By The Editorial Board of The Economist
FROM the way police entered the
house—helmeted and masked, guns drawn and shields in front, knocking
down the door with a battering ram and rushing inside—you might think
they were raiding a den of armed criminals. In fact they were looking
for $1,000-worth of clothes and electronics allegedly bought with a
stolen credit card. They found none of these things, but arrested two
people in the house on unrelated charges.
They narrowly avoided tragedy. On hearing intruders break in, the
homeowner’s son, a disabled ex-serviceman, reached for his (legal) gun.
Luckily, he heard the police announce themselves and holstered it;
otherwise, “they probably would have shot me,” he says. His mother,
Sally Prince, says she is now traumatised.
Gary Mikulec, chief of the Ankeny, Iowa police force, which raided Ms
Prince’s home in January, said that the suspects arrested “were not
very good people”. One had a criminal history that included three
assault charges, albeit more than a decade old, and on his arrest was
found to have a knife and a meth pipe.
It is easy to see why the police like to be better armed than the
people they have to arrest. They risk their lives every day, and are
understandably keen to get home in one piece. A big display of force can
make a suspect think twice about pulling a gun. “An awful lot of SWAT
tactics are focused on forcing the suspect to surrender,” says Bill
Bratton, New York’s police chief.
But civil libertarians such as Radley Balko, the author of “Rise of
the Warrior Cop”, fret that the American police are becoming too much
like soldiers. Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams (ie,
paramilitary police units) were first formed to deal with violent civil
unrest and life-threatening situations: shoot-outs, rescuing hostages,
serving high-risk warrants and entering barricaded buildings, for
instance. Their mission has crept.
Boozers, Barbers and Cockfighters
Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of
Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000
times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities
use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas
have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut
sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That
same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando,
Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up
arresting 34 people for “barbering without a licence”. Maricopa County,
Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was
suspected of organising cockfights. Police rolled a tank into Mr
Llovera’s yard and killed more than 100 of his birds, as well as his
dog. According to Mr Kraska, most SWAT deployments are not in response
to violent, life-threatening crimes, but to serve drug-related warrants
in private homes.
He estimates that 89% of police departments serving American cities
with more than 50,000 people had SWAT teams in the late 1990s—almost
double the level in the mid-1980s. By 2007 more than 80% of police
departments in cities with between 25,000 and 50,000 people had them, up
from 20% in the mid-1980s (there are around 18,000 state and local
police agencies in America, compared with fewer than 100 in Britain).
The number of SWAT deployments soared even as violent crime fell. And
although in recent years crime rates have risen in smaller American
cities, Mr Kraska writes that the rise in small-town SWAT teams was
driven not by need, but by fear of being left behind. Fred Leland, a
police lieutenant in the small town of Walpole, Massachusetts, says that
police departments in towns like his often invest in military-style kit
because they “want to keep up” with larger forces.
The courts have smiled on SWAT raids. They often rely on “no-knock”
warrants, which authorise police to force their way into a home without
announcing themselves. This was once considered constitutionally
dubious. But the Supreme Court has ruled that police may enter a house
without knocking if they have “a reasonable suspicion” that announcing
their presence would be dangerous or allow the suspect to destroy
evidence (for example, by flushing drugs down the toilet).
Often these no-knock raids take place at night, accompanied by
“flash-bang” grenades designed temporarily to blind, deafen and confuse
their targets. They can go horribly wrong: Mr Balko has found more than
50 examples of innocent people who have died as a result of botched SWAT
raids. Officers can get jumpy and shoot unnecessarily, or accidentally.
In 2011 Eurie Stamps, the stepfather of a suspected drug-dealer but
himself suspected of no crimes, was killed while lying face-down on the
floor when a SWAT-team officer reportedly tripped, causing his gun to
discharge.
Householders, on hearing the door being smashed down, sometimes reach
for their own guns. In 2006 Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old woman in
Atlanta, mistook the police for robbers and fired a shot from an old
pistol. Police shot her five times, killing her. After the shooting they
planted marijuana in her home. It later emerged that they had falsified
the information used to obtain their no-knock warrant.
Big Grants for Big Guns
Federal cash—first to wage war on drugs, then on terror—has paid for
much of the heavy weaponry used by SWAT teams. Between 2002 and 2011 the
Department of Homeland Security disbursed $35 billion in grants to
state and local police. Also, the Pentagon offers surplus military kit
to police departments. According to Mr Balko, by 2005 it had provided
such gear to more than 17,000 law-enforcement agencies.
These programmes provide useful defensive equipment, such as body
armour and helmets. But it is hard to see why Fargo, North Dakota—a city
that averages fewer than two murders a year—needs an armoured
personnel-carrier with a rotating turret. Keene, a small town in New
Hampshire which had three homicides between 1999 and 2012, spent nearly
$286,000 on an armoured personnel-carrier known as a BearCat. The local
police chief said it would be used to patrol Keene’s “Pumpkin Festival
and other dangerous situations”. A Reason-Rupe
poll found that 58% of Americans think the use of drones, military
weapons and armoured vehicles by the police has gone “too far”.
Because of a legal quirk, SWAT raids can be profitable. Rules on
civil asset-forfeiture allow the police to seize anything which they can
plausibly claim was the proceeds of a crime. Crucially, the
property-owner need not be convicted of that crime. If the police find
drugs in his house, they can take his cash and possibly the house, too.
He must sue to get them back.
Many police departments now depend on forfeiture for a fat chunk of
their budgets. In 1986, its first year of operation, the federal Asset
Forfeiture Fund held $93.7m. By 2012, that and the related Seized Asset
Deposit Fund held nearly $6 billion.
Mr Balko contends that these forfeiture laws are “unfair on a very
basic level”. They “disproportionately affect low-income people” and
provide a perverse incentive for police to focus on drug-related crimes,
which “come with a potential kickback to the police department”, rather
than rape and murder investigations, which do not. They also provide an
incentive to arrest suspected drug-dealers inside their houses, which
can be seized, and to bust stash houses after most of their drugs have
been sold, when police can seize the cash.
Kara Dansky of the American Civil Liberties Union, who is overseeing a
study into police militarisation, notices a more martial tone in recent
years in the materials used to recruit and train new police officers. A
recruiting video in Newport Beach, California, for instance, shows
officers loading assault rifles, firing weapons, chasing suspects,
putting people in headlocks and releasing snarling dogs.
This is no doubt sexier than showing them poring over paperwork or
attending a neighbourhood-watch meeting. But does it attract the right
sort of recruit, or foster the right attitude among serving officers? Mr
Balko cites the T-shirts that some off-duty cops wear as evidence of a
culture that celebrates violence (“We get up early to beat the crowds”;
“You huff and you puff and we’ll blow your door down”).
Others retort that Mr Balko and his allies rely too much on
cherry-picked examples of raids gone wrong. Tragic accidents happen and
some police departments use their SWAT teams badly, but most use them
well, says Lance Eldridge, a former army officer and ex-sheriff’s deputy
in Colorado.
It would be easier to determine who is right if police departments
released more information about how and how often they deploy SWAT
teams. But most are extremely cagey. In 2009 Maryland’s governor, Martin
O’Malley, signed a law requiring the police in his state to report such
information every six months. Three published reports showed that SWAT
teams were most often deployed to serve search warrants on people
suspected of crimes involving drugs and other contraband, but the law is
set to expire this year. Utah’s legislature has passed a similar
measure; it awaits the governor’s signature.
No one wants to eliminate SWAT teams. Imminent threats to human life
require a swift, forceful response. That, say critics, is what SWAT
teams should be used for: not for serving warrants on people suspected
of nonviolent crimes, breaking up poker games or seeing that the Pumpkin
Festival doesn’t get out of hand.
1 comment:
Here, I got the song to this one...
http://youtu.be/qrOeGCJdZe4
"They got all the right friends in all the wrong places
So yeah, we're going down
We've got all the right moves and all the wrong faces
So yeah, we're going down
They said, everybody knows, everybody knows where we're going
Yeah, we're going down
They said, everybody knows, everybody knows where we're going
Yeah, we're going down."
Just Not sure if that changes anything in Isiah's world...
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