WEST PALM’S 1ST FEMALE SWAT OFFICER
Burgoon aces ‘grueling’ tests, makes West Palm history.
WEST PALM BEACH — Before West Palm Beach police even hired her, Sarah Burgoon knew she’d be the department’s first female SWAT member.
The undaunted 35-year-old officer didn’t think it’d be easy. She didn’t want it to be.
This month, Burgoon ran, shot and sweated her way past her male colleagues and into West Palm Beach history. She is the first woman to make the department’s SWAT team in its 44 years of existence.
“Honestly, now that I have gone through it, I think it’s a big deal that anyone gets in,” she said.
Ask just about anyone in the department about the SWAT tryouts and the reaction is the same: an obvious cringe followed by such mumbled adjectives as “grueling” and “miserable.”
Capt. Brian Kapper, the leader of the SWAT team, stressed that Burgoon was held to the same standards, physically and mentally, as the men during the selection process, and she will be as she continues to train, too.
Eleven people tried out for the team this year. Only four even completed: two officers, Burgoon and Thomas Viale, and two of the city’s Fire Rescue members, who were trying out for medic positions.
After interviews with higher-ups about why they wanted the on-call, part-time position, in addition to the jobs they already hold in the department, Burgoon and Viale were selected. Both are in their fifth year with the department.
‘Honestly, now that I have gone through it, I think it’s a big deal that anyone gets in.’ Sarah Burgoon
SWAT team
When Burgoon started at the police academy, she’d already passed on a military career so she could raise her four boys. When her youngest started school, though, she applied for the academy and quickly decided she wanted a spot on the city’s SWAT team.
After years working road patrol and on the community response team, she finally does.
Burgoon and Viale will spend the next year familiarizing themselves with the SWAT team’s equipment, training for situations such as school shootings and honing the physical and mental strength that earned them those positions in the first place. Then they’ll really be ready to get to work with the 30 or so others on the team.
Most often when the team is called out, it’s to help serve search warrants for drug-related or violent offenses. They’re the ones who break down doors and go rifles- and shields-first into potentially deadly situations.
Kapper points to a January 2017 incident on 13th Street as among the most highstress, all-hands-on-deck situations his team recently has dealt with. Police were investigating gunfire one evening when they saw Nathaniel Royal shoot 54-year-old Manuel Jerome Poole on the second-story porch of their 13th Street apartment.
Poole was dead by the time officers carried him down the stairs, and Royal was barricaded in an apartment. SWAT members moved in and, with the help of the city’s hostage-negotiation team, talked Royal out of the apartment and safely took him into custody.
Royal remains in the Palm Beach County Jail, awaiting trial on first-degree murder and attempted murder charges.
High-stress situations like that drew Burgoon to the job. Her boys’ excitement about her training for the SWAT team pushed her to go through with it.
They bragged about her making the team before she’d even tried out, she said with a laugh.
“They’re probably my biggest cheerleaders,” she said.
Last year, Delray Beach police’s only female SWAT sniper was killed in a scooter crash in Key West. Christine Braswell was tougher than some of the men in the department, said police spokeswoman Dani Moschella, and Braswell rose to the top of the male-dominated profession.
In August 2016, Lashawnna Edwards became the first woman on the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office’s entry SWAT team. A sheriff ’s captain called Edwards making the team “ground- breaking.”