Interviews 12: Captain Granite (Patreon)

"Today we are in the Harris County Sheriff's Office, a sizeable building that feels more like a major metro police building or even state agency headquarters than what we're used to thinking of as a sheriff's office. We are in one of the Media Offices, which appear to be conference rooms set up to allow for announcements to be made to media representatives without standing on the building's steps. But there are only two people in it at the moment, myself and Captain Granite, a senior sheriff's officer with eleven years on the force. Thank you, Captain, for sitting down with us today."

"Of course."

"So, you are head of the Harris County SABER Team, in Texas?"

"No, technically, the sheriff of Harris County is the head of the team. I'm in charge of the entire SABER division within the office and one of the field leaders, for the SABER RED team, which does mean I'm normally calling the shots anytime the public sees more than one or two SABER members at once. But the sheriff is my boss, and the people of the county are his boss."

"Understood. And before we go any further, can you tell our listeners what a SABER team is, what your primary duties are, and why Harris County is one of only 32 counties in the US with its own such team?"

"Sure. SABER stands for Special Action Brigade Emergency Response. That's just a fancy way of saying we're law enforcement first responders tasked with dealing with situations other agencies and groups lack the specific expertise, equipment, or authority to deal with. That often includes abHuman, alien, or mystic individuals, or items and events linked to such. In short, we deal with things linked to nonstandard powers, often colloquially known as Super Villains.

"As for why we have our own SABER team -- Harris County, Texas, is the 4th most populous county in the United States. As such it both includes a lot of abHumans and a lot of wealth and resources that criminals of all stripes are interested in. We're the home of the city of Houston, the Southwestern Node of the Babbage-Bell Grid, Calculaq Inc., T. Swift International, Danneb Oil, General Aetheric's Aerospace division, four separate and distinct state universities with two being Tier One research facilities, and of course, the Goldwater Space Center. Those factors result in a lot of super-powered crime, relative to our total population.

"In fact, after the super-powered hotbeds that contain New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Harris County has the next most frequent number of SABER calls per year, as calculated by S.T.E.E.L.'s analytics. Now, Houston has its own SABER teams, of course, as do most US cities with populations over 500,000. Not all of those are multiple-team departments, and not all their SABER officers are dedicated exclusively to super-powered crime. Kansas City has a SABER auxiliary, for example, which is a mix of full-time officers and reservists it can call on, all of whom have passed that state's reservist training and vetting process.

"But, given the size of Harris County, and how spread out some of the potential high-value locations are, it makes sense for the sheriff's department to have multiple full-time SABER teams. Across the US, it's mostly more populous counties that have a SABER team of their own, generally those with populations over 1.5 million. There are exceptions, of course. Los Alamos County in New Mexico and both Lincoln County and Washoe County in Nevada have dedicated SABER teams, as a result of how often powered criminals set up operations outside of townships within those counties as staging areas.

"And all the sheriff's SABER teams I am aware of have protocols for being called on by both cities within their county, and sheriff's departments elsewhere in the state. We have ombudsmen with direct contact to authorities in the city of Houston, as well as all surrounding counties and the cities of Austin, Dallas, Ft. Worth, and San Antonio. Texas is one of only two states in the country with more than one of the 20 biggest cities nationwide, so we maintain a very high level of interagency cooperation and coordination."

"Fascinating. And what exactly are your duties within the SABER Red team? What does a typical day look like for you? "

As a division leader, the typical day for me looks much more administrative than like a comic-book adventure. I'm one of the people who oversees that interagency coordination I mentioned, and that involves a lot of emails, and a lot of meetings. I also keep track of training requirements for everyone in the SABER Red team, set daily assignments, maintain safety and maintenance records, go over field reports and intelligence briefings, and write updates to our own agency's advisories and notices. Oh, and budget recommendations. A lot of time is spend recommending budget items, writing explanations for those recommendations, recording how previous budget items have or haven't been used, and estimating how long existing budgets will last."

"Are your SABER Teams underfunded?"

"I think you'll find every law-enforcement agency in the world will say it's underfunded. I completely understand the Commissioner's Court has a limited budget, and the Sheriff's Department in general, and the SABER teams in specific, are only a few out of hundreds of top-level line items in that budget. The commissioners need specific information to decide what each agency and department's budget is going to be, and part of my job is to ensure they get that information in a timely, accurate format."

"If you don't mind my saying, that sounds like a very careful, diplomatic answer."

"It is also part of my job to be able to give careful, diplomatic answers. Which is why I'm the one talking to you today."

"Fair enough. And your point about a typical day not involving super-powered conflicts is well-taken. But if a day is going to involve SABER in a powered fight, how does that start? How do you get notified, pick a team, make plans, and so on?"

"Well, first of all, we try not to pre-determine that any call we get is automatically a conflict. We obviously have to be prepared for that, but SABER is trained to do more than stop abHumans robbing a bank. We are the county's go-to specialists for anything so far beyond the ordinary that no other agency or department seems appropriate. For example, we got called out when there was a report of glowing men damaging cars in the Washburn Tunnel. When we arrived we found a number of extraterrestrials and a few damaged cars. It turns out, the aliens were making a rendezvous with a sentient armadillo species they'd met ten million years ago. The aliens thought that cars were hunter-killer robots seeking to harm their armadillo allies, and the Washburn Tunnel was an invasion route for those robots. Because we approached them peacefully, and because Officer Cicero has an abHuman ability to learn languages in just minutes of interaction, we were able to prevent any further violence or misunderstandings."

"Okay, and that's a great example of a non-conflict SABER call-out. But what about, for example, the Sugar Land Siege? You were the senior officer in charge of most of that incident, and it was definitely what I'd call a conflict. Can you walk us through the beginnings of that? "

"Yes, I was in charge for most of that incident. And the very fact so many people are at least vaguely familiar with it is indicative of how un-typical an event that was, but I can certainly walk you through the key points of how SABER Red got involved in that. It's worth noting that as with many well-known events, a lot of public perceptions about it are inaccurate. It didn't take place in Harris County of course, but nearby Fort Bend County. But it also wasn't in Sugar Land city limits, but nearby on US Highway 59.

"That incident started when a highway patrol called in what appeared to be a tank or armored car headed southbound as part of a small convoy. The convoy did not respond to the patrol officers flagging them to pull over, so Sugar Land police and Fort Bend sheriff's deputies set a blockade to stop them. The convoy tried to ram through the blockade, but underestimated how much the SWAT trucks included in the blockade would slow them down. The convoy was stopped, and then revealed all the trucks were some kind of high-tech armored cars with holograms that made them look like regular trucks. The armored cars all linked together forming this small pillbox in the middle of the highway, and used high-tech weaponry to force the officers to move well back.

"Normally, that might be a job for the Texas State department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Superpowers, but all the TSATFS field teams were already engaged in a swarm of hostile drones up in Amarillo which, investigators determined later, was a distraction that was part of the same criminal enterprise. So, the Fort Bend sheriff called my boss--as I said, we have excellent cooperation and coordination--and SABER Red was on duty so we were sent out. At the same time, SABER Blue was called to active duty, and SABER Yellow was moved to be on ready stand-by."

"Is that standard procedure--to move every other SABER team up one level of readiness when Red gets called out?"

"Not universally, it depends on the exact situation. But we do make sure there's always someone in reserve to deal with additional situations. The exact protocols for that aren't public record, for what I think are obvious reasons, and are reviewed and revised regularly in any case. But ever since the highwaymen and masked marauders of the 1950s, both powered and organized crime has looked to overwhelm local jurisdictions to gain temporary tactical advantage. The G-Squad put a stop to that once it was formed, and S.T.E.E.L took over that role in the early 1980s. But we don't depend on being saved by federal or international forces. The National Sheriff's Association has been on top of this issue for decades, as have numerous other interagency organizations.

"Short of a full-fledged alien invasion, and as we've proved even during some of those, the SABER teams of this country are ready to ensure no one can simply overwhelm any community. We prepare. We train. We're ready."

"Well done, to get your official SABER Red motto into your answer. But we went off on a digression. Can you finish the key points of the event commonly known as the Sugar Land Siege?"

"Of course. Once SABER Red got the call, we set up a response coordination network with all involved agencies. That allowed us to have an idea of the on-the-ground situation and what additional resources would be available and on what timetable, all while we moved to the incident site. We got a SABER officer to recon the site in advance of our main arrival..."

"And was that Sergeant Velocity? "

"It was not. It's true that she is often first-on-scene due to her abHuman speed power, in this case I ruled that the site was too hot for her to be approaching it solo. Instead, we had Deputy Overeye form an observer drone using materials on-hand from officers on the scene. He piped the drone's feed into our Scabbard..."

"And a Scabbard is one of the armored personal carriers T. Swift International manufactures exclusively for US SABER teams?"

"That's right."

"And is it true you officially only lease those, and TSI retains ownership of them, in order to prevent any weaponry other than less-than-lethal options be mounted on it?"

"It's true we lease them, which comes with free repairs by the way. And it's true that TSI only allows specific offensive systems be mounted on them, all of which are what might be called 'Less Lethal.' But I can't say from personal knowledge that the reason TSI only leases Scabbard vehicles is to control what systems are installed."

"Again, a very diplomatic response. But we keep interrupting, and very much Do want to hear the rest of the Sugar Land Siege, as you saw it."

"It's not a problem, I'm here to answer questions after all. So, the footage from Oversee's drone indicated the ring of vehicles were building some kind of device within their central area. At the time, we could not determine what it was, but given their resources and technical sophistication, I concluded it was going to be something to give them a tactical edge in offense, defense, or escape. It turned out it was the latter, a translocation gate, but we did not know that at the time.

"Since the unknown subjects had already wrecked multiple law-enforcement vehicles, shot at an injured officers, refused all efforts by agents at the scene to communicate, and were building an unknown advanced technological device, I requests, and received, permission to treat them as a clean and present danger to both state interests and civilian life and/or property. That opened a new set of available responses for me to assign to the team.

"As I have noted, we try not to see every interaction as a conflict. But I felt this was not only already an active conflict, but one at imminent risk of escalation. So, I chose to have Oversee issue a final warning through his drone that if the group did not surrender they would be taken into custody through force.

"You asked how I picked teams for specific incidents. We had rolled out with all of SABER Red, but I did not want all of them on the breaching team. Deputy Oversee was too useful providing overwatch, and Officers Crash Cart and Velocity couldn't use our Garrison armor suits without compromising their field effectiveness..."

"You also don't use a Garrison suit."

"I don't need one. And I do have a modified Garrison helmet I use in these kinds of incidents, both for additional cranial reinforcement and situational awareness. And as the pointman of the breaching team, I also carried the optional Barricade heavy shield Garrison suits can use. I wanted the most resilient SABER Red team members on that breaching team, so myself, Deputy Corn-Fed, and Officer Shumard. I also needed our best pick for Breacher, and went with Corporal Claymore for her well-tested ability to boost the power of conventional explosives."

"To interject once more, when preparing for this interview I was impressed by how thorough testing is of SABER team-member powers, but also surprised how public that information is. Doesn't making all the information public allow villains to study your powered members and design countermeasures for them, specifically?"

"It might, though mostly powered criminals don't seem concerned with people they dismiss as 'Super Cops.' But more importantly, having the abilities of every powered law-enforcement officer understood and publicly available is a Texas state law. The people of the state want to know what parahuman abilities are being used in their name, and we respect and comply with that law. Exceptions can be made, but only with a court order that must be reviewed and renewed every two years."

"And you don't think that's a bad idea?"

"I think it's state law, and my opinion of it don't matter. I'll also note it can be very useful when investigating powered crimes to be able to rule out powered LEO with abilities similar to what was used for a crime. And, honestly, I understand the public's desire to know who they are trusting with law enforcement powers. I know other states handle this issue differently, from California's powered privacy laws that make revealing someone's unrevealed parahuman abilities publicly a crime to Illinois' database that is tightly restricted to senior law-enforcement and court officers. But Texans have clearly shown again and again they prefer powered transparency, and we give it to them."

"Very well. Please, go on with your recounting of the Sugar Land incident."

"There's not much more to cover, actually. We breached, discovered a few powered felons and numerous unpowered professional support criminals. That lead to a considerable brawl, but the resolution was never really in question. The only issue was if we could subdue the subjects prior to their completing their gate, and we did. SABER Red kept control of the site until S.T.E.E.L determined it was part of one of their investigations and sent agents to take over. Everything else was filing reports and checking for bruised officers and damaged gear."

"Let me ask you a different line of questions. You clearly have a strong desire to serve and the power needed to be an independent superhero. Why did you become a sheriff's deputy, rather than go solo, or join a hero team?"

"You know, I get asked that a lot, and honestly I don't know what the mystery is. As a sheriff's deputy I have a salary, retirement, health insurance, backup, training, legal authority, and an entire system designed to take care of parts of the job I'm not suited for. To be clear, I'm not knocking the people who choose to be independent heroes... but I have no idea how they manage it. Who pays their mortgages? How do they get a license plate run, or DNA evidence analyzed? What keeps them from crossing a line with no training on legal standards or office of professional conduct to let them know if they crossed a line?"

"There are organizations that support and even train heroes. You could join the Tri-State Sentinels, or the Red Rivier Regulators."

"Sure, but why go with private teams instead of a government-run and government-sanctioned law-enforcement agency? The Regulators are funded by Daneb Industries, which is all fine and well but that essentially makes them corporate security guards with superpowers. And the Tri-State Affiliation for Justice is a fine organization, but I don't think they have either the resources or the personnel to properly train and support their own hero team as much more than professional eye-witnesses. But more importantly, you were asking why a SABER team instead of going independent, and any group that receives funding, be it corporate or nonprofit, isn't any more independent than I am."

"You have an officer on your team who was on of the TriState Sentinels don't you? Sergeant Velocity?"

"I do, and she's a highly valued member of Red. And she's been on-record as stating she left the TS-Sentinels for much the same reasons I noted earlier. She wanted more training, more support, and the knowledge that she was working within the legal framework the people of Harris county have appointed."

"What about those officers who have left SABER teams to join private hero groups? I understand a number of SABER Blue and SABER Yellow members quite to join the Red River Regulators?"

"That's true, but they did not explain those choices to me, nor to the best of my knowledge have they made public statements on the matter."

"And you can't speculate on their reasons?"

"I could, but I won't. You'd have to ask them."

"What about the private heroes you are known to operate with? You've been seen working with Cannonhead many times, despite his avowed distrust of the government and frequently stating that 'all cops are bastards.'"

"Cannonhead and the Sheriff's Department have an... arms-length relationship."

"You seemed to work pretty closely in numerous recent raids on Serpentine drug houses and underground bases."

"Serpentine is a terrorist organization that deals in human trafficking, narcotics, and illegal genetic manipulation and cybernetics. They remain a major threat to the entire Southwest, and a top priority for the Sheriff's Department. Cannonhead has a unique line of information useful in taking down Serpentine, which he shares with us and which we are aware of the source for. We've invited him to work with us even more closely, but his extreme anti-police views prevent him from being willing to do so. Even so, to be clear, anytime Cannonhead is operating outside direct, on-scene Sheriff Department oversight, he is doing so without our knowledge or blessing."

"But he DOES work with you, more and more often. You, in particular, Captain Granite."

"Cannonhead and I see eye-to-eye, and we have both made our opinions about how the other does things clear. I welcome Cannonhead's assistance as a concerned citizen expert, but if he steps outside the bounds of the law, I'll have no hesitation about arresting him."

"And he knows this?"

"Absolutely."

"And his public statements that you are a means to an end, and he's sure he'll have to take you down someday?"

"Cannonhead believes all law-enforcement are nothing more than the enforcement arm of a billionaire elite who use money to directly or indirectly control society and the people who serve it. From his point of view, all LEOs are at best one tier short of being jackbooted thugs. He's convinced I'm either fooling myself or fooling him when I assert I have not run into that kind of willingness to bend the rules to benefit the rich and powerful."

"But you have, more than once alluded to a connection between Serpentine and Danneb Industries, with Danneb one of the largest contributor's to the Sheriff's political campaigns."

"Any such statements I made in the past were taken out of context, or a result of frustration and poor word choice on my part. I have no evidence to connect Serpentine to Danneb."

"Really? Because I can play the clips of your statements nine months ago..."

"Sorry, that's all the time I had allotted for this interview. Which is now over."