Cato has posted Radley Balko’s article on the rise in the number of SWAT raids and the high level of errors in SWAT raids – errors that often have deadly results (h/t Crooked Timber).
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.
Go read it.I blogged this a while ago, and said:
…the dumb but critically important fact is that any time guns come out, the potential for tragedy is there. As soon as this became a felony stop (where the responding police draw weapons in advance, and generally act as though the people being stopped are True Bad Guys), the door to a tragedy was opened. Officers have negligently (I never use the term ‘accidental discharge’ in talking about guns; it is a ‘negligent discharge’) shot the people they were handcuffing, or themselves, or their partners. The people who are stopped sometimes are uncompliant and do things which make the officers believe that a gun is being drawn. There are a million ways for this to end badly, and on the scale of those things, this one went poorly but not tragically.
and
The issue here is the overall police pattern of behavior that overuses felony stops and dynamic entries (the whole banging the door down in the middle of the night by SWAT teams thing). Because they are so inherently dangerous, their use needs to be judicious, and right now, it isn’t; this is from a mixture of legitimate ‘officer safety first’ strategies and a pure cowboy mentality. It’s certainly more fun to be SWAT than to be Barney Fife.
Barney and Andy, as I noted, got the job done.
[corrected dumb misspelling of his name]
Is this concurrent with the “War on Drugs” thing? Libertarians often raise the issue of loss of liberty wrt the WoD, and I tend to agree with them.
At its heart, this is just poor police work.
The entire SWAT movement has been very bad for police attitudes and competancy. It encourages the police to become paramilitary units who view the citizens as the enemy and who act accordingly. SWAT treats neighborhoods as battlespace, and it encourages police to see thier work as direct, dynamic confrontations in this battlespace. They are no longer protecting and serving. They risk becoming just another swaggering gang, like the ‘Coppers’ of the iconic Max Mad.
And that isn’t even just bad policing, that’s bad military tactics.
Sun Tzu says: “Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field. With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem…What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease. Hence his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage.”
The police have become enamoured with the wrong things. They act as if they are soliders and not magistrates. They have fallen in love with the laying of seiges and the planning of assaults. They think good police work is something that makes the action reel of COPS or otherwise looks good in the movies. The result is unnecessary deaths, both police shot by mistake, police shot because they created a battle where one might have never happened otherwise, civilians shot by mistake, and (as at Columbine) civilians shot while the police drew up a defensive perimeter and prepared to lay seige.
Note: The author’s name is “Radley Balko”, not “Rodney Balco”.
I recall talking to a couple of people whos dads were cops back in the ’60s, and got medals or comendations for charging into a bad situation and ending it (with violence, mind you).
What interested me was the fact that they were just guys in blue shirts, the first ones on the scene and therefore the first through the door. These days we seem to call the SWAT guys out for pretty much anything, even just a loud domestic dispute. That takes lots of extra time and I wonder if it’s any more effective in actual crime prevention.
I did a quick Google search and found that there are 459 SWAT teams in the entire country. If they’re conducting 40,000 raids a year, that’s every team in the country conducting an average four raids a week. That’s transparent baloney. (According to ‘one estimate’? Whose? From where?)
According to the article header, Rodney Balco is a ‘policy analyst specializing in civil liberties issues’ whatever the heck that means. (What does this guy *do* for a living? Does CATO send him a regular paycheck?) The article header also asserts that ‘most’ SWAT raids are merely to serve narcotics warrants. OK, Rodney. Count me concerned. I want to know more. Where are the statistics? Do not the ten largest cities in America maintain records of where, when and what their SWAT teams were deployed for? Even that would prove a useful thumbnail sketch.(I’m at work and haven’t the time to do more than skim through the header, along with my few favorite blogs).
None if this detracts from the genuine debate over the differences between the police and military cultures, or the dismaying results you get when trying to mix them, or the misuse of law enforcement powers at the local level… but there’s too much here that sets off my BS alarms.
Al Sharpton lives at
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(212)-987-5020
Bleah, my hasty-pudding math is off. The average rate is *twice* a week, if the author’s uncredited study is to be believed.
I still think that’s too often — by an order of magnitude. If the statistic is genuine, that’s cause for concern. If the author doesn’t bother to substantiate it, he deserves the Dan Rather treatment.
“Bleah, my hasty-pudding math is off. The average rate is twice a week, if the author’s uncredited study is to be believed.
I still think that’s too often — by an order of magnitude. If the statistic is genuine, that’s cause for concern. If the author doesn’t bother to substantiate it, he deserves the Dan Rather treatment.”
I’ve not been able to substantiate it, but I’m not completely convinced its a wrong number. Data is hard to come by, but I did find a story for a SWAT unit in Hagarstown, PA that said that they had about 30 ‘call outs’ per year. Of those, the majority were serving warrants (presumably the ‘no knock’ variety), and only about 6 were actual emergency responce situations. Given that this is a rather small town (under 40,000 people) I don’t find it all hard to extrapolate that SWAT units in more populated areas would be called on many more times per year.
Concerned yet?
The rationale behind no knock is invalid. The real bad guys reinforce their doors so they have plenty of notice to grab their guns, and evidence cannot be removed beyond the reach of forensic labs in the time it takes to wait for a response to a knock.. Police are paid by the hour, so sit out the siege. I would remove from police work any officers involved in a wrong door invasion, and I would not prosecute anyone for shooting an unanounced invader.
I’ve been wondering about the numbers of SWAT teams and raids. Do you think that SWAT officers are promoted more readily than, say, traffic cops?
Jay,
I would guess the “40,000 estimate “:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4803570.stm comes from Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University. A summary of the survey states:
http://www.justice(dot)eku(dot)edu/about/grants_KJSRBjune1999.asp
bq. SWAT ACROSS THE COUNTRY: NATIONAL TRENDS
bq. The first mail survey was sent in the first part of 1996 to all police agencies (excluding federal) serving communities of 50,000 people or more (79% response rate). The second was sent in the latter half of 1996 to all departments serving communities between 25,000 and 50,000 citizens (72% response rate).
bq. Both of these surveys also collected baseline data on the number of call-outs performed by each department starting in 1980. Yearly data were requested from 1980 to the end of 1995. Callouts included any activity which required a deployment of the unit…
bq. The returned surveys alone documented 29,962 tactical call-outs in 1995; this is a 939 percent increase since 1980 when there were 2,884 call-outs.
He counted roughly 30,000 call-outs with a return rate of roughly 75% on the survey. The 40,000 call-outs doesn’t seem like a bad projection. I also redid the math based on 459 swat teams. It works out to 1.68 call-outs a week or 5 call-outs in a 3 week period.
Note: a university web site is banned?
SWAT is needed, particularly in rural areas.
SWAT encounters in rural areas: meth labs; other illegal drug labs and transhipment points; illegal alien smuggling rings.
All of which harbor dangerous people who need to be apprehended with minimum loss of life.
SWAT uses overwhelming force so bad guys don’t shoot it out with the cops, and never have a chance (early AM entries).
Unless you’d trade Cops lives for feeling morally superior. That’s a trade I’m unwilling to take.
Rural Missouri is the Meth capital of the US; their SWAT teams are constantly rolling out to dangerous places where training, force, surprise, and the like make the difference between body bags and everyone leaving alive.
Jim, you are presenting a bit of a strawman. The issue Jim is not that of using SWAT teams where there are dangerous persons to be apprehended. It is using SWAT teams to escalate warrant execution of all kinds of situations beyond the level of force appropriate.
As for police lives, I have respect for efforts to increase officer safety but not at the expense of the citizens whose job is it supposedly theirs to protect.
Its a global trend. In Australia if there is the slightest hint that a firearm is present inside a premises then the “SWAT” team is called out.
The reasons for this are two fold:
1) If no SWAT team were used and an officer was injured or killed, the supervisor would face severe disciplinary action for not taking appropriate measures to guarantee officer safety.
2) If no SWAT team were used and a suspect was killed by a regular police officer, then the supervisor would face disciplinary action for not using officers who were better trained to handle the situation who may have been able to use non-lethal force to remove the threat.
If you were the Commanding officer what option would you choose if faced with this situation?
This topic came up elsewhere a while back and someone made the observation, “I’m surprised at how few occurences there are.”
When you look at that map, that’s over two decades! Throw in that there are all kinds of mistakes there, not just lethal ones, I’d have to agree that it’s really amazing that so few accidents have occurred nationally.
Let me see if I have this down.
Cops can solve a medical problem (drug addiction)?
Maybe we can put the SWAT teams on cancer too. With only 1.7 call outs a week there seems to be a lot of unused capacity there.
All to fight a phantom menace.
Is Addiction Real?
I suppose fighting addiction is easier than fighting terrorists.
Good article. The War on Terror, Drugs, Immigration and so on seem tied into a romatic and irrational Manichean view of the world that divides everyone into a Good & Evil. Naturally Good must attack Evil, and those who hang back in the prosecution of Evil are suspect. This leads to expectations completely divorced form empirical evidence, fails to deliver the goods, and progressively deprives the law abiding citizen of their Liberty and that without providing security. I wonder what it is about human beings that so often we reject empirical evidence in favor of failed ideology and belief?
Tom Perry: “Grim” recently published a WoC post that (however unintentionally) may answer your question, at least as it applies to Americans:
Such a complete failure to understand America is not reasonable. No culture on earth has such a complete hatred of the idea of failure.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that that’s the real reason why there’s been so little desire to call off the War on Drugs in spite of its manifest failures. To do so (1) would require admitting the failures in the first place, and (2) would be tantamount to letting the bad guys win*, both of which a vast number of law-abiding Americans would find very hard to swallow.
[*] Yes, I know (and agree) that ending drug prohibition would actually put the criminal element in the drug trade out of business. But the erstwhile criminals themselves would still be left alive and unpunished for their activities while prohibition was still in effect.
Good point Joshua.