Key Reflections
- Law enforcement priorities continue to evolve alongside the nature of terrorism and organised crime, underscoring the importance of constantly reassessing threat landscapes.
- With over 40 million visitors annually, and a large number of different cultures, the police in Las Vegas have worked to integrate diverse groups, ensuring a peaceful coexistence and trust between law enforcement and the community.
- There has been an emphasis on seeing ahead of the curve, predicting challenges, and preparing for them, which contributed to creating a safer and more effective police force.
- The scale of planning for the FIFA World Cup is massive, with comparisons to managing three Super Bowls a day for over a month. Managing these events requires meticulous planning, coordination, and risk assessment. The policing strategies must be refined continuously to stay prepared for future events.
- The 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas was a pivotal moment, and first responders were able to use their training and collaboration, particularly after lessons learned from the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks.
- Yoga, for both physical and mental well-being, especially for those in high-stress careers like law enforcement, is essential for longevity.
Transcript:
SG: Dr. Sajjan Gohel
SL: Sasha Larkin
SG: Welcome to the NATO DEEP Dive podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Sajjan Gohel, and in this episode, I speak with Sasha Larkin, Director of Intelligence and C4 Operations for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Sasha Larkin was also an Assistant Sheriff for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and has an extensive background in dealing with terrorism, organised criminal groups, and active shooter incidents. Her community led approaches have helped to enhance ‘whole of society’ cooperation.
Sasha Larkin, very warm welcome to NATO Deep Dive.
SL: Thank you for having me.
SG: It’s a great pleasure.
First guest of 2025, and it’s going to be a very interesting conversation to have with you. We actually met first in Las Vegas, and at that time you were with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Talk to me about your career as a police officer. Why did you want to become one? How did you end up in Las Vegas?
SL: It’s one of my favourite questions to answer. Why did I become a police officer? And I think the answer is less exciting than usually people are hoping for. Some people have terrible experiences where a police officer saved their life or made some intervention. I think it was in my blood. I was born wanting to be a police officer. A lot of little girls would dress up as fairies and princesses; I dressed up as a police officer. I fell in love with a TV show from the 1970s and 80s called CHiPs, it had a very catchy theme song, and I remember it was on Wednesday nights, and we had the old school TV with the wire clothes hanger antenna and the kind of knob you had to walk up and annoyingly change, and we got three channels. And CHiPs used to come on, and my mum would have a class on Wednesday nights, so I would sit at home and watch CHiPs.
And the work they did made so much sense to me. They were stopping people and helping them and giving them advice and always the first to arrive on some exciting scene. I could not believe that they had this partnership between Poncherello, who was Erik Estrada, and then Larry Wilcox, who was John Baker. They were best friends, they showed up on these calls together, and I thought, that is what friendship is, that’s like the truest form of camaraderie and expression, they saved each other’s lives countless number of times, and that was it. That was the only thing I ever wanted to do, and I spent my whole youth focused on taking the police tests, being tough, getting my black belt, making sure I could always pass a lie detector test, getting my security clearance. That was my whole existence until I became a police officer. It was really exciting. And I will tell you that I don’t have one regret. After almost 26 years as a police officer, I loved every day of my job, even the awful days. I have no regrets.
SG: Well, that’s really encouraging and such a positive story. I myself actually watched CHiPs when I was young too, and I loved the motorbikes a lot.
SL: It was the greatest. They made it look so easy.
SG: Absolutely.
So, you spent so much of your career with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. What stands out about them? What makes them unique? Of course, the city of Las Vegas, but perhaps you could expand on all of that.
SL: So, I ended up in Las Vegas after college. I was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I went to the University of New Mexico, UNM, and I came to Vegas actually on a whim. I came with my mom. I was competing professionally in martial arts, and they used to have a big karate tournament here every summer. It was an old school competition. I think the acronym was NASKA. I can’t remember what it stands for, National Association of Karate, something or other. And I would come to the tournament and compete, and it just so happens that this particular year, I won my division. And so, my mom took me to celebrate, and we went to the Stardust, and we went to see a show at the old Stardust. And when we were there, the man who was the stage manager at the Stardust just took a fancy to us, and he put us in the best seat in the house. And afterwards, he said, ‘hey, we are auditioning for our show, Enter the Night.’ He said, ‘you should come audition.’
And I grew up a ballet dancer before I was a martial artist. I’d done 15 years on pointe shoes, dancing in shows, The Nutcracker, and Swan Lake, and classically trained and I thought that’s an interesting offer. And so, I took his information, and we went home. And I kept thinking about it. I kept thinking about Las Vegas, and came back, auditioned for the show, and got hired. So, I, on a whim, moved to Las Vegas to be a showgirl.
But I really wanted to go to graduate school. I really wanted to further my education. So, I was bartending during the day, dancing in the show at night. And the recruiters from the police department came into the restaurant that I was working at. And they said, ‘hey, we’re hiring.’ And I said, ‘no, thank you. I’m going to go to the FBI.’ Did you ever see The X-Files?
SG: I did, yes.
SL: Yes, I thought I was going to be Agent Scully from The X-Files. And so I was going to go to the FBI, and I was getting my degree in anthropology, in odontology, the study of dead people’s teeth, and I literally thought that’s what I was going to do with my life. So, the recruiters would come in every week, and they were like, ‘okay, just come on a ride-along.’ I was like, ‘yeah, okay, I’ll come on a ride-along.’
So, I went on a ride-along with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in 1998 and had the best time. I could not believe that they paid people to have this much fun at work. And that was it. I threw my dreams of the FBI out the door, and they said, ‘hey, just so you know, we’ll pay for you to go to graduate school.’ At that time, they had an educational incentive. And I said, ‘well, done. Done.’ And so, I put my interest card in, and about six months later, I was hired. And it worked out well, because my show Enter the Night, was getting ready to close, because the legendary Wayne Newton was taking over our show, and they were going to build out the showroom at the Stardust for him. And so, I was going to be out of a job with the Stardust anyway. And so, divine timing really manifested itself perfectly. And so, I hung up my showgirl costume, I shaved my head.
What you can’t tell on this podcast is that my hair right now is to my waist and when I went to the police academy, it was just below my waist. And so, you can imagine the full dedication I had when I went in and they said, ‘oh, well, you know that the standards are the same for the men and the women.’ I said, ‘oh, yeah, I can do the same amount of push-ups or run just as fast.’ And they were like, ‘no, no, no, no, the grooming standards.’ And I said, ‘what do you mean?’ They said, ‘Well, the men have to shave their head above their ears, above their collar, so do the women.’ And I thought about it for a minute, and I felt my hair, and I went, ‘yeah, okay, I’m in.’
And that was it. Shaved my head, so there was nothing they could do to get me to quit, because they had taken my hair. I couldn’t go back to being a bald showgirl. And that was it, the journey started, and it was remarkable. And like I told you; I had no regrets. The police department here is second to none. I believe that we set the bar very high for excellence in everything that we do and continue to do. And it was the adventure of a lifetime.
SG: Well, I certainly saw how high the standards are when I came to Las Vegas a couple of years ago, where we first met, and your police department was hosting the Leadership in Counter-terrorism (LinCT) conference, which is the elite conference when it comes to counter-terrorism.
Talk to me about what is distinct about being a police officer in Las Vegas that you could say wouldn’t be the case in another major city in the U.S.
SL: To begin with, people come to Las Vegas to escape themselves and their lives sometimes, I believe. Or to prepare for a life they’re about to have. That’s why we’re the capital of bachelorette and bachelor parties. That’s why we have drive-through wedding chapels. There’s a mystique here that we’ve built over the last few decades, I would probably argue started back when the mob ran Vegas to the most part, is that there was a different layer of existence that happens here, where you can walk down the strip on any given day or night and see people wearing a variety of fashion, and nobody thinks anything of it. They think, ‘oh, well, you’re in Vegas, it’s okay. ‘You can go out to a club and listen to any kind of music and dance any way you want, nobody judges you. You can have any sort of vice or desire, and you’ll find it here, you’ll find a way to satisfy it. And so, I think that those things make policing here very unique.
But on top of that layer, what really fascinated me and hooked me in, to want to excel, was the community. We have a community here that is more diverse than almost any other major city, I would argue. And let me explain what I mean. So, we’re a population, when I started about 1.5 million, and then we would fluctuate up to close to 2 million. And for many years, probably over a decade, we were the fastest growing city in the United States. Number one, very exciting.
Number two, we’re constantly changing. We would build new strip casinos, and we would tear down the old ones. We would build new real estate properties. We were expanding out and growing past our existing parameters. We started bringing in major sports teams. We started to really diversify our economy, which made it very exciting to be here. On top of that, we get 40 to 46 million visitors a year. We have Nellis Air Force Base, which is the busiest flight line in the country. McCarran Airport, now Harry Reid Airport, one of the top five to six busiest airports in the country. And so, with that, you get such a melting pot of cultures. And we have all eight major religions hosted here with large houses of worship.
Why is that all interesting? Because there’s something about our community where people mesh well. And the work that I ended up doing within our police department was to number one, connect the police department to all of those divergent communities. Number two, the magic was when we started to connect the communities to each other. And in a lot of other cities where you see race wars, religious tensions, socioeconomic disparities that cause major issues. I believe that we have done a masterful job of integrating these communities with each other and with the police department in a way that has created a level of harmony that is unspoken. And when tragedy or things have occurred from the George Floyd riots or a police shooting in another city that is very questionable, our community didn’t uprise. Our community came to us and said, ‘hey Metro, what are you guys doing to make sure that never happens here?’ And we always had an answer and a plan, or we got on it real quick and made sure that we heard their cries and their concerns and did things to rectify it, so they felt confident in us. Because never forget, we derive our legitimacy from the trust of the community. If they don’t trust us, we cease to exist with any sort of trust. That’s what makes Las Vegas different.
And now I will give you one last token. We always try to stay ahead of the change curve. We had a sheriff, his name was Doug Gillespie, and he was a remarkable sheriff. And he always talked to us about how to see around that curve. Leadership is the ability to see around the curve and predict what was going to happen before it happened. And to make sure that our police department was forward thinking in tactical situations, how we deploy use of force. So much so that during those years when he was sheriff, he went out to the Department of Justice and brought them in and said, ‘hey, we’ve had a lot of officer-involved shootings. We want to go through the reform process and really understand what we can do better as a police department to lower our use of force, to lower our officer-involved shootings, and to earn more trust in the community.’ Where other police departments around the country were getting put on consent decrees, were getting put under modifications, forced upon by the federal government.
But he had enough foresight to understand we needed to be proactive about change and not scared of it. And I loved that. To me, that was so exciting that we were going to take that chance. That was really during the time that I was promoting. I was somewhere between sergeant and lieutenant during that time. And it really gave me such inspiration to want to be a leader of this agency, that that’s what makes us different.
And then, of course, you put an umbrella over all of that. The weather in Las Vegas, the people, it’s really an amazing place to be and police. And it’s exciting. And no two days are the same. And it’s an amazing city, start to finish.
SG: Absolutely. And as you said, no two days are ever the same. How did the challenges of the threats that you had to deal with evolve from when you started, up to recently? You mentioned the role of the mob, so of course lots of people, like myself, we saw movies like Casino with Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci. Perhaps it’s exaggerated—I look forward to what you have to say on that—but could you talk about how those challenges and threats evolved over time?
SL: The evolution of threats is something that I pay a lot of attention to because it really drives our enforcement efforts. And more importantly, it drives how we use intelligence, because we should be using intelligence to drive our enforcement efforts. What do I mean by that? Well, in the late ‘90s, we were still really feeling the ramifications and the effects of things like Rodney King. You have to think about 1996, ‘97. We had all sorts of very famous stories: O.J. Simpson, right? What the police did, how they handled that, the case that followed, what the police did or didn’t do. Think about Mark Fuhrman and what happened in those famous courtroom scenarios.
Then you had Rodney King happen, which was the first time I think America saw real police brutality unfold live on TV. And then you saw the riots unfold. And look, we did feel the riots then in the late ‘90s. And so, I just joined on when we were still on the heels of that. And there was a real lack of police trust. The community didn’t trust us, and we were not welcomed with open arms in a lot of places, rightfully so. We policed with a heavy hand. We really believed that we could arrest our way out of problems. We believed that if we arrested people for the little things—jaywalking, littering, sleeping on a bus bench—that they wouldn’t be there to commit the larger crimes. Throw everybody in jail, cast out a big net, and then they’d be in jail. So, we wouldn’t have to worry about them.
But the truth was that that was not an effective way to police, for a couple of reasons. Number one, we drove down community trust even further, because we were arresting a lot of good people that were maybe trying to get to work and did have a broken taillight because they couldn’t afford to fix it, and then we were going to write them a ticket or arrest them, and now they’re even more in debt. So, there was a snowball effect that was happening that was eroding public trust. And then a little thing happened called 9/11. And so, the threat picture on that day changed completely for everybody. All of a sudden, we’re introduced to this thing called Islamic terrorism. And most people went, “Islamic what?” And we were no different. And that was really the game changer for me—understanding terrorism.
I want to give you a little side note of why it was so impactful for me. I had twin cousins when I was young that were killed in a flight over Lockerbie on Pan Am 747. And I remember as a little girl my mother weeping when she got the phone call and dropping to her knees. And I remember asking her, “Mom, what’s wrong?” and I remember her explaining to me that this airplane had exploded in midair, and these terrorists, these Islamic terrorists had done it. And of course, at that age, I remember thinking, “I don’t know what that means.” I know my cousins had passed away who just graduated medical school, and they were flying home. But then years later, 9/11 happens, and I remember my mother calling and saying, “It’s those same guys that killed your cousins. It’s the same. It’s the same group.” And I really paused for a minute and thought, “Wow. This threat has not left. This threat has gotten stronger.” And that was it. I was hooked into the study of terrorism, international terrorism. I wanted to know everything I could about it. And for the next years that followed after 9/11, I read every book and watched everything I could find on it, and really tried to self-educate, because during that time, there were not a lot of courses around on it. We weren’t really into the internet or internet studies yet.
And so, what happened was the threat picture changed that day from us focusing on petty crimes to focusing on where does terrorism live in our city, and how does it affect us? And I think during those years also, we started to expand our threat to understand gang violence was on the rise. We were really feeling the effects of what happened in Los Angeles and Oakland come across the state line. And we were feeling gang violence. The best way I can explain it is if there was a gang murder where a Blood killed a Crip, well, logically what happens next is a Crip kills a Blood out of retaliation, and then this escalation continues on and on and on, with really no end to the cycle. So, what we did during those years was we said, “Okay, hold on. There’s got to be a way. We’ve got to be able to stop this cycle.” And so, we partnered with a man named John Ponder who was working these programs with a couple of other pastors in our community. And the pastors were working a program called RECAP, which is an acronym for Reclaim Every City Around Peace. And what they were doing was they were partnering with these pastors in inner cities. I believe it began in Chicago. And they were taking pastors to the homes of the victims and working with the families and the gang members and the relatives, and saying, “Hey, look, retaliation is not the way.” And they would go through faith and belief in God in order to reach these families and quell gang violence. And it absolutely worked. It was absolutely effective. We saw a dramatic decrease in violent gang murders and homicides.
And we really started to recognize there’s something to this. We need to refocus our efforts. And so, at the same time, the sheriff during those years, Joe Lombardo, he said, “Hey, I really want you to get serious about community outreach within these religious facilities.” So, what happened was I was a patrol sergeant in an area command where we had two mosques. We had a Nation of Islam mosque, which was not police-friendly whatsoever. They had a true disdain for us because of the way that we had probably treated them in years past. And then there was a Sunni mosque that was about three quarters of a mile down the street, which was a place where most of the congregants were reverts—they believe they had been born of an Islamic faith, but had lost their way, but reverted when they were in prison and found Allah again and had come out and had really realized their devotion and their sense of faith. So, they reverted in this sense. And it was one of their imams—wonderful man, Imam Fatim, whom I’ve come to love very dearly, along with his family. His father was in the upper echelons of the Black Panther movement in Chicago. And so, you can understand their mindset and how they felt about police. It was not warm and friendly in the beginning.
But I will tell you that that’s where it started. They took a chance on us, the police, and we, the police, went in there and, humbly, my team and I went in at the direction of our sheriff and said, “We don’t understand Islam. We live in a post-9/11 world, and we don’t understand. All we know is what CNN and Fox News tells us, which is Islam is bad. Terrorists. Violence. But that’s not what we see here. What I see in your mosque is a school for underprivileged children. I see a health care clinic for the homeless. And I see a group of individuals that stop and help anyone in need. So, help me understand the missing piece. What am I not understanding?”
So, they brought us in, and they taught us everything from prayer, to history, to the origins, and to why this mosque was formed, how it came to be, and what we could do better to earn their trust. And that worked both ways, bidirectionally. So, we spent the next two years, my team and I working on trust and building it out. And then eventually, the sheriff called down and he said, “Hey, you guys are having really good results. Will you do this for the whole department?” And I thought, “You know what? Let’s give it a try.” So, they brought us up to the Fusion Center, which is how I got connected to counter-terrorism. And they had us build out this outreach program for the entire department and for every religion. It was now 2012 by this time, and I believe Doug Gillespie was our sheriff.
There was a shooting at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, if you remember that shooting, an active shooter went into the temple—it was the first time we’d seen something like this in a Sikh temple—and he killed six and injured four. And so, he said, “Go to the Sikh temple here and find out if they’re okay and what we can do to support them.” And I will tell you that that was one of the biggest faux pas of my career was I went, “Oh my God, we didn’t know. We were so focused on building relationships in the Muslim community. We hadn’t opened our aperture to look at the rest of the religious communities.”
So, on that day, our whole program changed. We went from being just focused on Islam and all of the mosques to really focusing on all of the religions. So, we went to the Sikh temple. There were two at the time. And we said, “We saw what happened in Wisconsin, and we’re so sorry. We want to have a relationship with you and understand how we can better support you.” And they were remarkable. And I had been by this time to India, so I had a bit of a connection there, and they loved us, and we loved them. And that was it.
That really was the spark that then grew our program to the eight major religions in Las Vegas. It grew our program to including the LGBT community, the NAACP, the ACLU—everybody that had an opinion about the community of the police, we realized we needed to know them and connect with them and hear them. So that was what makes policing in Las Vegas, I believe, different. And it’s what got me out of bed every single day with passion to make a difference and connect and was the spark that you got to see at that LinCT conference. That was really the culmination of how hard we as an agency and community had worked to pull together.
SG: I certainly saw that camaraderie. That came across in Las Vegas with yourself, with all your colleagues, and how welcoming it was. It’s certainly in my memory very strongly. I appreciate you sharing all those very important and personal experiences. If we move on to the current part of your career, the most interesting, and one that, as I was saying to you before, I’m quite jealous of—so you are the Director of Intelligence and C4 Operations for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Could you explain what that entails and what your daily job looks like?
SL: Sure. So, after almost 26 years on the police department, we reach a point where we can’t go any higher. I was the Assistant Sheriff over Homeland Security, and all of the tactical operations. And I knew that the only other thing I could do was run for sheriff. But our Sheriff was barely into his first year, and he was probably going to stay a second term.
And I was on LinkedIn one day and saw this posting for FIFA, for the Director of Intelligence. And in the job posting it listed everything that I was doing in our fusion centre. And I thought, there’s no way a job like this actually exists. So, I applied for it and interviewed with who I believe to be the most brilliant, humble, intelligent leader I’ve ever worked for, GB Jones. He is our chief executive officer of security.
And he had come from the NFL, running all the international security operations. And before that, he’d been with the FBI. And he’s actually – and I love to brag about this, because it’s really, you’ll understand the mindset we have – he is actually the one that put the case together and the handcuffs on Moussaoui after 9-11, which is what makes it so interesting and his love for intelligence and why he has supported our efforts so greatly.
And so, the great thing about my job is that it has never existed before. This is the first time that FIFA has ever had 100% control of putting on the World Cup. It’s really exciting. It’s going to be in three different countries, the United States, Mexico, and Canada; in 16 cities, 11 of them in the United States. And really what we’re doing is, he gave me the opportunity to build out this intelligence unit.
And I’m just now putting a team together that is second to none. And we are going to develop risk and threat assessments for the teams and the matches that will then drive the manpower distribution and deployment efforts for all of the host cities to ensure, number one, and I believe to be most important, that they understand what is coming to their city. Because you see, soccer fans are a little bit more passionate than what we’re used to in America.
And anybody that’s been to an international soccer game understands that statement. And so, we’ve really spent the last six months, eight months, educating American law enforcement on what it means to have soccer fans and what the Ultras are, what some of these hooligans are that might be coming. How can they prepare? How can they police? How can they interact? And it’s been a lot of fun to share this culture and honestly to learn from the Europeans and the South Americans, and even the Mexicans and Canadians because they are no strangers to soccer.
And so, it’s really been an incredible opportunity to learn about all of these cultures and teams and what we’re going to do, the fun we’re going to have when we host them here in North America. And so, the day-to-day operations right now are about putting together these risk and threat assessments and establishing a clear command and control communications and coordination effort that allows the 68 functional areas within FIFA to flawlessly communicate to all of our external stakeholders and all of our internal stakeholders to make sure decision-makers have information they need to make timely and effective decisions.
SG: So, this is a mega event. This is going to be the biggest football World Cup ever and also the first one held in three countries. Your experience in Las Vegas, because of the fact that city does so many mega events, huge sporting ones, does that help you in your work that you do currently?
SL: Of course. The way we always try to give people just a little bit of a measurement, it’s basically three Super Bowls a day for 40 days. Like when we break it down like that, people are like, holy smokes, like it’s extraordinary, the amount of people, and how we’re going to move the tournament across the United States and Mexico and Canada. You know, you think about that, three Super Bowls a day.
And to your question, before I left Metro, I had the wonderful opportunity to be in charge of running special events and Homeland Security when we planned F1 for the first time. Las Vegas hosted the Formula One race, not just any place, down Las Vegas Boulevard. It was crazy. People told us we were nuts. We had to build out the street to be the exact thickness that F1 requires. Think about the fact that we had to close down Las Vegas Boulevard, the entries and exits into all those casinos, how they were going to make deliveries, how people were going to get in and out, ingress and egress.
The planning took us 20 months, maybe more. I mean, I feel like we went to meetings for two years. Right on the heels of F1, we had New Year’s Eve, right? Because F1 was in November, New Year’s Eve is end of December. And you know, Vegas New Year’s Eve is no small undertaking. And then right after that, we did the Super Bowl. So, within a matter of four months, we did three mega events. And I thought, man, I’ve seen it all.
But the truth was, it just was the tip of the iceberg of what we’re preparing for now. We’re going to have 48 teams, right, 48 different countries, in three countries, doing 104 matches over 40 days. It’s extraordinary. And so, yes, it prepared me on many levels, but I will tell you what prepared me more was having to make decisions every day as a leader on a police department, right? We made life or death decisions on the police department here. They’re not necessarily life or death, but they absolutely impact, and every decision we make has a ripple effect, right? It doesn’t just affect me or my group. It affects 67 other functional areas. So, understanding how that works is a great, was very helpful. It was a great attribute for me to have and to not just make decisions in a silo.
SG: Most definitely. Do you think that the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup can act as a kind of dry run to help prepare for the World Cup?
SL: So, we are in the middle of planning that while planning for the World Cup. So, what’s interesting about the Club World Cup is its 32 teams, which used to be the size of the World Cup. So, we’re planning basically two World Cups back-to-back.
The interesting thing about the club teams is that we do get more than one team from some countries, so it won’t be as many nations, but they still come with geopolitical issues. They still come with issues of rivalries with other teams, almost more so because maybe you get two teams that were neighbouring and have turf issues, right? Or longstanding cultural issues of their families from decades or generations beyond. And anybody that knows football or soccer understands that the teams have their fans that travel with them, and those issues and cultural differences travel with them. So, to your question, is it a dry run? In a way.
But here’s the catch, and this is what we talk about all the time, is if things go well, and we are absolutely planning for them to go well and going to put plans in place with our cities that close every loop – when it goes well, the fear is complacency will set in for the World Cup, and we can’t allow that to happen. Complacency is the mother of all evil. It’s the biggest threat, is that these cities will say, it’s fine, we did the Club World Cup, and it went great, we’ve got this. Or we’ve done Super Bowls, and it went fine. No, no, no. We cannot rest on our laurels on what we did yesterday. We have to plan as if every single time. So that’s number one.
Number two, if something goes wrong, does it then cause hesitation for the World Cup? So, in a way, I hold my breath on both ends. Yes, we will learn. Yes, we will have takeaways and things that will do better for the World Cup. But what I don’t want to have happen is people get a sour taste in their mouth or get complacent. I want them to treat this as their own individual event with their own individual learning experiences and then wipe the slate clean and understand we have to do it all over again next summer. So, it is a little bit of a give and take on both ends.
SG: Sounds very intense, but also exciting as well. You, of course, were serving in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department when the tragic 2017 Las Vegas shooting took place. How much of that experience helps in terms of understanding threat perception, providing security, safety? Are there lessons that one can take from that?
SL: It’s an interesting question. The short answer is yes. So, I always phrase it like this. I had the opportunity, and I do believe with all of my heart that it was an opportunity, to be the incident commander at the Route 91 lot that night.
My boss told me to come down there and run the scene. Now, there was another captain that was running the deployment efforts. There was another captain that was at the area command who was in charge of the strip, running the efforts of all the teams going into different hotels. And so, we really had what we call a unified command.
But I will tell you that being in that lot was like nothing I’ve ever experienced, and I hopefully will never experience again. It was some of the most incredible heroism of police officers and first responders I’ve ever seen, including the fire department. And I’ll get back to that as to why in a second.
Secondly, it was an unbelievable tragedy that was just unthinkable. But it was also the great human spirit coming together because we saw patrons and fans rescuing people they didn’t know. We saw people taking the shirt off their back to make tourniquets. We saw people doing things that were truly remarkable. And so, it gave me a lot of faith in humanity.
At the same time, I lost incredible faith as to why this event ever unfolded. It’s a really interesting dualistic experience, if you believe in dualism. And having to make decisions in those moments and having to understand command and control at a whole different level absolutely prepared me to do it for the World Cup.
You know, the truth is, I think that our training kicks in in moments like that. We believe that that’s why we train as hard as we do. So, you can put your training cap on and just get through it by your brain knowing it’s been through something like this before in training.
We did very deep after-action reviews. We did them in partnership with FEMA, with the FBI, with the fire department. Tons of lessons learned, right? We learned all kinds of things from how we should stage and have an abundance of tourniquets, communication flaws, things that we would do better, having go bags at events and casinos and hotels, all sorts of things, right? How we would issue commands, radio channels that would be used and not used.
But at the end of the day, I feel very confident that number one, our police officers did the job that they were supposed to do, with heroism. And number two, that the training we had put into place with the fire department to have rescue task forces and to work a protocol that we always called MACTAC, which we learned after the Mumbai terrorism attack when Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist organization, came into the banks in 2008 in November. It was the first time we’d seen multiple attacks happening simultaneously the way that they had done it, right? And so, we believed that 1 October was that because what had happened for us during that time was when the shooting was happening at the Route 91 lot, people that were leaving the Route 91 lot, victims, were running into hotels up and down the strip.
For instance, they would run into the Tropicana Hotel covered in blood, maybe injured, maybe shot, and saying, oh my God, there’s an active shooter, there’s an active shooter. Well, people there would be like, oh my God, there’s an active shooter at the Tropicana Hotel. And so, they would call the police. And so we were getting what we call ghost calls, where they were saying in our dispatch centre – it’s incredible to see the map light up when we actually have a graphic that shows this – it shows active shooter at the Tropicana, active shooter at the Flamingo, active shooter at Caesar’s Palace, because people were going into all these places.
So, we thought we were under attack like Mumbai. And so, we had trained this. We had honestly gone, we sent people to Mumbai, India after that attack happened and learned all the things that went well and didn’t go well. And one of the biggest takeaways we got was that they hadn’t trained or partnered with the fire department.
So that was one of the programs that I got to be a part of and leading was MACTAC and the integration of the fire department into our fusion centre. And the Clark County Fire Department was the first one to step up and say, we want to be a part of this. And so, they gave us a full-time fire captain embedded in our fusion centre that ran both outreach and training and tactics for the fire department.
So, for the years that followed – so we started that in 2009 – so for the following seven years, eight years, we trained with them both in a tactical scenario and in response protocols on something like this, on an active shooter event.
So, when 1 October happened, the fire department was ready. They knew what to do. They knew what we were going to do. They had bulletproof vests on their rigs, which they had gotten through grants and works that we had done together. They knew how to deploy them. They knew how to don their helmets. They knew how to go into a warm zone and in some cases a hot zone and make rescues that absolutely saved lives.
And it was because of that training and lessons that we had learned from other places and not been afraid to integrate in, again, that forward-thinking mentality, that we were successful on a level that I believe saved lives. And yes, we lost 58 lives that night, two later. So, we’re at a total of 60.
But I will tell you that the unparalleled leadership of Joe Lombardo, who’s now the Nevada Governor, but during that time was our Sheriff, is what got our agency through that time. He was doing press conferences every hour when it first happened, and then he did them every two hours. I don’t think the man slept for two weeks, but he never showed a crack in his armour, and he was there every step of the way, which gave us strength, inspiration, and resilience. And I do believe that that was some of the places that I got the best lessons in leadership, was from leaders like Joe Lombardo.
SG: Well, yes, and I remember also that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department had produced a presentation, giving in real time effectively what transpired that tragic day. I actually was supposed to be in Las Vegas that particular week, but my friends and I, we postponed our plans just because logistically we couldn’t make it work. So, I always think about that as one of those ‘what-if’ scenarios.
But yes, you and your colleagues really handled that in the most remarkable way possible. A lot of what we’re talking about is high intensity. It is challenging. It can be very stressful.
My understanding is that you engage a lot in yoga, and I think when we have a lot of practitioners on the podcast, it tends to be also an important dimension of that – it’s one thing learning about what the job entails, but then it’s also, in order to be good at the job continuously, there has to be that recovery as well. Do you think that yoga is an important part of that?
SL: I love that you asked me this question, especially on the heels of having to talk about 1 October and feeling my heart race. Yoga is and has been my medicine for survival.
You know, obviously, I’ve never done drugs. I never had a hankering, never had an addiction, thankfully, except for my yoga mat. What I mean by that is I’ve never been able to find such serenity and peace as I can on that mat.
There’s something magical that happens when you connect your breath to the movement of your body. My yoga teacher used to always say that energy follows thought, and thought follows breath. It really is true that the second you step on there and you intentionally take a deep breath, and you focus on your inhale, it’s almost instantaneous. Your physiology changes. If you do that for two or three minutes, your body starts to move and soften. I like to say it remembers. It remembers that sense of knowing. In yoga, we call it dhi, knowingness, that sense of knowingness and understanding that’s always been there, it’s innate to our soul.
One of the lessons I always loved, having been a martial artist before I found yoga, we used to, in the 80s and 90s, draw yin-yangs all the time. That was our cool patch and things we wore on our gi, the balance of good and evil. In yoga, they taught us a lesson. My teacher said there’s a balance of Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha is the innate knowingness of your soul. It’s the light in your soul that never changes. It never dims or extinguishes, no matter what happens in life. Sometimes it gets covered up with illusion, or Maya. Sometimes we don’t pay attention to it. We disconnect from it and that’s what creates suffering, but it never changes. The other thing, Prakriti, is that which is always in flux, that which is always changing. It’s the seasons, it’s the weather. It’s our mind. It’s bouncing all over the place. Together, they are the yin and the yang, the balance. Yoga has always given me the ability to recognize both of those spaces. I lived in Prakriti, bouncing all over the place, running from call to call, chaos to event to chaos. But in those moments, I always remembered how to connect into my breath, remember that essence and that light, and make decisions from that space.
So being a practitioner of yoga was more than just the physical movements. The physical movements were fun. They kept my body healthy. Listen, wearing a gun belt for 26 years wreaks havoc on anyone’s body, your lower back, your spine, everything. It can cause excruciating pain if you’re not careful. Yoga diminished that for me. Yoga helped really give me strength in my core and my body to where I didn’t suffer too greatly.
But moreover, it helped me in everything from shooting accurately, learning how to control my breath, to thinking, learning how to think before I speak, take a deep breath, think about my answer and not have an emotional reaction. And lastly, to assimilate. It’s one of the greatest lessons I try to teach young police officers; if you don’t have a process of assimilation or digestion, you will not have a long-lived career, or you’ll be a statistic and die five years after you retire because you didn’t assimilate the traumas and everybody else’s stuff that you will accumulate over a career. You can’t not accumulate things that you see.
Just the 20 hours that I was at that Route 91 lot, I remember thinking, I don’t have any idea how I’m going to digest all the things I’ve seen tonight. And I’ll be honest with you, doctor, I couldn’t get on my yoga mat for close to two weeks. I couldn’t do it. Emotionally, I couldn’t do it. So, I did the next best thing. I put my running shoes on and like Forrest Gump, I just ran. I ran and ran and ran. And at some point, five or six miles into my run the next day, tears started streaming down my face as my body just started to break down.
And that was digestion. That was my digestion of the inconceivable. And a couple days later, after kind of purging some of that initial emotion, I was able to get on that yoga mat and breathe. And I’ll tell you that it was even longer, probably two months, before I could sit down and meditate again. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing the visuals of what happened at Route 91. I couldn’t close my eyes and not hear the sounds and smell the smells.
And I remember calling my yoga teacher and saying, I can’t meditate. I’ve been a meditator for 20 years, and I can’t do it. And he said, it’s okay. He said, easy. He said, just do your practice. Even if you do your mantra while driving or running, just your practice is there. And he was right. The evolution of assimilation happened organically. And after a while, I could close my eyes again and get on my mat and breathe and do all those things that make yoga so special.
But I always tell people yoga is evolution. The practice you do at 20 years old is not going to be the same practice at 40 or 60. And that has absolutely held true in my life. And thank goodness for that, right? Thank goodness because I’ve become wiser and more attuned. And I hope that anybody that has any sort of high stress life, doesn’t have to just be policing or military, finds a way to connect with their breath and develop some sort of assimilation. Because otherwise, you’ll turn to a vice or a numbing agent. And we know that that isn’t going to end well. So, yoga.
SG: Well, that’s probably the best case I’ve ever heard in my life for why yoga should be considered. I feel like getting my own yoga mat right now.
SL: You can never go wrong.
SG: Of course. So, one final question. Maybe it’s the hardest question, maybe. Who is your prediction for winning the World Cup in 2026?!
SL: That’s a good one. Well, I have to tell you that so many great teams have qualified.
I mean, we’ve had eight teams qualify so far. And I saw that Argentina just qualified, which I know a lot of people are excited about. But I think it’s too early for me to give an accurate prediction because we don’t have all the teams qualified yet.
So, I’m going to take a rain check on my actual prediction and tell you that my prediction is we’re going to have a safe World Cup. Because I’m going to make sure that we pour every ounce of quantitative and qualitative effort into those assessments and give our host cities everything that they need to do a remarkable job keeping our venues and stadiums safe.
SG: That’s a very good answer! And I have absolutely no doubt that it will be safe with you at the helm. I’m pretty sure I heard you whisper England’s going to win the World Cup!
SL: Oh, is that who we’re hoping for?! I know that they come from a long history. And I’ll tell you that we had a chance to work with those guys. And they are so wise. And they had so much experience that, hands down, we probably learned more from their beliefs than we have from anyone else about international soccer and what to expect. So, hats off to those guys.
SG: Well, it’s been so fascinating to talk to you, Sasha. And I just want to thank you for giving the time for the NATO DEEP Dive podcast. And hopefully we can talk again and see how everything is progressing.
SL: I would love that. Thank you for having me. It’s been so much fun to talk about the things I love the most, policing, soccer, and yoga.
SG: It’s been our pleasure.
SL: Thank you.
SG: Thank you for listening to this episode of NATO DEEP Dive, brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP). My producers are Marcus Andreopoulos, Victoria Jones, Eve Register, and Hannah Hains. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
Disclaimer: Please note that the views, information, or opinions expressed in the NATO DEEP Dive series are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of NATO or DEEP.
This transcript has been edited for clarity