Tactical Tracking: Ancient Strategies for Modern Manhunts

1. What they did

Patrick Patten, a former ranger who has developed and taught woodland operations training since the early 1990s, argues that police tactical teams still need tracking and land navigation skills, even in an age of drones, handheld thermal cameras, seismic sensors and street cameras. He notes that modern technology often fails when a fugitive flees into woodland, and that many teams get little or no training for this kind of high-risk callout.

He draws on his own cases:

• The murder of U.S. Park Ranger Joe Kolodski (1998). Kolodski, the author’s friend and co-worker, was ambushed and killed on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. A five-person woodland operations team followed the suspect’s track.
• The Eric Rudolph manhunt (from July 1998, for ten months). As Lead Tracker for the Southeast Bomb Task Force in the Nantahala National Forest, he planned search strategy for up to 15 tactical tracking teams and served as tracker with elite tactical teams for ten months.
• A search for an alleged child molester in a 20,000-acre area of his park.
• The Eric Frein manhunt in Pennsylvania (2014), where he was a tactical advisor.

2. What they found

The Kolodski case

• Containment was set at about a two-mile radius. The tracking team picked up the suspect’s track and found the abandoned murder weapon, where the killer had fired another 15 rounds at responding officers.
• Soon after, a perimeter team caught a suspect two miles from the crime scene.
• Using visual tracking, the team back-tracked the suspect from the arrest site to the crime scene, finding and casting his boot tracks and other evidence on the way. This evidence was later used to convict him of first-degree murder.
• The author credits the success to the woodland experience of the rangers, who tracked poachers, fugitives and lost persons every day.

The Rudolph manhunt

• Over ten months the author patrolled more than 600 miles with various teams.
• He saw a stark difference in effectiveness between teams that included ex-military members or hunters and those that did not. These members brought navigation and tracking skills.

Land navigation

• Woodland missions (perimeter, grid search, surveillance, sweeps, blocking or tracking) all depend on accurate navigation and on recording routes for command.
• Without this, a fugitive or his hiding place may be missed, Probability of Detection models can be skewed, and teams can be put in the wrong place. The author has found poor tactical land navigation to be common among teams.

Tracking

• A qualified tracker, in the author’s words, is someone who has spent purposeful time looking at the ground and following tracks, and who knows the woods, including flora and wildlife.
• Tracking can close the time and distance gap to a fugitive, show the direction of travel so takedown teams can be positioned, and expand or reconstruct crime scenes, recovering evidence an untrained operator would miss.
• In the child molester search, elimination tracking (using tracking to find where someone has not travelled) shrank the search area, and the suspect was found and arrested within 30 hours.
• Some teams call on local game wardens and rangers as trackers.
• In the Frein manhunt, the author saw a marked improvement in the strategy, tactics and readiness of urban teams compared with earlier manhunts, which he puts down to training.

3. What they concluded

• Integrating qualified trackers into operations and planning is essential to the success of any woodland manhunt.
• Teams should recruit people with woods skills, develop team members in tactical land navigation and tracking, and give the whole team annual woodland skills training.
• As the article’s opening quote from Archilochus puts it: “We don’t rise to the occasion but fall to the level of our training.”

4. How tracking was or was not used

Visual tracking of people in woodland: following a fugitive’s line of sign (trailing), back-tracking from an arrest site to a crime scene, finding and casting boot tracks as evidence, and elimination tracking to rule out areas. Training courses described in a photo caption start in a spoor pit before moving to the woods.

5. Tracker or observer certification

Reported but not validated. The author describes his own experience (Lead Tracker on the Rudolph manhunt, ranger, former woodland operations instructor for the Department of Homeland Security) and defines a “qualified” tracker by experience and knowledge, but no certification or test of tracking skill is reported.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• Map, compass, Global Positioning System (GPS) and other route-recording devices, used together for redundancy.
• A team navigator who knows the team’s position at all times and studies maps for choke points, a fugitive’s natural lines of drift and possible ambush sites.
• Casting of boot tracks for court evidence.