"Community-Oriented SWAT Teams"


Bit of a oxymoron there
Radley Balko is still working on something about the increasing number of SWAT teams away from the big cities. This isn't much more than a glimpse, but I am still interested.

Remember President Clinton's "community policing" program? The idea was to devote billions ($7.5 so far) toward hiring new cops for smaller communities. The new cops were supposed to be "community-oriented," meaning they were to use less force, work with neighborhood groups, and foster dialogue and trust between cops and the communities they serve (touchy-feely language swiped from the program itself, not mine). The COPS website boasts that 83% of the money has gone to towns of less than 50,000 people.

Problem is, at the same time, the Pentagon has increasingly been offering military technology, intelligence, training, and weaponry available to local police departments at a huge discount, sometimes even for free.

That is one of the first acknowledgments I've seen that all this police power predated the election of George W. Bush.

That hasn't stopped the current administration from capitalizing on it though.

I can't help but wonder what correlation there may be between the increase of smaller cities with heavily armed SWAT teams and the rise in arrests and convictions for nonviolent crimes. Even if most of those crimes are because of the Drug War.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sun - November 13, 2005 at 04:07 PM  Tag


 ◊  ◊   ◊  ◊ 

Random selections from NeoWayland's library


Pagan Vigil "Because LIBERTY demands more than just black or white"
© 2005 - 2009 All Rights Reserved