http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323848804578608040780519904.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories
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Sean McCabe
On Jan. 4 of last year, a local narcotics strike force
conducted a raid on the Ogden, Utah, home of Matthew David Stewart at 8:40 p.m.
The 12 officers were acting on a tip from Mr. Stewart's former girlfriend, who
said that he was growing marijuana in his basement. Mr. Stewart awoke, naked, to
the sound of a battering ram taking down his door. Thinking that he was being
invaded by criminals, as he later claimed, he grabbed his 9-millimeter Beretta
pistol.
Sean McCabe
The police say that they knocked and identified
themselves, though Mr. Stewart and his neighbors said they heard no such
announcement. Mr. Stewart fired 31 rounds, the police more than 250. Six of the
officers were wounded, and Officer Jared Francom was killed. Mr. Stewart himself
was shot twice before he was arrested. He was charged with several crimes,
including the murder of Officer Francom.
The police found 16 small marijuana plants in Mr.
Stewart's basement. There was no evidence that Mr. Stewart, a U.S. military
veteran with no prior criminal record, was selling marijuana. Mr. Stewart's
father said that his son suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and may
have smoked the marijuana to self-medicate.
Early this year, the Ogden city council heard complaints
from dozens of citizens about the way drug warrants are served in the city. As
for Mr. Stewart, his trial was scheduled for next April, and prosecutors were
seeking the death penalty. But after losing a hearing last May on the legality
of the search warrant, Mr. Stewart hanged himself in his jail cell.
The police tactics at issue in the Stewart case are no
anomaly. Since the 1960s, in response to a range of perceived threats,
law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have
been blurring the line between police officer and soldier. Driven by martial
rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment—from bayonets and M-16
rifles to armored personnel carriers—American police forces have often adopted a
mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and, more
recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S.
scene: the warrior cop—armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted
wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.
The acronym SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics.
Such police units are trained in methods similar to those used by the special
forces in the military. They learn to break into homes with battering rams and
to use incendiary devices called flashbang grenades, which are designed to blind
and deafen anyone nearby. Their usual aim is to "clear" a building—that is, to
remove any threats and distractions (including pets) and to subdue the occupants
as quickly as possible.
Daily Republic/Associated
Press
Today the U.S. has thousands of SWAT teams. A team
prepares to enterahouse in Vallejo, Calif., on March 20,
above.
The Saturday Essay
- Who Ruined the Humanities? (7/13/13)
- The Middle-Class Revolution (6/29/13)
- Why She Drinks: Women and Alcohol (6/22/13)
- Think Inside the Box (6/15/13)
- How America Lost Its Way (6/8/13)
- A Message for the Class of 2013 (5/1/13)
- Battle of the Beach (5/25/13)
The country's first official SWAT team started in the
late 1960s in Los Angeles. By 1975, there were approximately 500 such units.
Today, there are thousands. According to surveys conducted by the criminologist
Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University, just 13% of towns between 25,000
and 50,000 people had a SWAT team in 1983. By 2005, the figure was up to
80%.
The number of raids conducted by SWAT-like police units
has grown accordingly. In the 1970s, there were just a few hundred a year; by
the early 1980s, there were some 3,000 a year. In 2005 (the last year for which
Dr. Kraska collected data), there were approximately 50,000 raids.
A number of federal agencies also now have their own
SWAT teams, including the Fish & Wildlife Service, NASA, the Consumer
Products Safety Commission and the Department of the Interior. In 2011, the
Department of Education's SWAT team bungled a raid on a woman who was initially
reported to be under investigation for not paying her student loans, though the
agency later said she was suspected of defrauding the federal student loan
program.
The details of the case aside, the story generated
headlines because of the revelation that the Department of Education had such a
unit. None of these federal departments has responded to my requests for
information about why they consider such high-powered military-style teams
necessary.
Americans have long been wary of using the military for
domestic policing. Concerns about potential abuse date back to the creation of
the Constitution, when the founders worried about standing armies and the
intimidation of the people at large by an overzealous executive, who might
choose to follow the unhappy precedents set by Europe's emperors and
monarchs.
The idea for the first SWAT team in Los Angeles arose
during the domestic strife and civil unrest of the mid-1960s. Daryl Gates, then
an inspector with the Los Angeles Police Department, had grown frustrated with
his department's inability to respond effectively to incidents like the 1965
Watts riots. So his thoughts turned to the military. He was drawn in particular
to Marine Special Forces and began to envision an elite group of police officers
who could respond in a similar manner to dangerous domestic disturbances.
Standard-Examiner/Associated
Press
When A strike force raided the home of Matthew David
Stewart, one officer was killed.
Mr. Gates initially had difficulty getting his idea
accepted. Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker thought the concept risked a
breach in the divide between the military and law enforcement. But with the
arrival of a new chief, Thomas Reddin, in 1966, Mr. Gates got the green light to
start training a unit. By 1969, his SWAT team was ready for its maiden raid
against a holdout cell of the Black Panthers.
At about the same time, President Richard Nixon was
declaring war on drugs. Among the new, tough-minded law-enforcement measures
included in this campaign was the no-knock raid—a policy that allowed drug cops
to break into homes without the traditional knock and announcement. After fierce
debate, Congress passed a bill authorizing no-knock raids for federal narcotics
agents in 1970.
Over the next several years, stories emerged of federal
agents breaking down the doors of private homes (often without a warrant) and
terrorizing innocent citizens and families. Congress repealed the no-knock law
in 1974, but the policy would soon make a comeback (without congressional
authorization).
During the Reagan administration, SWAT-team methods
converged with the drug war. By the end of the 1980s, joint task forces brought
together police officers and soldiers for drug interdiction. National Guard
helicopters and U-2 spy planes flew the California skies in search of marijuana
plants. When suspects were identified, battle-clad troops from the National
Guard, the DEA and other federal and local law enforcement agencies would swoop
in to eradicate the plants and capture the people growing them.
Advocates of these tactics said that drug dealers were
acquiring ever bigger weapons and the police needed to stay a step ahead in the
arms race. There were indeed a few high-profile incidents in which police were
outgunned, but no data exist suggesting that it was a widespread problem. A
study done in 1991 by the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute found that
less than one-eighth of 1% of homicides in the U.S. were committed with a
military-grade weapon. Subsequent studies by the Justice Department in 1995 and
the National Institute for Justice in 2004 came to similar conclusions: The
overwhelming majority of serious crimes are committed with handguns, and not
particularly powerful ones.
The new century brought the war on terror and, with it,
new rationales and new resources for militarizing police forces. According to
the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Department of Homeland Security has
handed out $35 billion in grants since its creation in 2002, with much of the
money going to purchase military gear such as armored personnel carriers. In
2011 alone, a Pentagon program for bolstering the capabilities of local law
enforcement gave away $500 million of equipment, an all-time high.
The past decade also has seen an alarming degree of
mission creep for U.S. SWAT teams. When the craze for poker kicked into high
gear, a number of police departments responded by deploying SWAT teams to raid
games in garages, basements and VFW halls where illegal gambling was suspected.
According to news reports and conversations with poker organizations, there have
been dozens of these raids, in cities such as Baltimore, Charleston, S.C., and
Dallas.
In 2006, 38-year-old optometrist Sal Culosi was shot and
killed by a Fairfax County, Va., SWAT officer. The investigation began when an
undercover detective overheard Mr. Culosi wagering on college football games
with some buddies at a bar. The department sent a SWAT team after Mr. Culosi,
who had no prior criminal record or any history of violence. As the SWAT team
descended, one officer fired a single bullet that pierced Mr. Culosi's heart.
The police say that the shot was an accident. Mr. Culosi's family suspects the
officer saw Mr. Culosi reaching for his cellphone and thought he had a
gun.
Assault-style raids have even been used in recent years
to enforce regulatory law. Armed federal agents from the Fish & Wildlife
Service raided the floor of the Gibson Guitar factory in Nashville in 2009, on
suspicion of using hardwoods that had been illegally harvested in Madagascar.
Gibson settled in 2012, paying a $300,000 fine and admitting to violating the
Lacey Act. In 2010, the police department in New Haven, Conn., sent its SWAT
team to raid a bar where police believed there was underage drinking. For sheer
absurdity, it is hard to beat the 2006 story about the Tibetan monks who had
overstayed their visas while visiting America on a peace mission. In Iowa, the
hapless holy men were apprehended by a SWAT team in full gear.
Unfortunately, the activities of aggressive, heavily
armed SWAT units often result in needless bloodshed: Innocent bystanders have
lost their lives and so, too, have police officers who were thought to be
assailants and were fired on, as (allegedly) in the case of Matthew David
Stewart.
In my own research, I have collected over 50 examples in
which innocent people were killed in raids to enforce warrants for crimes that
are either nonviolent or consensual (that is, crimes such as drug use or
gambling, in which all parties participate voluntarily). These victims were
bystanders, or the police later found no evidence of the crime for which the
victim was being investigated. They include Katherine Johnston, a 92-year-old
woman killed by an Atlanta narcotics team acting on a bad tip from an informant
in 2006; Alberto Sepulveda, an 11-year-old accidentally shot by a California
SWAT officer during a 2000 drug raid; and Eurie Stamps, killed in a 2011 raid on
his home in Framingham, Mass., when an officer says his gun mistakenly
discharged. Mr. Stamps wasn't a suspect in the investigation.
What would it take to dial back such excessive police
measures? The obvious place to start would be ending the federal grants that
encourage police forces to acquire gear that is more appropriate for the
battlefield. Beyond that, it is crucial to change the culture of militarization
in American law enforcement.
Consider today's police recruitment videos (widely
available on YouTube), which often feature cops rappelling from helicopters,
shooting big guns, kicking down doors and tackling suspects. Such campaigns
embody an American policing culture that has become too isolated,
confrontational and militaristic, and they tend to attract recruits for the
wrong reasons.
If you browse online police discussion boards, or chat
with younger cops today, you will often encounter some version of the phrase,
"Whatever I need to do to get home safe." It is a sentiment that suggests that
every interaction with a citizen may be the officer's last. Nor does it help
when political leaders lend support to this militaristic self-image, as New York
City Mayor Michael Bloomberg did in 2011 by declaring, "I have my own
army in the NYPD—the seventh largest army in the world."
The motivation of the average American cop should not
focus on just making it to the end of his shift. The LAPD may have given us the
first SWAT team, but its motto is still exactly the right ideal for American
police officers: To protect and serve.
SWAT teams have their place, of course, but they should
be saved for those relatively rare situations when police-initiated violence is
the only hope to prevent the loss of life. They certainly have no place as
modern-day vice squads.
Many longtime and retired law-enforcement officers have
told me of their worry that the trend toward militarization is too far gone.
Those who think there is still a chance at reform tend to embrace the idea of
community policing, an approach that depends more on civil society than on brute
force.
In this very different view of policing, cops walk
beats, interact with citizens and consider themselves part of the neighborhoods
they patrol—and therefore have a stake in those communities. It's all about a
baton-twirling "Officer Friendly" rather than a Taser-toting RoboCop.
Mr. Balko is the author of "Rise of the Warrior
Cop," published this month by PublicAffairs.
