Eric Litchfield is a retired captain from the Santa Rosa Police Department in northern California. During his tenure, he managed divisions and programs that included patrol, traffic, tactical teams, incident management, detectives, professional standards and training, recruiting, and promotion assessments.

Captain Litchfield has extensive experience in personnel investigations, policy development, recruiting, crowd control tactics, and managing large scale critical incidents.

He is also a graduate of the POST Command College Strategic Foresight program, and a former fellow with the Institute for American Policing Reform.

During our time together, we discussed the specific training differences between the men and women who serve as peace officers vs. the training of ICE and Border Patrol agents today in the Trump administration.

We talked at length about the tone, tenor, and screening of ICE officers and how their specific training is not focused on working with the public, and why this has proven to be deleterious to the institution of ICE, its agents on the ground, and to American citizens writ large.

We also discussed the leadership of J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, and Steven Miller…specifically…how they have publicly declared “Immunity” for their federal officers, vs. the Qualified Immunity standard they will be held to in a court of law.

Captain Litchfield helped me better understand the importance of training, screening, and governance of both state and federal officers and agents. I hope you find this helpful as well.

*Note that this episode was recorded before the killing of Alex Pretti on January 24, 2026.*

Watch Episode:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit truethirty.substack.com/subscribe