The Scary Truth About SWAT Raids

Winston Churchill is commonly credited with having said, "Democracy means that when there's a knock in the door at 3 am, it's probably the milkman."

Not so in America, where SWAT teams, in full paramilitary gear, perform nighttime raids on marijuana smokers and poker enthusiasts. Not infrequently, the cops burst into the wrong house or apartment, and perfectly innocent people get hurt or killed. Mind-boggling fact:

Since the early 1980s, the U.S. has seen a 1,300 percent rise in the number of SWAT team deployments, from 3,000 per year in 1981, to more than 40,000 per year in 2001 (the number is likely even higher today).

After a year-long study, Cato policy analyst Radley Balko has literally written the book on the SWAT team proliferation: Overkill, the Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America (he modestly calls it a paper, but it sure looks like a book if you get the hard copy. Or you can download the electronic version here).

For a taste of what's in Overkill, read Balko's latest column. Noting that the increase in SWAT raids is directly related to the escalation of the drug war, he writes:

Because most drug crimes are consensual crimes, there's no direct victim to report them. Therefore, police have to rely on informants to tip them off to whose dealing, and where. These informants are notoriously unreliable. They tend to be criminals themselves, looking for leniency. Or they could be rival drug dealers, looking to bump off the competition.

The problem is, these violent, highly-confrontational SWAT raids are conducted based on information first gleaned from informants. Which means the information isn't always accurate. Which means an untold number of innocent Americans have been subjected to the horrifying predicament of having armed men invade their homes in the middle of the night, and needing to decide immediately upon waking if the intruders are cops or criminals, and if they should submit or resist.

Comments

[colson]

ditto - it's a great read.... but if you (other readers) have followed Balko for the past year or so, you know many of the situations, scenarios and points made. I'm glad to have it in such a concise fashion now because I have to deal with arrogant and misguided classmates who are getting criminal justice degrees, spouting much of the same rhetoric as you would expect to come from a modern criminal justice education.