{"id":1151,"date":"2006-07-18T17:54:50","date_gmt":"2006-07-18T17:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:49","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:49","slug":"swat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1151","title":{"rendered":"SWAT"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cato has posted Radley Balko’s article on the rise in the number of SWAT raids<\/a> and the high level of errors in SWAT raids – errors that often have deadly results (h\/t Crooked Timber<\/a>).<\/p>\n

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.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go read it.I blogged this a while ago<\/a>, and said:<\/p>\n

…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 \u2018accidental discharge\u2019 in talking about guns; it is a \u2018negligent discharge\u2019) 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.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and<\/p>\n

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 \u2018officer safety first\u2019 strategies and a pure cowboy mentality. It\u2019s certainly more fun to be SWAT than to be Barney Fife.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Barney and Andy, as I noted, got the job done.<\/p>\n

[corrected dumb misspelling of his name]<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rodney Balco publishes a study on the rise in the use of SWAT assault tactics. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}