Or, more accurately, militarizing the sort of police activity that ordinary police officers would once have done:
. . . last year Maryland became the first state in the country to make every one of its police departments issue a report on how often and for what purpose they use their SWAT teams. The first reports from the legislation are in, and the results are disturbing.
Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George’s County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state’s SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.
Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.
It’s easy to see how this happened, all over North America, not just in Maryland. Increasing perception of the dangers of the drug war fed the demand for more SWAT-type forces in more and more police departments. Once in place, extensively equipped and expensively trained, the police authorities needed to justify keeping these teams active and involved . . . that is, they couldn’t pay them to sit around waiting for a hostage-taking or a major drug bust. They needed those officers to be out doing things — preferably media-friendly “big” things.
Even in the most dangerous areas, there are only so many situations that rationally require the heavy hand of the fully-armed SWAT team, so the incentives were already in place to expand the role from the original (and relatively rare) combat-style deployment to other, less dangerous (but often more mediagenic) crime fighting.
Anyone in the army can tell you that even in wartime, the majority of soldiers don’t get shot at: they patrol, they train, they do various military and non-military activites. For policemen-as-combat-troops, there are even fewer chances to use all their expensive equipment and training. The temptation to use the SWAT team for less and less dangerous activities is overwhelming, which is why you get the lads and lasses in bullet-proof vests and army helmets appearing even for non-violent misdemeanor offenses.
The choices for law enforcement are not good: disband your SWAT team and run the risk of not having the resources on hand when you actually do need that kind of force, or stay the course, keep the SWAT team(s), and keep them busy so it doesn’t look like you’re wasting a big chunk of your annual budget on inessential services. The bureaucratic instinct is to avoid courses which carry a potential result that could reflect negatively on the organization — which is why you rarely hear about police departments giving up their SWAT teams.
I have to say that I really don’t understand your views here.
Olympic fascist spectacle: A-OK!
The actual functional trappings of a police state: Boo, hiss!
You can’t have one without the other. As the man said, you have to break a few skulls to make Olympic Gold. Or something like that.
Comment by Lickmuffin — March 2, 2010 @ 15:16
Wow! You’re right! How blind I’ve been!
It’s okay . . . I’m fine. You’ve helped me to see the light.
And it’s the massed searchlights of the party. I’ve been seduced by the snazzy uniforms, the polished jackboots, and the enticing restoration of ordnung.
Comment by Nicholas — March 2, 2010 @ 15:26
Glad to help.
It’s quite simple, really: if you want to host the Olympics, and you want to have a succesful national Olympic team, you have to have armed-to-the teeth SWAT teams.
To fund the Olympics and Olypians, you need to have confiscatory tax rates.
When you have confiscatory tax rates, you’re going to have people trying to avoid the taxes.
Some of those people are going to engage in dodgy and risky behaviour, such as importing, growing, manufacturing or just generally dealing with narcotics.
Some of those people are going to use violence to protect their businessess.
To deal with those guys, you need heavily armed and specially trained police.
Just three degrees of separation there, really, but it works out to something like this:
Publicly funded Olympics = SWAT teams on every corner.
What do we tell people whose family members are killed in no-knock raids where the cops had the wrong address? “Sorry about that, but that snowboarding dude needed a gold medal.”
It’s ironic that the first snowboarder to win a medal for the sport — a Canadian — tested positive for weed.
It’s not ironic at all that the same dude wants to become a Liberal MP. Snowboard boots, jackboots — same thing, really.
Comment by Lickmuffin — March 2, 2010 @ 16:57
I think I’m going to move that comment into a separate article. Too much going on here in the comments (and I don’t know how many readers actually read the comments these days).
Comment by Nicholas — March 2, 2010 @ 17:01
[…] commenter “Lickmuffin” responded to the post entitled SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing with a long comment tying together the Olympics and the omnipresent SWAT […]
Pingback by Linking Olympic glory with jackbooted thugs? « Quotulatiousness — March 2, 2010 @ 17:14
Very good points Nicholas… I can see “dedicated” SWAT teams in a select few cities world wide (New York, LA, Chicago, Toronto?, London, etc… Here in the South Bend area, each of the local “major” police departments have their own SWAT teams that are “on call”… Usually there are a couple team officers on duty doing their regular duties. When a SWAT assignment gets called, the off-duty members respond from what they are doing and the on-duty officers either head to the scene to start size up, or get the SWAT van… Also our local teams all train together regularly so they can become a bigger team if needed… Our “bomb squads” work the same way… I’m not sure if they have something similar up north with you… I suspect one reason it works here is the majority of our officers have take home squad cars so they can respond any time… Again, great post…
Comment by Jason — March 2, 2010 @ 18:10