Just in case drug dealers start using IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades, the Cobb County PD has refurbished this $500,000 Light Armor Vehicle for their SWAT team. Originally used against another drug dealer, Manuel Noriega, this monster is another step in this nation's march toward the full militarization of our police forces.
In a speech to Congress,
reason magazine's Radley Balko, the leading opponent of this troubling trend,
noted that "since the late 1980s...thanks to acts passed by the U.S. Congress, millions of pieces of surplus military equipment have been given to local police departments across the country."
Police departments like Cobb's insist they need these weapons. As police chief George Hatfield said: "In these times, you don’t know what you are facing, We want the maximum safety for our officers and the public. We want to be prepared for whatever comes up. This is another tool that will allow us to be quicker and faster in our response."
But does this militarization actually make the public safer? According to Peter Kraska, a criminologist at the University of Eastern Kentucky, there has been a
1500 percent increase in the use of SWAT teams in this country since the 1980's. Cobb County seems to be no different. Hatfield says that the CCPD has used its SWAT team 50 times this year, which means that like the rest of the country's SWAT teams, theirs is being used for things outside the scope of their original mandate.
SWAT teams were created to diffuse volatile situations, like bank robberies and hostage situations. Now, according to Kraska, their time is spent primarily for other police work:
- 75% serving warrants
- 13.4% dealing with barricaded suspects
- 3.6 dealing with hostage situations
- 1.3% handling riots
The problem is in that seventy-five percent. When you allow SWAT teams to do routine police work like serving warrants, you find that instead of diffusing volatile situations, they are creating them.
They throw flash-bang grenades through people's windows and bust in their doors, screaming and putting automatic weapons in their face. Occupants have a split-second to decide whether they are being raided by the police or by criminals. In
one such case, it was criminals, posing as San Antonio police officers. In another, it was actually police, and one ended up dead, while the man who shot him, Cory Maye, who had been cowering terrified in his daughter's bedroom, was
sentenced to death.
Mr Maye was completely innocent of the allegations made in obtaining the vague warrant.
Balko also has highlighted the case of
Ryan Frederick, an avid gardener with a variety of exotic tropical plants growing in his back yard around his coi pond. He shot a cop breaking into his house one morning, thinking it was the same man who had broken in earlier in the week, rifled through his stuff, and left without taking anything.
It appears that the man who had broken in was a criminal confidential informant, acting at the behest of the Chesapeake Police Department. The informant told them that there was a large scale marijuana growing operation in Frederick's garage.
There was none. But now Mr Frederick is facing capital murder charges.
These situations, if handled differently, are completely avoidable. If there had been a large-scale growing operation in Ryan's home, he'd have been hard-pressed to destroy or hide it before the cops could find it. They could have waited until he left his house and arrested him on the street, rather than busting in his door and turning the situation violent.
During South Florida's
Operation D-Day, in which local Rambos raided 50 alleged grow houses in one day, ensnaring the guilty and innocent alike, law enforcement
terrorized a pair of innocent political exiles from Cuba. There, too, law enforcement insisted that these paramilitary tactics were necessary to protect officers and the public, but as Balko
pointed-out, "this operation apparently turned up just eight guns from 150 homes."
In many cases, a simple short surveillance would have shown the police that they had the wrong house. There are so many,
The Cato Institute has an
interactive map of these botched raids, where apparently, the first victim is always the
family dog.
Such was the case for the mayor of Prince Georges County in Maryland, who had a SWAT team
bust in his door, kill his dogs, and made the family lie on the floor next to their dead pets while they searched the home. He is now
demanding an investigation by the Justice Department, saying, "This appears to be a pattern and practice in our law law enforcement agencies where a lack of training and supervision is apparent."
These stories of wrong-door raids are horrifying, but even when the raids are on the correct homes, the results can be
devastating. In Lima, Ohio, police raided the home of a known drug dealer, even though they admitted that "because of the fact there were toys on the outside of the residence they were concerned about the fact there could be children inside and they were taking every precaution when they made entry."
They could have waited until he left, or the children were gone, but instead they raided the home at 8PM, when everyone was home, and in the process killed a mother and shot a baby.
And of course, they killed two dogs, too.
SWAT teams have their valid uses, and when utilized properly, can save lives. But when police forces become militarized - and SWAT teams are used for routine police work - it is a recipe for disaster. And when those teams are using tanks, helicopters, and armored personell cariers, America starts looking suspiciously like a Police State.