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Post by redstone14 on Mar 23, 2014 0:17:21 GMT -5
Paramilitary policeCops or soldiers?America’s police have become too militarised Mar 22nd 2014 | ATLANTA | From the print edition FROM the way police entered the house—helmeted and masked, guns drawn and shields in front, knocking down the door with a battering ram and rushing inside—you might think they were raiding a den of armed criminals. In fact they were looking for $1,000-worth of clothes and electronics allegedly bought with a stolen credit card. They found none of these things, but arrested two people in the house on unrelated charges. They narrowly avoided tragedy. On hearing intruders break in, the homeowner’s son, a disabled ex-serviceman, reached for his (legal) gun. Luckily, he heard the police announce themselves and holstered it; otherwise, “they probably would have shot me,” he says. His mother, Sally Prince, says she is now traumatised. Gary Mikulec, chief of the Ankeny, Iowa police force, which raided Ms Prince’s home in January, said that the suspects arrested “were not very good people”. One had a criminal history that included three assault charges, albeit more than a decade old, and on his arrest was found to have a knife and a meth pipe. It is easy to see why the police like to be better armed than the people they have to arrest. They risk their lives every day, and are understandably keen to get home in one piece. A big display of force can make a suspect think twice about pulling a gun. “An awful lot of SWAT tactics are focused on forcing the suspect to surrender,” says Bill Bratton, New York’s police chief. But civil libertarians such as Radley Balko, the author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop”, fret that the American police are becoming too much like soldiers. Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams (ie, paramilitary police units) were first formed to deal with violent civil unrest and life-threatening situations: shoot-outs, rescuing hostages, serving high-risk warrants and entering barricaded buildings, for instance. Their mission has crept. Boozers, barbers and cvckfighters
Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a licence”. Maricopa County, Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was suspected of organising cvckfights. Police rolled a tank into Mr Llovera’s yard and killed more than 100 of his birds, as well as his dog. According to Mr Kraska, most SWAT deployments are not in response to violent, life-threatening crimes, but to serve drug-related warrants in private homes. He estimates that 89% of police departments serving American cities with more than 50,000 people had SWAT teams in the late 1990s—almost double the level in the mid-1980s. By 2007 more than 80% of police departments in cities with between 25,000 and 50,000 people had them, up from 20% in the mid-1980s (there are around 18,000 state and local police agencies in America, compared with fewer than 100 in Britain). The number of SWAT deployments soared even as violent crime fell. And although in recent years crime rates have risen in smaller American cities, Mr Kraska writes that the rise in small-town SWAT teams was driven not by need, but by fear of being left behind. Fred Leland, a police lieutenant in the small town of Walpole, Massachusetts, says that police departments in towns like his often invest in military-style kit because they “want to keep up” with larger forces. The courts have smiled on SWAT raids. They often rely on “no-knock” warrants, which authorise police to force their way into a home without announcing themselves. This was once considered constitutionally dubious. But the Supreme Court has ruled that police may enter a house without knocking if they have “a reasonable suspicion” that announcing their presence would be dangerous or allow the suspect to destroy evidence (for example, by flushing drugs down the toilet). Often these no-knock raids take place at night, accompanied by “flash-bang” grenades designed temporarily to blind, deafen and confuse their targets. They can go horribly wrong: Mr Balko has found more than 50 examples of innocent people who have died as a result of botched SWAT raids. Officers can get jumpy and shoot unnecessarily, or accidentally. In 2011 Eurie Stamps, the stepfather of a suspected drug-dealer but himself suspected of no crimes, was killed while lying face-down on the floor when a SWAT-team officer reportedly tripped, causing his gun to discharge. Householders, on hearing the door being smashed down, sometimes reach for their own guns. In 2006 Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old woman in Atlanta, mistook the police for robbers and fired a shot from an old pistol. Police shot her five times, killing her. After the shooting they planted marijuana in her home. It later emerged that they had falsified the information used to obtain their no-knock warrant. Big grants for big gunsFederal cash—first to wage war on drugs, then on terror—has paid for much of the heavy weaponry used by SWAT teams. Between 2002 and 2011 the Department of Homeland Security disbursed $35 billion in grants to state and local police. Also, the Pentagon offers surplus military kit to police departments. According to Mr Balko, by 2005 it had provided such gear to more than 17,000 law-enforcement agencies. These programmes provide useful defensive equipment, such as body armour and helmets. But it is hard to see why Fargo, North Dakota—a city that averages fewer than two murders a year—needs an armoured personnel-carrier with a rotating turret. Keene, a small town in New Hampshire which had three homicides between 1999 and 2012, spent nearly $286,000 on an armoured personnel-carrier known as a BearCat. The local police chief said it would be used to patrol Keene’s “Pumpkin Festival and other dangerous situations”. A Reason-Rupe poll found that 58% of Americans think the use of drones, military weapons and armoured vehicles by the police has gone “too far”. Because of a legal quirk, SWAT raids can be profitable. Rules on civil asset-forfeiture allow the police to seize anything which they can plausibly claim was the proceeds of a crime. Crucially, the property-owner need not be convicted of that crime. If the police find drugs in his house, they can take his cash and possibly the house, too. He must sue to get them back. Many police departments now depend on forfeiture for a fat chunk of their budgets. In 1986, its first year of operation, the federal Asset Forfeiture Fund held $93.7m. By 2012, that and the related Seized Asset Deposit Fund held nearly $6 billion. Mr Balko contends that these forfeiture laws are “unfair on a very basic level”. They “disproportionately affect low-income people” and provide a perverse incentive for police to focus on drug-related crimes, which “come with a potential kickback to the police department”, rather than rape and murder investigations, which do not. They also provide an incentive to arrest suspected drug-dealers inside their houses, which can be seized, and to bust stash houses after most of their drugs have been sold, when police can seize the cash. Kara Dansky of the American Civil Liberties Union, who is overseeing a study into police militarisation, notices a more martial tone in recent years in the materials used to recruit and train new police officers. A recruiting video in Newport Beach, California, for instance, shows officers loading assault rifles, firing weapons, chasing suspects, putting people in headlocks and releasing snarling dogs. This is no doubt sexier than showing them poring over paperwork or attending a neighbourhood-watch meeting. But does it attract the right sort of recruit, or foster the right attitude among serving officers? Mr Balko cites the T-shirts that some off-duty cops wear as evidence of a culture that celebrates violence (“We get up early to beat the crowds”; “You huff and you puff and we’ll blow your door down”). Others retort that Mr Balko and his allies rely too much on cherry-picked examples of raids gone wrong. Tragic accidents happen and some police departments use their SWAT teams badly, but most use them well, says Lance Eldridge, a former army officer and ex-sheriff’s deputy in Colorado. It would be easier to determine who is right if police departments released more information about how and how often they deploy SWAT teams. But most are extremely cagey. In 2009 Maryland’s governor, Martin O’Malley, signed a law requiring the police in his state to report such information every six months. Three published reports showed that SWAT teams were most often deployed to serve search warrants on people suspected of crimes involving drugs and other contraband, but the law is set to expire this year. Utah’s legislature has passed a similar measure; it awaits the governor’s signature. No one wants to eliminate SWAT teams. Imminent threats to human life require a swift, forceful response. That, say critics, is what SWAT teams should be used for: not for serving warrants on people suspected of nonviolent crimes, breaking up poker games or seeing that the Pumpkin Festival doesn’t get out of hand. www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599349-americas-police-have-become-too-militarised-cops-or-soldiers
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Post by redstone14 on Mar 23, 2014 13:49:37 GMT -5
John W. Whitehead Attorney, President of The Rutherford Institute, and author of 'A Government of Wolves' The Second Amendment: A Symbol of Freedom or an Invitation to Violence? Posted: 03/17/2014 3:39 pm EDT Updated: 03/21/2014 1:59 pm EDT
You can largely determine where a person will fall in the debate over gun control and the Second Amendment based on their view of government and the role it should play in our lives. Those who want to see government as a benevolent parent looking out for our best interests tend to interpret the Second Amendment's "militia" reference as applying only to the military. To those who see the government as inherently corrupt, the Second Amendment is a means of ensuring that the populace will always have a way of defending themselves against threats to their freedoms. And then there are those who view the government as neither good nor evil, but merely a powerful entity that, as Thomas Jefferson recognized, must be bound "down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." To this group, the right to bear arms is no different from any other right enshrined in the Constitution, to be safeguarded, exercised prudently and maintained. Unfortunately, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, while these three divergent viewpoints continue to jockey for supremacy, the U.S. government has adopted a "do what I say, not what I do" mindset when it comes to Americans' rights overall. Nowhere is this double standard more evident than in the government's attempts to arm itself to the teeth, all the while viewing as suspect anyone who dares to legally own a gun, let alone use one. Indeed, while it still technically remains legal to own a firearm in America, possessing one can now get you pulled over, searched, arrested, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without ever having committed a crime, shot at and killed. (This same rule does not apply to law enforcement officials, however, who are armed to the hilt and rarely given more than a slap on the wrists for using their weapons against unarmed individuals.) Meanwhile, the government's efforts to militarize and weaponize its agencies and employees is reaching epic proportions, with federal agencies as varied as the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration placing orders for hundreds of millions of rounds of hollow point bullets, and local police agencies being "gifted" with military-grade weaponry and equipment from the Defense Department. Ironically, while the Obama administration continues its efforts to "pass the broadest gun control legislation in a generation," the U.S. military boasts some weapons the rest of the world doesn't have. Included in its arsenal are an AA12 Atchisson Assault Shotgun that can shoot five 12-gauge shells per second and "can fire up to 9,000 rounds without being cleaned or jamming"; a Taser shockwave that can electrocute a crowd of people at the touch of a button; an XM2010 enhanced sniper rifle with built-in sound and flash suppressors that can hit a man-sized target nine out of ten times from over a third of a mile away; and an XM25 "Punisher" grenade launcher that can be programmed to accurately shoot grenades at a target up to 500 meters away. Talk about a double standard. The government's arsenal of weapons makes the average American's handgun look like a Tinker Toy. It's no laughing matter, and yet the joke is on us. "We the people" have been so focused on debating whether the Second Amendment "allows" us to own guns that we've overlooked the most important and most consistent theme throughout the Constitution: the fact that it is not merely an enumeration of our rights but was intended to be a clear shackle on the government's powers. As such, the Second Amendment reads as a clear rebuke against any attempt to restrict the citizenry's gun ownership. It is as necessary an ingredient for maintaining that tenuous balance between the citizenry and their republic as any of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, especially the right to freedom of speech, assembly, press, petition, security, and due process. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas understood this tension well. "The Constitution is not neutral," he remarked, "It was designed to take the government off the backs of people." In this way, the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights in their entirety stand as a bulwark against a police state. Without any one of these freedoms, including the Second Amendment right to own and bear arms, we are that much more vulnerable to the vagaries of out-of-control policemen, benevolent dictators, genuflecting politicians, and overly ambitious bureaucrats. When all is said and done, the debate over gun ownership in America is really a debate over who gets to call the shots and control the game. In other words, it's that same tug-of-war that keeps getting played out in every confrontation between the government and the citizenry over who gets to be the master and who is relegated to the part of the servant. The Constitution is clear on this particular point, with its multitude of prohibitions on government overreach. As 20th century libertarian Edmund A. Opitz observed in 1964, "No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights." In a nutshell, then, the Second Amendment's right to bear arms reflects not only a concern for one's personal defense, but serves as a check on the political power of the ruling authorities. It represents an implicit warning against governmental encroachments on one's freedoms, the warning shot over the bow to discourage any unlawful violations of our persons or property. As such, it reinforces that necessary balance in the citizen-state relationship. As George Orwell noted, "That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." A longer version of this commentary is available on The Rutherford Institute's website. Follow John W. Whitehead on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rutherford_instwww.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/the-second-amendment-a-sy_b_4980918.html
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Post by redstone14 on Mar 24, 2014 11:17:10 GMT -5
Gun ordinances face defiance from law officersBy Contributor / March 24, 2014 / 43 Comments By Bruce Parker | Special to Watchdog.org The head of a nationwide sheriffs coalition is calling on Vermont’s law enforcement officers to defy three controversial gun control measures passed by Burlington voters three weeks ago. “Sheriffs have a constitutional duty to refuse to comply with such ordinances,” said Richard Mack, president of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. “We’re seeing sheriffs in New York oppose the Safe Act and Gov. Cuomo. If we have sheriffs in New York doing this, how much more should we have sheriffs doing it in Vermont?” On March 4, Burlington voters joined a push by elected officials throughout northeastern states to enact stiffer gun control measures. By a 2-to-1 margin, they banned the carry of firearms in bars and restaurants, authorized police to confiscate guns during domestic disputes and required gun owners to keep firearms locked up at home. “It’s astonishing that people are so cavalier about violating the Second Amendment,” Mack said. “Burlington City Council sounds like they are just following the trend to do things that are entirely unconstitutional and go around sheriffs, and go around the laws, or subvert the laws, or disobey the laws.” The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which touts sheriffs as the highest law enforcement officials charged with defending the rights of citizens in states, claims that 17 police associations and nearly 500 sheriffs nationwide have pledged to defy unconstitutional gun control measures. The thought that Vermont’s top law officers might publicly oppose gun restrictions isn’t a novel idea. Sheriffs in Colorado are refusing to enforce that state’s new background checks and ban on high-capacity magazines. In Connecticut, tens of thousands of residents are refusing to comply with a new state law that requires registration of guns and high-capacity magazines. In Saratoga Springs, N.Y., citizens publicly protested the state’s new SAFE Act last week by burning a thousand gun registration forms. In Vermont, hundreds – some blazoned in orange hunting attire and hoisting the Gadsden Flag – rallied at the state Capitol to urge the Legislature to uphold Vermont’s strong Second Amendment gun laws, among the most robust in the nation. When asked if Vermonters might follow the citizens of neighboring states and refuse to comply with gun control ordinances, Bill Moore, a policy analyst at the Vermont Traditions Coalition, predicted that noncompliance would be “highly likely and widespread.” A standoff between Burlington and Vermont gun owners may be a ways off, however. According to Moore, Burlington’s ordinances are largely symbolic because they violate Vermont’s “Sportsmen’s Bill of Rights,” a state law that prohibits municipalities from enacting their own gun laws. “These ordinances, as the anti-gunners will admit, are intentionally and specifically meant to challenge the Gun Owners’ Bill of Rights and Vermont’s current constitutional protections,” Moore told Watchdog. According to Moore, the Burlington City Council advanced the measures to create an opportunity for the Legislature to revise Vermont’s strong Second Amendment protections — an outcome that he said is “not highly likely.” Burlington councilman Paul Decelles, one of the few officials to vote against the proposed changes to the city charter, echoed that sentiment. “I think every single one of the councilors recognized that this is never going to pass the state test, but they pushed this along to have a broader discussion at the state level. I don’t think any one of them thinks this is actually going to be upheld,” Decelles told Watchdog. The mayor of Burlington may disagree. Before the March 4 vote, Mayor Miro Weinberger issued a statement on the mayor’s office website saying he supported “charter changes focused on protecting Burlington children, domestic violence victims, and law enforcement officers.” Weinberger has been an outspoken member of Michael Bloomberg’s national coalition of pro-gun-control mayors, which advocates for local gun control in the name of safety, but whose members have fled recently due to revelations the organization wants nationwide gun confiscation. Mack said the mayor’s gun control advocacy contradicts both the U.S. Constitution and recent case law. “Another thing the mayor of Burlington needs to ask himself is, do the Supreme Court decisions of Heller and McDonald mean anything at all, that people have the right to keep and bear arms? Does the Second Amendment mean anything, or are you allowed to act as if it doesn’t exist just because you don’t agree with the law?” Despite opponents’ views the ordinances are illegal, it remains unclear what would happen if Burlington’s measures gain traction at the Legislature. “I know our chief of police very well, and I know many cops in Burlington, and they would never walk into somebody’s house and demand to see guns,” Decelles said. “They would never do these things. They are more concerned about real crime.” watchdog.org/133907/burlington-gun-ordinances/
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Post by redstone14 on Mar 25, 2014 0:32:10 GMT -5
Homeland Security Exercise Targets “Free Americans Against Socialist Tyranny” Leaked documents reveal plan to counter online dissent during martial lawPaul Joseph Watson Infowars.com March 24, 2014 Leaked Homeland Security documents obtained by Infowars reveal details of a joint DHS/FEMA national exercise set to take place this week, one of the components of which revolves around an effort to counter online dissent by a group called “Free Americans Against Socialist Tyranny,” which is disgruntled at the imposition of martial law after an earthquake in Alaska. The document again underscores the federal government’s obsession with characterizing libertarians and conservatives as some kind of extremist radical threat. The document (PDF) was leaked by an individual affiliated with Stewart Rhodes’ Oathkeepers organization and passed on to Infowars. It is entitled National Exercise Program – Capstone Exercise 2014 – Scenario Ground Truth. The document is intended for “U.S. Department of Homeland Security Trusted Agents Only” and is “disseminated only on a need-to-know basis.” Even the role players involved in the exercise itself are prohibited from seeing the files. The exercise is designed to evaluate readiness in preparation for a catastrophic incident, natural disaster or major act of terrorism. Some of the scenarios which will be in play during the exercise include a series of earthquakes, tsunamis and a nuclear weapons accident. On page 125 of the document, a scenario is outlined whereby a group calling itself “Free Americans against Socialist Tyranny” responds to “The U.S. Northern Command mission of Defense Support to Civil Authorities” (or the imposition of martial law) by launching a protest campaign on social media and potentially engaging in cyber attacks. According to the scenario, the campaign is driven by suspicion that “the government is responsible for the Alaska earthquake and a “hacktivist” manifesto.” “The U.S. Northern Command mission of Defense Support to Civil Authorities has led to increased activity by some anti-government organizations,” states the document. “Currently, the most vocal organization is Free Americans against Socialist Tyranny; using social media, they advertise anti-U.S. rhetoric focusing on the Department of Defense as well as to recruit like-minded individuals to join their “cause”. “While some Free Americans against Socialist Tyranny members are capable of conducting adverse cyber operations, the greatest threat is current government employees sympathetic to their cause,” the document adds. “It is believed that there are employees within US Northern Command, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, National Guard, and Defense Information Systems Agency that may support Free Americans against Socialist Tyranny doctrine based on individual comments on social media sites. Free Americans against Socialist Tyranny sympathizers may include both former and current members of the military with training on satellite communications, computer network defense, network operations, as well as military command and control.” The scenario also suggests that Northern Command members sympathetic to Free Americans Against Socialist Tyranny may attempt to hack the North American Aerospace Defense Command as a form of retaliation. This is by no means the first time that the Department of Homeland Security has characterized anti-big government Americans as domestic extremists. A study funded by the Department of Homeland Security, details of which emerged in 2012, characterized Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority,” and “reverent of individual liberty” as “extreme right-wing” terrorists. As we have exhaustively documented on numerous occasions, federal authorities and particularly the Department of Homeland Security have been involved in producing a deluge of literature which portrays liberty lovers and small government advocates as extremist radicals. The document also mentions the threat posed by “disgruntled military and Department of Defense civilians,” which ties into the talking point, repeatedly promoted by the DHS and other federal agencies, that returning veterans pose a major domestic terror threat. The Capstone Exercise 2014 document makes it clear that a key part of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA’s preparation for the aftermath of major catastrophic incidents in the United States is centered around combating online dissent which will be sparked as a result of federal authorities and military assets instituting martial law, or what the document refers to as “Defense Support to Civil Authorities”. This is particularly chilling given reports that emerged in 2006 concerning a nationwide FEMA program under which Pastors and other religious representatives were trained to become secret police enforcers who teach their congregations to “obey the government” in preparation for a declaration of martial law, property and firearm seizures, and forced relocation. The fact that the DHS is focusing its cyber security efforts during a major national exercise not on targeting foreign state actors or terrorists but on combating online dissent by conservatives is sure to increase concerns that the federal agency once again has libertarians, patriots and small government activists in the crosshairs. www.infowars.com/homeland-security-exercise-targets-free-americans-against-socialist-tyranny/
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Post by redstone14 on Mar 25, 2014 10:59:50 GMT -5
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Post by redstone14 on Apr 2, 2014 0:23:58 GMT -5
The Economist Versus SWATOf mission creep and paramilitary policing.March 29, 2014 - 11:05 pm By Jack Dunphy On Monday morning, two LAPD officers responded to a reported incident of domestic violence in the Hollywood Hills, a neighborhood where violent crime is all but unheard of. Radio calls of this nature can be harrowing, but as the officers approached the house there was nothing to indicate that this one was especially so. Until the shooting started [1]. Once at the doorway the officers were met with gunfire, which wounded one of them. They returned fire with uncertain results and held their ground until help arrived. With the wounded officer removed to safety, additional officers surrounded the house and attempted to communicate with the gunman. When repeated efforts to talk to the suspect went unanswered, a SWAT team was called in, and when they entered the house they found the man dead from a gunshot wound. As of this writing it has not been determined if the suspect killed himself or was killed in the initial exchange of gunfire. Few would argue that use of a SWAT team in these circumstances was unwarranted. Here you had a suspect who had already shot at two officers, wounding one of them. He was believed to be barricaded in the home with access to unknown numbers and types of firearms and ammunition. The first officers to answer the domestic violence call, with no indication of what awaited them beyond the threshold, approached the door with their semiautomatic handguns holstered. Their pump-action shotgun would have remained in their car, as would have the semiautomatic rifle that some officers are trained to use. The patrol officers who responded after the gunfire would have been similarly armed. And while the first officers taking up positions outside the house would have been wearing Kevlar helmets, their concealable body armor would have been viewed as insufficient for the task of engaging and arresting a suspect whose willingness to kill had already been demonstrated. Furthermore, the officer-needs-help call was answered by officers from several police stations, few if any of whom had ever had the opportunity to train as a coordinated unit. t is situations like this one that SWAT teams [2] were created for, and in fact the LAPD was an early innovator of the concept — the department’s SWAT team was established in 1967. But today some say that police SWAT teams and the paramilitary hardware they employ have become too widely used. An article in the March 22 edition of The Economist makes this argument, and it is one that cannot be dismissed out of hand. The article, “Cops or soldiers? [3]” opens with an account of a police raid in Ankeny, Iowa. “From the way police entered the house,” it begins, “helmeted and masked, guns drawn and shields in front, knocking down the door with a battering ram and rushing inside — you might think they were raiding a den of armed criminals. In fact they were looking for $1,000-worth of clothes and electronics allegedly bought with a stolen credit card. They found none of these things, but arrested two people in the house on unrelated charges.” And the piece goes on to describe how tragedy was narrowly avoided: The homeowner’s son, “a disabled ex-serviceman,” reached for his gun on hearing the intruders, but secured it on realizing they were police officers. As anecdotes go, this one is unpersuasive in the campaign against the proliferation of SWAT teams. Yes, the crime involved here was relatively minor and non-violent, but as the article discloses, one of the suspects arrested had three assault charges on his record and was found with a knife. If writer Jon Fasman’s intent was to portray the police tactics employed in the raid as overkill, he fell short of the mark. Sometimes an overwhelming show of force is the best way to avoid using it. Which is not to undermine the premise of the article. In the August 16, 2013 issue of National Review, I reviewed Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces [4]. (My review is online behind the NR paywall [5], alas.) Balko is an outspoken libertarian whose opposition to the “war on drugs” is made clear throughout the book. I’ve been a minor player in this so-called war for more than 30 years now, so the reader should weigh my opinions with this in mind. That said, I was struck at how much I found to agree with in Balko’s book, and in the article in The Economist. Some years ago I participated in a large-scale operation that targeted a particular street gang in South Los Angeles. In addition to the LAPD, the FBI, ATF, and DEA were involved, and when it came time to serve the many search and arrest warrants on the wanted suspects’ homes, the locations were divided up among the various agencies. When I arrived at the command post prior to sunrise on warrant day, I was amazed at the array of armored vehicles the feds had assembled for the day’s task. Some of them were enormous, and most were painted in the military-style scheme that reflected their desert war heritage. As both Balko and Fasman point out, since the 9/11 attacks and the onset of the War on Terror, federal and local law enforcement agencies have received great quantities of military surplus equipment, and on this particular morning the feds saw fit to put some of it to use, no matter how unnecessarily. Further, the federal agents who manned these vehicles, unlike their blue-uniformed counterparts from the LAPD, were wearing tan, military-style uniforms more suited to a battlefield than to a police operation in the middle of America’s second-largest city. I point this out not to impugn the federal agents who participated in the operation that morning, but merely to illustrate what both Balko in his book and Fasman in his article describe as “mission creep.” Fasman cites Peter Kraska, professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, who estimates that in 1980, SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times across America but are now used 50,000 times a year, many of them in circumstances that would not appear to demand heavy firepower. The cities of Baltimore and Dallas, Fasman writes, have used SWAT teams to break up illegal poker games. The thinking within some departments seems to be, “We paid for the stuff, we might as well use it.” If one accepts, as I do, the premise that SWAT teams are often misused, it’s important to understand why this is so. One explanation that occurs to me may at first seem counterintuitive: the availability of military-style hardware has the effect of rewarding timidity on the part of police managers. For example, when I first began participating in search warrants in the mid-1980s, the oversight for warrant preparation and service within the LAPD was minimal, with only my immediate supervisor and the lieutenant above him providing input under ordinary circumstances. The tactical plans we drew up in preparation for warrant service were one or two pages, and the process of receiving information, verifying it, and then preparing and serving a search warrant might be accomplished inside of a few hours. Today, the LAPD’s search warrant tactical plan is nine pages long, and the approval process, even before a warrant is presented to a judge, can go up the chain of command all the way to a deputy chief. As in most police departments, one does not ordinarily advance in the ranks of the LAPD by being a seasoned investigator or tactical officer, but rather by avoiding these jobs. So, when presented with a proposed search warrant, the timorous manager, knowing that his name will now be associated with the operation, asks himself two questions: What can go wrong, and how can I avoid being blamed for it when it does? He then satisfies himself by directing that every available resource be devoted to the operation, whether tactically necessary or not. But sometimes common sense is allowed to prevail. On one occasion some of my coworkers pursued and captured a wanted armed robber, then prepared to search the man’s house under the terms of his probation. Nothing in our investigation suggested even the possibility that any additional dangerous people lived at the home, which the robber shared with his grandmother. A superior asked me if we were going to “tac up,” i.e. put on our helmets and heavy body armor and deploy our rifles, for the search. I told him we were not. “And why not?” he asked. “Because we’d look like idiots,” I said. I was blessed at the time to have a superior for whom this was a good enough reason. I wish it were always so. pjmedia.com/blog/the-economist-versus-swat/
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Post by redstone14 on Apr 19, 2014 13:06:21 GMT -5
APRIL 18, 2014 4:00 AM The United States of SWAT? Military-style units from government agencies are wreaking havoc on non-violent citizens. By John Fund Regardless of how people feel about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s standoff with the federal Bureau of Land Management over his cattle’s grazing rights, a lot of Americans were surprised to see TV images of an armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary wing of the BLM deployed around Bundy’s ranch. They shouldn’t have been. Dozens of federal agencies now have Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams to further an expanding definition of their missions. It’s not controversial that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Prisons have them. But what about the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? All of these have their own SWAT units and are part of a worrying trend towards the militarization of federal agencies — not to mention local police forces. “Law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier,” journalist Radley Balko writes in his 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop. “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 proliferation of paramilitary federal SWAT teams inevitably brings abuses that have nothing to do with either drugs or terrorism. Many of the raids they conduct are against harmless, often innocent, Americans who typically are accused of non-violent civil or administrative violations. Take the case of Kenneth Wright of Stockton, Calif., who was “visited” by a SWAT team from the U.S. Department of Education in June 2011. Agents battered down the door of his home at 6 a.m., dragged him outside in his boxer shorts, and handcuffed him as they put his three children (ages 3, 7, and 11) in a police car for two hours while they searched his home. The raid was allegedly intended to uncover information on Wright’s estranged wife, Michelle, who hadn’t been living with him and was suspected of college financial-aid fraud. The year before the raid on Wright, a SWAT team from the Food and Drug Administration raided the farm of Dan Allgyer of Lancaster, Pa. His crime was shipping unpasteurized milk across state lines to a cooperative of young women with children in Washington, D.C., called Grass Fed on the Hill. Raw milk can be sold in Pennsylvania, but it is illegal to transport it across state lines. The raid forced Allgyer to close down his business. Brian Walsh, a senior legal analyst with the Heritage Foundation, says it is inexplicable why so many federal agencies need to be battle-ready: “If these agencies occasionally have a legitimate need for force to execute a warrant, they should be required to call a real law-enforcement agency, one that has a better sense of perspective. The FBI, for example, can draw upon its vast experience to determine whether there is an actual need for a dozen SWAT agents.” Since 9/11, the feds have issued a plethora of homeland-security grants that encourage local police departments to buy surplus military hardware and form their own SWAT units. By 2005, at least 80 percent of towns with a population between 25,000 and 50,000 people had their own SWAT team. The number of raids conducted by local police SWAT teams has gone from 3,000 a year in the 1980s to over 50,000 a year today. Once SWAT teams are created, they will be used. Nationwide, they are used for standoffs, often serious ones, with bad guys. But at other times they’ve been used for crimes that hardly warrant military-style raids. Examples include angry dogs, domestic disputes, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. In 2010, a Phoenix, Ariz., sheriff’s SWAT team that included a tank and several armored vehicles raided the home of Jesus Llovera. The tank, driven by the newly deputized action-film star Steven Seagal, plowed right into Llovera’s house. The incident was filmed and, together with footage of Seagal-accompanied immigration raids, was later used for Seagal’s A&E TV law-enforcement reality show. The crime committed by Jesus Llovera was staging cvckfights. During the sheriff’s raid, his dog was killed, and later all of his chickens were put to sleep. Many veteran law-enforcement figures have severe qualms about the turn police work is taking. One retired veteran of a large metropolitan police force told me: “I was recently down at police headquarters for a meeting. Coincidently, there was a promotion ceremony going on and the SWAT guys looked just like members of the Army, except for the police shoulder patches. Not an image I would cultivate. It leads to a bad mindset.” Indeed, the U.S. Constitution’s Third Amendment, against the quartering of troops in private homes, was part of an overall reaction against the excesses of Britain’s colonial law enforcement. “It wasn’t the stationing of British troops in the colonies that irked patriots in Boston and Virginia,” Balko writes. “It was England’s decision to use the troops for everyday law enforcement.” There are things that can be done to curb the abuses without taking on the politically impossible job of disbanding SWAT units. The feds should stop shipping military vehicles to local police forces. Federal SWAT teams shouldn’t be used to enforce regulations, but should focus instead on potentially violent criminals. Cameras mounted on the dashboards of police cars have both brought police abuses to light and exonerated officers who were falsely accused of abuse. SWAT-team members could be similarly equipped with helmet cameras. After all, if taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill and cede ground on their Fourth Amendment rights, they have the right to a transparent, accountable record of just what is being done in their name. – John Fund is national-affairs columnist at National Review Online. www.nationalreview.com/article/376053/united-states-swat-john-fund
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