this episode.

Pete Blaber — Former Delta Force commander and author of The Mission, the Men, and Me, whose leadership hierarchy of mission, men, and me was referenced as a framework for understanding selfless leadership.

David Acosta Jr. — Instructor at Achilles Heel Tactical who wrote the 'Learning vs. Parroting' article referenced in the conversation about honoring the source of borrowed instructional material.

Shane Foster — Person Scott previously discussed the differences between small, mid, and large agency policing opportunities with, referenced when comparing LAPD's scale to Joey's current smaller department.

Hunter Freeland — Firearms instructor mentioned for his point that simply telling officers to 'shoot a match' is performative without proper context and preparation.

Vic — Friend of Joey's who encouraged him to get out and start shooting USPSA matches.

Ray — Friend of Joey's who, alongside Vic, pushed Joey to start competing in shooting matches.

John Constantine is retired US Secret Service and author of Hallways and Stairwells. This is a long-form conversation that moves from presidential protection to personal identity and back again. John spent roughly 23 years in the service, 15 of them on the Counter Assault Team, the guys in the black BDUs running motorcades and stacking up for the worst day that hopefully never comes. That particular mission, always training, always ready, almost never firing a round operationally, turns out to be one of the most instructive laboratories for leadership that exists anywhere.

We dig into what actually makes a team function under stress: consistent briefings, predictability, the Obi-Wan Kenobi method of coaching someone through a real operation instead of a simulated one, and the quiet discipline of holding standards without weaponizing them. John references the mission, men, and me framework in concrete operational terms, names the exact moment careerism poisons a unit, and explains why the hardest-working people in any agency almost never rise to the top rank.

The conversation gets personal fast. John talks about the transformation that led to the book, his own unwillingness to love the me at the bottom of that hierarchy, and how temporarily stepping away from his team revealed exactly how much of his identity was wrapped up in a patch and a position. If you've ever stayed somewhere too long because leaving felt like dying, this one is for you. It closes up with a sharp question: is becoming a better leader about managing other people or managing yourself? The answer lands exactly where you would expect it to.

In this episode:

• The on-the-job coaching method: John would hand a junior operator his seat in the motorcade, sit directly behind him, and whisper why questions the entire operation instead of taking back control. Repeating that five to ten times made the first real solo rep feel like a familiar one.

• Briefing the same way every time builds predictability across the whole team. When everyone has briefed the plan in their own words, one trigger phrase from the team leader resets the entire unit mid-operation without a single shouted order.

• The three-tier standards model: the floor you get paid for (PT test, firearms qual), the team standards the leader builds on top of that (pre-comm checks, briefing format, deployment calls), and the misconduct tier where defending the indefensible begins. Conflating all three is where most supervisors lose the room.

• Raising standards must be done incrementally and quietly. John implemented a core CAT deployment procedure that was a holy war at introduction. Two years later nobody remembered the fight because the new way had become normal SOP.

• Mission, men, and me is the correct order, but the me must still be fed. John's central lesson from the book is that he poured everything into mission and men for 15 years and left nothing for himself, which is exactly what drove the identity collapse when he finally stepped off the team.

• Forty percent of law enforcement and military suicides among retirees occur within the first year of separation. John ties that directly to identity loss and argues the antidote is building a layered identity, family, faith, jujitsu, community, before the position disappears rather than after.

• A leader who is not actively training his people to take his job is just kicking the can. John's test: out of ten people on your team, can two of them do your job today? If yes, you can move on. If not, you are the limiting factor.

• Ego is not the enemy. An untrained ego and an unhealthy ego are. Teaching people to believe in a principle rather than a technique means that under stress they fall back to that belief the same way they fall back to their firearms fundamentals.

Chapters:

0:01 The Capable Standard: Scott's new project
2:37 How Scott and John got connected
7:02 Going authentic on social media after the false start
9:38 John's bio: Jersey kid to Secret Service
13:28 The Counter Assault Team mission explained
23:00 Complacency, Butler, and the reactive Secret Service
35:59 On-the-job coaching and building predictable teams
39:08 Predictability as a team standard
56:01 Hallways and Stairwells: what the book is really about
56:45 Mission, men, and me: the leadership framework
1:44:51 Managing morale wreckers and high performers
2:12:36 Identity, retirement, and letting go

Mentioned:

John Constantine — Guest, retired US Secret Service agent with roughly 23 years of service and 15 years on the Counter Assault Team, and author of Hallways and Stairwells.

Geoffrey — Mutual friend who connected Scott Howell and John Constantine and is described as someone who always leads with how he can help others.

Ryan Nichols — Austin PD SWAT team leader referenced by Scott as a previous Iron Sights guest who raised the concept of predictability as a team standard.

This one's with the full Guild Solutions Group crew, including founder Shane Foster, Director of Training Jason "Jabo" Long, lead instructors Matt Petaki and Jeremy Nash, and Pryme Infil CEO Jarred Pereira. The conversation goes everywhere it should.

You will hear how Jarred Pereira built Pryme Infil out of a 65-page PowerPoint written at 2 a.m. on FMLA leave after surviving a federal deposition he was never prepared for, and why documentation is now the front line of officer protection. You will hear Jeremy Nash walk through the night he drove through a crossfire, absorbed 13 shotgun pellets to the face, and kept calling it over the radio. And you will hear Jabo and Shane break down why breaching produces immediate, undeniable feedback that strips ego out of the room, while movement and CQB are still fighting a religion war built mostly on theory and borrowed doctrine.

This is also a conversation about what is actually shifting in law enforcement right now: younger officers who are hungry and humble, agencies starting to share instead of gatekeep, and a generation of senior guys who are choosing mentorship over silence. The Guild is not just a training company. It is a living system, and this episode drops you right inside it. You will hear the I knows and the what ifs, the coffin in the living room, the x-ray on the t-shirt, and the refrigerator bolted to a six-by-six bolted to the floor. It's a fun one with a group of good dudes.

In this episode:

• Jarred Pereira built Pryme Infil from a 65-page PowerPoint written on FMLA leave after a federal deposition revealed his team's operations and training documentation was legally indefensible: the software automates analytics, aggregates training and operations data, and produces the kind of ironclad after-action record that holds up in litigation

• Breaching produces immediate, binary feedback: either the door opens or it does not, which removes ego and allows failures to be shared freely, while movement and CQB methodology stays siloed because practitioners protect losses and only report wins

• Jason "Jabo" Long's law policy and ethics presentation is built around a cognitive framework rather than slide-by-slide policy recitation: give officers enough structure to contextualize what they are reading in policy so they understand how it applies under stress, not just in a classroom

• Jeremy Nash's agency runs over 200 operations a year with a team of roughly 33, and the barricaded door problems they encounter, including plywood systems bolted through refrigerators into six-by-six posts anchored to the floor, have become the primary driver of the Guild's real-world breaching curriculum

• The 'I knows versus what ifs' framework: building a bank of verified, replicable I knows through data, reps, and shared experience is what gives operators something solid to draw from when they hit the what if that was never on the syllabus

• Guild Solutions Group is a lane-specific organism: Shane Foster owns technical breaching and instructional development, Jabo owns movement, Sean owns leadership, and the instructors from New York own the operational problem sets. Nobody teaches outside their lane

• Pryme Infil is building toward shared analytics: agencies that adopt the platform will eventually be able to pull aggregated operation and training stats on the fly during guild courses, turning what used to be institutional memory locked in one agency into accessible cross-agency data

• The cultural shift Jabo identifies as most important in the next decade: pre-traumatic stress protocols, wellness coordinators embedded in agencies, and a systematic approach to mental health resiliency built into the career arc from academy through retirement

Chapters:

0:01 Intro: The Capable Standard and The Brief
2:28 Guest introductions: Guild Solutions Group and Pryme Infil
7:44 What brought the group to Sacramento
10:20 Jabo's law, policy, and ethics presentation breakdown
16:16 How Pryme Infil was built and why
25:49 The characters: team culture and individual stories
28:12 Jeremy Nash's story: shot in the face on duty
45:33 Barricaded doors: the real problem sets these guys face
52:57 Breaching vs. movement: why data sharing is lopsided
1:06:02 Why Iron Sights exists: The honest answer
1:13:23 I knows vs. what ifs: the framework for solving problems under pressure
1:43:18 What's shifting positively in law enforcement right now

Mentioned:

Shane Foster — Founder and President of Guild Solutions Group, former law enforcement officer and US Air Force NCO, and previously a Product Specialist Manager at Team Wendy, who organized the Sacramento operational breaching course.

Jason "Jabo" Long — Director of Training for Guild Solutions Group, retired law enforcement officer with 25 years of service including 17 years on full-time SWAT, who delivered the law, policy, and ethics presentation during the course week.

Matt Petaki — Lead instructor for Guild Solutions Group and active New York law enforcement officer with 16 years on the department and over 13 years on the special operations team, including full-time status for the past three years.

Jeremy Nash — National Instructor at Guild Solutions Group and New York law enforcement officer with over 20 years on the job, former Marine, who was shot with a shotgun at close range while driving through a crossfire on duty in 2017.

Jarred Pereira — Creator, Co-Founder, and CEO of Pryme Infil, a software platform for law enforcement operations and training documentation, who built the company after surviving a federal deposition that exposed his team's documentation gaps.

You don't have to wear a badge to fight for the people who do. Kim Pastore, founder of the Jorge Pastore Foundation, lost her husband Jorge, an Austin PD SWAT officer, in the line of duty in 2023. What she built in the aftermath, in a remarkably short amount of time and entirely from the outside looking in, is one of the most honest, boots-on-the-ground efforts to close the training gap facing law enforcement in this country. This conversation is long overdue, and it goes deep.

Kim and I trace the full arc: from Fort Lauderdale, a karate school, and a firefighter-paramedic who couldn't shake the pull of tactical law enforcement, all the way to Austin, COVID, defund protests, a SWAT career, a line of duty death, and a foundation that is now putting officers through world-class training from Texas to New Jersey to Alabama and beyond. What you'll hear is not a polished nonprofit pitch. It's a real conversation about what it costs to build something like this, what the obstacles actually are, and why the people doing the most important work are often the ones getting the most pushback.

The training gap is real, it's leadership-driven, and it's fixable. Kim breaks down exactly why consistent, valuable training is so hard for patrol officers to access, what the foundation is doing to solve it one class at a time, and what a model built on radical transparency with donors actually looks like in practice. If you have ever wondered where your money goes when you give to a law enforcement nonprofit, this episode answers that question with specifics.

And then the conversation goes somewhere even heavier: the line of duty death notification process, the wife's perspective no one in the room has ever heard, and why leadership at every level needs to have a plan in place before the worst day happens. Kim has spoken at law enforcement conferences across the country on this, and the lines that form afterward tell you everything about how much the community needed someone to finally say it out loud.

In this episode:

• The single biggest obstacle to consistent law enforcement training is leadership: training needs to be built into the work week as a mandatory, funded part of the job rather than something officers fund themselves on personal time and PTO.

• The Jorge Pastore Foundation operates on a radical transparency model with donors: instead of a general donation bucket, Kim presents a specific training, names the cost, and lets donors sponsor individual officers so they can see exactly where every dollar went, including photos afterward.

• Free training has a hidden cost: the foundation learned early that charging officers even a small amount creates buy-in and accountability, making the training more effective and the commitment more real.

• Eric Wise of Cornerstone Performance and 303 Solutions is now tasked with seeking out the smallest, most underserved agencies, including departments in Alabama and rural Texas, that receive little to no firearms instruction whatsoever.

• The foundation's training calendar for 2027 is already being built out by genre, with categories covering pistol, rifle, CQB, and critical response training, mapped to the companies and regions best suited to deliver them.

• Kim's line of duty death best practice protocol, developed with John Becker and peer support resources, gives departments a four-page checklist covering who notifies, what is said, how support officers are assigned, and how outside resources are used, addressing a gap that exists in most agencies.

• The foundation's regional expansion model mirrors what has been built in Central Texas: Humble Warrior Games and legacy matches in new regions, with money raised locally going back into local law enforcement training, structured almost like a franchise that gives communities a vehicle to honor their own fallen officers.

Chapters:

0:16 The Capable Standard: Scott's new free email, the Brief
2:25 Introducing Kim Pastore and the Jorge Pastore Foundation
3:48 Kim's origin story: Fort Lauderdale, karate, and Austin
8:05 The foundation's mission, pillars, and how it started
22:20 The biggest obstacle: why patrol officers can't get training
35:39 Working with instructors: logistics, facilities, and costs
41:33 Donor transparency: where the money actually goes
58:17 Speaking at conferences: the wife's perspective on line of duty death
1:07:56 What civilians don't understand about a SWAT incident
1:12:25 Jorge Pastore's final call: bravery, protocol, and the debrief
1:25:55 Line of duty death protocol: fixing the gap in every department
1:52:59 Where JPF is headed: regional expansion and how to get involved

Mentioned:

Kim Pastore — Founder of the Jorge Pastore Foundation, guest on this episode, who built a law enforcement training nonprofit after the line of duty death of her husband Jorge Pastore in 2023.

Jorge Pastore — Austin PD SWAT officer and husband of Kim Pastore, killed in the line of duty in 2023 during a hostage rescue call; namesake of the Jorge Pastore Foundation.

Eric Wise — Founder of Cornerstone Performance and 303 Solutions, a full-time firearms instructor tasked by the foundation with finding and training the smallest, most underserved law enforcement agencies.

Jake Labhart — Founder of In Extremis Performance, mentioned for his movement-based training work that Kim believes should be in every police academy.

Shane Foster — Founder of Guild Solutions Group, described as one of the interconnected training professionals working with the Jorge Pastore Foundation.

Chuck Pressburg — Owner and lead instructor of Presscheck Consulting, whose courses the Jorge Pastore Foundation sponsors officers to attend through a direct donor-to-training-company model.

Tommy — Associated with the sub second guys, working to deliver four-hour training blocks to law enforcement officers who can't get more time approved.

John Becker — The person who first encouraged Kim to share the wife's perspective on line of duty death notification publicly, connecting her to speaking opportunities at tactical conferences and helping develop the debrief format she now presents.

Anthony Coley — Organizer of the Legacy match and PCSL matches, described as a daily collaborator with Kim in expanding competitive shooting events for law enforcement across the country.

I sat down with Sean Bonilla, founder of Ready and Able Defense and a law enforcement officer who came up through the fight world, and we dig into a question that doesn't get asked enough: are you even cleaning up your house before you try to fix it?

Sean lays out a framework that cuts through the noise, starting with the one thing competitive fighting taught him that most cops never get: frequency of consequence. When you fight, you feel the cost of skipping training. In law enforcement, you can go years without that wake up call, and that gap is where complacency lives. The conversation moves from there into how to actually structure team training, why bringing in a third party before you have consistent SOPs just adds mud to a muddy plate, and why the frontline supervisor is the most important training role in any agency.

This one is not about gear, and it is not about tactics. It is about the process of building people who think, move predictably, and keep getting better. Whether you are a TL, a shift sergeant, a new patrol officer trying to spark something in your squad, or just a serious practitioner trying to get the most out of your range time, there is something here that is going to make you rewind the tape and take notes.

Sean is the same guy in person as he is online: organized, patient, genuinely invested in the people he is talking to, and blunt enough to call out the problems without making it personal. That comes through in every minute of this conversation.

In this episode:

• Fighting creates frequent, high consequence feedback loops that law enforcement rarely replicates naturally, and that infrequency of real testing is the root cause of complacency, not laziness or bad character

• Before bringing in a third party instructor, a team must first have consistent, written SOPs and TTPs so that outside training reinforces the foundation rather than layering confusion on top of an already dirty plate

• The frontline supervisor is the most critical training position in any agency: one sergeant who pays out of pocket, shows up, and brings his whole shift along does more for culture than any top down mandate

• Confusing preference with policy is one of the most damaging things an instructor can do: if two instructors are contradicting each other on how to run a structure, the new guy has nowhere solid to stand

• Predictability is the actual goal of team training, not novelty or complexity: if your guys cannot predict what each other will do, you have not earned the right to complicate the problem yet

• The debrief is where the real teaching happens: pulling the answer out of the student instead of telling it to them forces the brain to work harder, sticks better in long term memory, and leaves the person knowing they can succeed, not just that they failed

• Setting the expectation that missing is part of training and that 100 percent speed must be tested regularly removes the fear of failure that keeps shooters locked into safe, slow, improvement resistant habits

• Identifying the deficiency first and then constructing a specific plan to address it applies equally to a two person private lesson, a SWAT team training cycle, and a sales organization, the process is the same at every level

Chapters:

0:01 Intro: The Capable Standard and The Brief
2:33 How Scott Found Sean and Why He Wanted This Conversation
6:40 Sean's Background: Fighting, Faith, and the Road to Law Enforcement
8:45 What Fighting Taught Sean That Law Enforcement Can't Replicate
19:32 Military Rejections and the Persistence That Led to a Badge
23:44 Full Circle: Working for the Department That Once Arrested Him
40:31 Early Exposures, Academy Culture, and the Gap Nobody Talks About
50:50 Why the Frontline Supervisor Is the Most Important Training Role
1:38:18 SOPs, Consistency, and Not Confusing Preference for Policy
1:58:27 Earning the Right to Complicate: Building Predictability First
2:10:05 Debriefing the Right Way: Extraction Over Instruction
2:30:24 Where to Find Sean and Ready and Able Defense

Mentioned:

Sean Bonilla — Guest on this episode, founder of Ready and Able Defense, law enforcement officer, MMA fighter, and firearms trainer based in South Florida.

Chris Kuras — Scott's original connection to South Florida, runs Good Dude Concepts and provides CQB training, which brought Scott down to the area for this episode.

Zack Harrison — Referenced by Scott as a recent Iron Sights guest whose conversation about early exposures and training investment directly connected to themes in this episode.

Chris Palmer — Scott credits him with introducing the phrase 'knee jerk reaction machine' to describe how law enforcement agencies respond reactively to critical incidents.