The Playboy article is a simple one-page thing with six examples of SWAT raids gone wrong. The real issue, of course, isn't just that sometimes raids go wrong, but the whole spectacle of police militarization in the US.
I first encountered this subject in the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine back in 1999. Funnily enough, you can read the story in question online here, because when FOX News asked Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh to explain his motivations for his attack, that article was one of the things he sent them. The article, by Wayne Laugesen, is called "The Thin Blurry Line: When Cops and Soldiers Are One-and-the-Same".
"Since the late '80s we've been seeing the militarization of police, and the policization of military," says Peter Kraska, a professor of police studies at Eastern Kentucky University, who has studied the militarization of police for more than a decade. "These are converging forces. Soldiers are told to be cops, both domestically and on foreign soil, and cops are becoming more like soldiers, working in elite SWAT-style units."
In 2006, the aforementioned Radley Balko wrote a paper for the CATO Institute called Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. To start with, I'll be quoting heavily from those two sources to give you a brief summary of what's going on in SWAT nation. Here's Laugensen:
Kraska says his research has found that in small town America - towns of 25,000-50,000 - two of every 10 policemen serve on a department paramilitary unit. Throughout America, 11% of police departments have armored personnel carriers. Of all the country's elite paramilitary police units, 20% are used for routine patrol work, and 85% of their calls are to carry out no-knock warrants for drug raids. In 1986, the nation had 3,000 deployments of paramilitary police units. In 1996, it rose to 30,000.
A tenfold increase in paramilitary police deployments. Why? Here's a chilling quote from Balko's paper:
“They [police officers] made a mistake. There’s no one to blame for a mistake. The way these people were treated has to be judged in the context of a war.”
—Hallandale, Florida, attorney Richard Kane, after police officers conducted a late night drug raid on the home of Edwin and Catherine Bernhardt. Police broke into the couple’s home and threw Catherine Bernhardt to the floor at gunpoint. Edwin Bernhardt, who had come down from his bedroom in the nude after hearing the commotion, was also subdued and handcuffed at gunpoint. Police forced him to wear a pair of his wife’s underwear, then took him to the police station, where he spent several hours in jail. Police later discovered they had raided the wrong address.
The war he's referring to is, of course, the war on drugs. Wayne Laugensen explains:
"The collapse of the Soviet Union has, unfortunately, led many military officials to seek out a new enemy to justify continued funding," writes David Kopel, a New York University law professor and author of No More Wacos. "The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) admits that it is no longer capable of protecting Americans from incoming nuclear missiles. Yet NORAD enjoys hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding, as part of a $1.8 billion systems upgrade, having convinced congress to assign NORAD the mission of tracking planes and ships that might be carrying drugs."
In addition, the federal government has been especially keen to promote the militarization of the police. Balko:
In 1994, the Department of Defense issued a memorandum authorizing the transfer of equipment and technology to state and local police. The same year, Congress created a “reutilization program” to facilitate handing military gear over to civilian police agencies.
(...)
By the late 1990s, the various laws, orders, and directives softening Posse Comitatus had added a significant military component to state and local police forces. Between just 1995 and 1997, the Pentagon distributed 3,800 M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 grenade launchers, and 112 armored personnel carriers to civilian police agencies across the country.
(...)
A retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the Times in the 1999 article, “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted.”
One of the reasons given for this militarization, and enthusiastically peddled by Hollywood, is the spectre of heavily armed criminals. Radley Balko debunked that:
Moreover, there's simply not much evidence that criminals are arming themselves with heavy weaponry. In a paper by David Kopel and Eric Morgan published by the Independence Institute in 1991, about a decade into the militarization of civilian policing that began in 1980, the authors point to a number of statistics showing that high-powered weapons, which are often cumbersome and difficult to conceal, simply aren't favored by criminals, including drug peddlers. The authors surveyed dozens of cities and found that, in general, less than 1 percent of weapons seized by police fit the definition of an “assault weapon.” Nationally, they found that fewer than 4 percent of homicides across the United States involved rifles of any kind. And fewer than one-eighth of 1 percent involved weapons of military caliber. Even fewer homicides involved weapons commonly called “assault” weapons. The proportion of police fatalities caused by assault weapons was around 3 percent, a number that remained relatively constant through- out the 1980s. It was during the 1980s that SWAT teams first began to proliferate.
Kopel and Morgan also interviewed police firearms examiners. The examiners in Dade County, Florida—home to Miami— for example, found that contrary to the Miami Vice depiction of the South Florida drug trade in the 1980s, the use of assault weapons in shootings and homicides in Miami was in decline throughout the decade.
Despite this, more and more military-grade weapons and equipment are being channeled to police forces around the United States. The latest threat invented to justify it is the heavily armed illegal immigrant. When I wrote about Sheriff Joe Arpaio's antics earlier, I encountered this piece of reporting:
Arizona Republic: Joe Arpaio launches 16th immigration sweep in desert
In a stretch of barren desert alongside Interstate 8 near Gila Bend that has become a corridor for human and drug smuggling, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and about 100 men staged a crime-suppression operation Thursday.
Arpaio brought with him a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun that can shoot accurately up to a mile as a display of the kind of force he would use if anyone hurts a deputy.
"I am trying to send a message to Mexico," he said. "We will not take anyone hurting our deputies. We will fight back."
The 7-year-old gun has not yet been used, Arpaio said. "It is more for defense." Nor have any of his deputies yet been harmed in a border scuffle.
"We have been very lucky," he said.
The sheriff said criminals smuggling drugs and immigrants across the border are now carrying AK-47s along the swath of desert that is seldom patrolled. The Barry M. Goldwater Range is used for shooting and cannot be patrolled without permission from the United States Air Force. That gives smugglers an easy path for entry, Arpaio said.
This is classic law enforcement logic: there's supposedly a heavily armed enemy out there who puts the officers at risk, necessitating military-grade hardware and civil rights violations. The fact that the AK-toting illegal immigrants seem to be a myth, as evidenced by, among other things, the lack of shootouts with heavily armed immigrants in Sheriff Joe's neck of the woods, is irrelevant. What matters is that the police need bigger guns. Balko:
With all of this funding and free or discounted equipment and training from the federal government, police departments across the country needed something to do with it. So they formed SWAT teams — thousands of them. SWAT teams have since multiplied and spread across the country at a furious clip.
It's no joke, too. I earlier wrote about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system's SWAT team. Just recently, a SWAT team raided a house at the behest of a department of education investigating white-collar crime.
In this part of the world, it used to be a running joke how every single Russian government agency sprouted a SWAT team equivalent around the turn of the millennium. Now the same seems to be true of the US.
What's wrong with it? Balko:
The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.
These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.
That's no exaggeration. Here's a few of the examples Balko provided for the Playboy piece I mentioned earlier:
- Anthony Diotaiuto, a 23-year-old student, was killed by a SWAT team making a "no-knock" raid on his house. They knocked down his door, without declaring themselves to be the police, and when the justifiably alarmed Diotaiuto went for his gun to defend himself, the police shot him.
- Cheryl Lynn Noel, a 44-year-old woman, was shot to death in her bed by a SWAT officer in 2005. After finding marijuana seeds in the family's trash can, the Baltimore police department sent a SWAT team to raid her house in the middle of the night. The team broke down the door, threw stun grenades inside and stormed up to the bedroom, where they found Noel holding a handgun. The police officers immediately shot her. Full details here.
- Cory Maye, sentenced to death for shooting a police officer who entered his apartment on a no-knock raid. Maye had no idea the man he shot was a police officer. Read the Reason piece here.
This is the most terrifying aspect of this era of SWAT teams. The police may come by information that leads them to seek a search warrant on your house or a nearby house, or an arrest warrant on you or one of your neighbors. This information may well come from a paid informer, who may have a grudge against someone or just plain lie. It's now becoming increasingly common for the warrant to be carried out by a SWAT team breaking into either the target house or one near it; wrong-door raids happen far too often.
If you do find your door being broken down by a SWAT team, you're very unlikely to be able to tell that it is, in fact, the police who are coming at you, and not, for instance, home invaders. In the United States, it's considered legitimate to own a firearm for home defense, and the country has seen some spectacular home invasion cases. However, should you exercise this right to home defense, and it's the police coming in through your door and not a criminal, they will shoot you and face no consequences for doing so. Not that being unarmed will protect you, as SWAT teams regularly kill unarmed people as well, whether because they think they're armed or by accidentally discharging their weapon.
To sum up, it's entirely legal, and considered totally legitimate, for US law enforcement agencies to maintain heavily armed paramilitary units which regularly assault the homes of private citizens and kill and maim some of them. In the Soviet Union, people lived in dread of the midnight knock on the door: it would mean the secret police were coming to arrest them. In the United States, on the other hand, the police don't knock, and they'll shoot.
The fact that this kind of activity is considered normal policing is just terrifying. On principle, the idea that police officers can invade your home without announcing themselves, kill your pets and possibly kill you, based on nothing more than vague circumstantial evidence that you might be guilty of anything ranging from failing to appear in court to a misdemeanor, is unthinkable. Yet it's true.
This is another case of the basic problem of police misconduct: the majority of the population believes that the police only ever do bad things to criminals, and that criminals, by being criminals, deserve it. The problem with this is that there are criminals and there are criminals: the majority of SWAT team raids target unarmed people without serious criminal backgrounds, guilty of non-violent crimes like possession of small amounts of marijuana. Worse, it ignores the fact that there are wrong-door raids where the police attack the wrong house or apartment, and raids based on false information. And in both those cases, the police shoot, tase and beat first and ask questions later.
The reasoning given for all this is, most commonly, the safety of the officers. For these SWAT teams, that comes before the safety of the citizens they're supposed to be protecting. That isn't right. US law enforcement is treating the citizens of the United States like the inhabitants of an occupied country.
Reading the Laugesen article from 1999 is especially scary now, in 2011, when it's gotten even worse than he imagined.
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