Former WPD detective & crisis negotiator started his career in the Air Force
WELLINGTON, Kan. (KSNW) — Bradley “Bubs” Bryant grew up in Wichita. He graduated from Wichita West High School, joined the Air Force, and served in the Wichita Police Department for over three decades.
Bryant says he really had no desire to join the military. He was at a drive-in movie with his girlfriend when he realized his draft number was up next in the lottery. So, instead of waiting for a call and being told to report, Bryant took matters into his own hands.
“So, I went down to the Air Force recruiter and says, ‘Hey, I need to be in the Air Force, so what can you give me?’ ‘Well, we don’t have much to choose from. You can be a cop, a cook, or a medic.’ Well, needles scared me, so I didn’t want to be a medic. I thought about being a cook. Oh, I don’t think that’s what I want to do. So, I said, ‘I’ll take the cop,’ and here I am today,” said Bryant.
Bryant went through Air Force basic training and air policeman training before being sent to his first assignment at a small Air Force base in the mountains east of San Diego called Mount Laguna.
“They tracked every flight coming in or out of the southwest United States,” he said.
After two years there, Bryant was assigned to Zwiebruken, which is right on the border between France and Germany. He was promoted to staff sergeant, and nine months later, he was on his way to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth.
“Carswell was a Strategic Air Command base. It had six bombers, B-52s, and four tankers, KC 135s, on standby 24 hours a day,” said Bryant. “They were always ready. The crews were always on standby waiting in a crew area, and we were out guarding the things.”
Bryant was initially assigned to an off-base nuclear security site and storage area. He had to supervise 25 to 30 people.
“We had 14, I think it was 14 bunkers full of nuclear weapons that we had to guard,” he said.
One day, when Bryant was in training, he says he was approached by two men with their arms full of manuals.
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“I’m sitting there one day, and I’m looking at some stuff, and the executive officer and another guy come in, and they both got field manuals. A whole stack of them. And they just sat them down on my desk, and I said, ‘What’s this?’ And the executive officer said, ‘You got 30 days to make a combat skills and terror threat training course.’ I said, ‘What?’ I had never had any training like that at all,” said Bryant.
So, Bryant got busy and designed a week-long combat skills training course to be taught to 700 trainees over three years. The training was on how to survive an ambush and a crisis situation.
“We taught them covering concealed tactical field communications, hand signals, and such. We made sure they all knew how to use all of the weapons. We taught them small unit tactics,” he said.
Bryant says after “playing Army man for three years,” he and his wife decided to move back home, and he applied to the Wichita Police Department.
“And I’ll be real honest. The first night on the street scared me to death because I said, ‘Everybody’s looking at me,'” he said.
He was assigned to the smallest beat in the city and worked out of East Patrol for 11 years. Bryant says his beat had the largest concentration of alcoholics, bums, and derelict people in the city. So, he spent much of his time getting to know the city’s homeless community.
“So, I worked with the street people for a long, long time. At one time, I could safely say we had on an annual basis between 2,500 and 3,500 people drifting through Wichita on their way to something up north or on their way to something down south,” he explained.
In 1990, Bryant was promoted to City Hall, where he worked as a detective and was also assigned to homicide.
“I spent about two and a half years in homicide working over there, and then I went down to work in what they call checks, frauds, and forgeries, which is better known now as financial crimes,” he said.
Bryant was also a founding member of the Kansas Association of Hostage Negotiators. He was a crisis negotiator for 22 years for the WPD until he retired after 32 years on the police force.
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“I don’t know how many negotiations I did, but I can tell you it had to be in the many hundreds over the 22 years that I did it. And I did everything from suicide jumpers to armed individuals, whatever,” said Bryant.
Bryant also wrote hundreds of poems and published several books of his poetry. The poems were intended to help survivors of family members of murder victims. He says the poems also helped him deal with the pain of being there with the victims and not being able to do anything to help them.
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