Overkilled


What should we make of increased use of police SWAT teams on routine police work?

Radley Balko has an article in the Washington Post about the overuse of SWAT teams.

During the past 15 years, The Post and other media outlets have reported on the unsettling "militarization" of police departments across the country. Armed with free surplus military gear from the Pentagon, SWAT teams have multiplied at a furious pace. Tactics once reserved for rare, volatile situations such as hostage takings, bank robberies and terrorist incidents increasingly are being used for routine police work.

Eastern Kentucky University's Peter Kraska -- a widely cited expert on police militarization -- estimates that SWAT teams are called out about 40,000 times a year in the United States; in the 1980s, that figure was 3,000 times a year. Most "call-outs" were to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders.

That statistic is troubling enough, but it is compounded by the raids, particularly in drug cases, being based on tips from notoriously unreliable informants, often with no corroborating investigation. This leads to the "wrong address" raids we frequently hear about in the news.

Now police military-style units are increasingly being deployed on gambling raids, too. Last November, police with guns and K-9 units raided a charity poker game in Baltimore. Police in New York are using similar tactics against gambling clubs. Last April, a SWAT team of 52 officers raided a small-stakes poker game in a Denver suburb. An alternative weekly, the Cleveland Scene, reported last year that Jaycees and American Legion clubs in northeastern Ohio "are being raided with the kind of firepower once reserved for drug barons and killers on the lam."

These gambling crackdowns carry a whiff of hypocrisy. Even as it sends SWAT teams to protect citizens from the scourge of gambling, Virginia spends $20 million a year promoting its state lottery. As police in Ohio knock over private poker games, the Ohio Lottery pulled in $2.15 billion in 2005. And while Maryland police have been busting charity tournaments, the state's lottery cashes in on the poker craze with scratch-off games such as Royal Flush, Aces & 8s and Poker Showdown.

I do think there is a problem. History buff that I am, I see some very worrisome trends.

Some of the email to Mr. Balko (here, here, and here) has been quite telling. I'm disturbed by heavily armed officers ("tactical" or no) being sent on what amounts to routine police calls.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - February 6, 2006 at 04:36 AM  Tag


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