Matt Naham
Rare
When I think of SWAT teams I
think of bank robberies not ordinary drug busts. The latter, I think, fall more
into the category of routine than special and can be taken care of with
ordinary weapons and tactics. - Matt
The American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) published a study Monday that found excessive militarization of
police due to the rising use of SWAT teams to execute ordinary search warrants
is disproportionately affecting minorities, and African-Americans in
particular:
All across the country, heavily
armed SWAT teams are raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night, often
just to search for drugs. It should enrage us that people have needlessly died
during these raids, that pets have been shot, and that homes have been ravaged.
Our neighborhoods are not
warzones, and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies.
Any yet, every year, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment flows
from the federal government to state and local police departments. Departments
use these wartime weapons in everyday policing, especially to fight the
wasteful and failed drug war, which has unfairly targeted people of color.
SWAT team usage has gone up for
two main reasons: Post-9/11 spending security increases and the shift to what
are called “multi-jurisdictional” SWAT teams.
A Salon.com story last year
explains the first phenomenon well with contributions from the Washington
Post’s Radley Balko, an expert on police state excess.
“Since 9/11, the newly formed
Department of Homeland Security has distributed billions in grants, enabling
even some small town police departments to buy armored personnel carriers and
field their own SWAT teams,” Alex Halperin writes.
“Once you have a SWAT team the
only thing to do is kick some ass. There are more than 100 SWAT team raids
every day in this country,” he continues. “They’re not chasing murderers or
terrorists. For the most part they go after nonviolent offenders like drug
dealers and even small time gamblers.”
Balko noted the correlative
relationship between SWAT teams and the war on drugs, in conjunction with
post-9/11 security increases.
“The drug war is what got us to
a crisis point and Sept. 11 just kind of blew it out of the water. A Pentagon
program hit its record in 2011 by giving away about $500 million of equipment.
[Department of Homeland Security] grants in the last 10 years have given away
$35 billion. DHS has accelerated the trend,” Balko said.
Multi-jurisdictional SWAT teams
have given SWAT teams usage even more reason to go up, having “reduce[d] the
budgetary constraints of local departments and agencies, as these costs are
shared between several organizations.”
In fact, “SWAT teams are
currently called out over 540,000 times a year nationwide, as opposed to just
3000 times per year on average in the 1980’s, but most of these ‘call-outs’,
according to statistics, were to serve warrants (Balko 2006).”
All of this leads to one big
question and then a subsequent question with a smaller scope: Is it a good idea
to use SWAT teams to serve warrants as general rule, and are our reasons to
extend that usage to serving non-violent drug offenders sufficient?
The evidence, especially that
provided by the ACLU, seems to indicate no.
Kriston Kapps of Citylab.com
notes that “67 percent of Americans think U.S. policy should focus on
treatment, with just 26 percent favoring prosecutions for people who use
drugs.” Even still, “79 percent of the incidents reviewed by the ACLU involved
a SWAT team searching a person’s home” and “more than 60 percent of the
incidents reviewed involved a search for drugs.”
The ACLU’s graphs yield some
staggering numbers, particularly the wide racial disparities.
