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| Just look at that face - any more puckered and he'd burst a vein! |
WaPo | The American Civil Liberties Union has released the results
of its year-long study of police militarization. The study looked at
800 deployments of SWAT teams among 20 local, state and federal police
agencies in 2011-2012. Among the notable findings:
- 62 percent of the SWAT raids surveyed were to conduct searches for drugs.
- Just under 80 percent were to serve a search warrant, meaning eight in 10 SWAT raids were not initiated to apprehend a school shooter, hostage taker, or escaped felon (the common justification for these tactics), but to investigate someone still only suspected of committing a crime.
- In fact, just 7 percent of SWAT raids were “for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.”
- In at least 36 percent of the SWAT raids studies, no contraband of any kind was found. The report notes that due to incomplete police reports on these raids this figure could be as high as 65 percent.
- SWAT tactics are disproportionately used on people of color.
- 65 percent of SWAT deployments resulted in some sort of forced entry into a private home, by way of a battering ram, boot, or some sort of explosive device. In over half those raids, the police failed to find any sort of weapon, the presence of which was cited as the reason for the violent tactics.
- Ironically (or perhaps not), searches to serve warrants on people suspected of drug crimes were more likely to result in forced entry than raids conducted for other purposes.
- Though often justified for rare incidents like school shootings or terrorist situations, the armored personnel vehicles police departments are getting from the Pentagon and through grants from the Department of Homeland Security are commonly used on drug raids.
In other words, where violent, volatile SWAT tactics were once used
only in limited situations where someone was in the process of or about
to commit a violent crime — where the police were using violence only to
defuse an already violent situation — SWAT teams today are
overwhelmingly used to investigate people who are still only suspected
of committing nonviolent consensual crimes. And because these raids
often involve forced entry into homes, often at night, they’re actually creating violence and confrontation where there was none before.
When SWAT teams are used in a way that’s consistent with their
original purpose, they’re used carefully and cautiously. The ACLU report
finds that, “In nearly every deployment involving a barricade, hostage,
or active shooter, the SWAT report provided specific facts that gave
the SWAT team reason to believe there was an armed and often dangerous
suspect.” By contrast . . .
. . . incident reports for search warrant executions, especially in drug investigations, often contained no information about why the SWAT team was being sent in, other than to note that the warrant was “high risk,” or else provided otherwise unsubstantiated information such as “suspect is believed to be armed.” In case after case that the ACLU examined, when a SWAT team was deployed to search a person’s home for drugs, officers determined that a person was “likely to be armed” on the basis of suspected but unfounded gang affiliations, past weapons convictions, or some other factor that did not truly indicate a basis for believing that the person in question was likely to be armed at the moment of the SWAT deployment. Of course, a reasonable belief that weapons are present should not by itself justify a SWAT deployment. Given that almost half of American households have guns, use of a SWAT team could almost always be justified if this were the sole factor.But we’ve already seen cases in which the mere factor that the resident of a home was a legal gun owner — in some cases by virtue of the fact that the owner had obtained some sort of state license — was used as an excuse to execute a full-on SWAT raid to serve a warrant for an otherwise nonviolent crime.
