TEXAS' NO-KNOCK SWAT COPS INVADE PEOPLE'S PRIVACY

You and your law-abiding neighbors in Texas might be just one street
address away from a life-threatening, midnight raid by the local
paramilitary police unit.

As these so-called SWAT squads increasingly become America's favorite
search warrant delivery service, bungled raids - including many to
the wrong address - have skyrocketed.

In these assaults on private property, scores of innocent citizens,
police officers and nonviolent offenders have died.

In a recent Cato Institute report titled Overkill: The Rise of
Paramilitary Police Raids in America, Radley Balko describes how
"over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization
of its civilian law enforcement, along with dramatic and unsettling
rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called
Special, Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work.

"The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics
warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home."

These raids - as many as 40,000 per year - terrorize nonviolent drug
offenders, bystanders and wrongly targeted civilians who are awakened
in the dead of night as teams of heavily armed paramilitary units,
dressed not as police but as soldiers, invade their homes.

Earlier this year, Balko reports, on a tip from an informant, a Fort
Worth SWAT team fired several rounds of tear gas into the home of
Steve Blackman - he was not home at the time - and then forcibly and
violently entered the home.

To add to the destruction, the police also slashed the tires on
Blackman's truck.

Later, the police realize they trashed the wrong house.

Back in 2002, a San Antonio SWAT unit fired tear gas canisters,
shattered a glass door with bullets and then stormed an apartment
occupied by three Hispanic men.

One man, Vincent Huerta, said, "the way they entered, I never thought
it could be the police."

All thought the raid was a robbery.

Again, police raided the wrong address, even though they had
conducted surveillance on the suspected residence for two days.

Police blamed the error on the darkness and that the apartments were
in a cluster of look-alike buildings.

How did the once trusted neighborhood cop become a serious threat to
life and privacy on the home front?

Originally, Los Angeles officials formed the nation's first SWAT
units in response to civil riots and hostage taking and bomb-toting
radical groups in the 1960s.

But by 1995, one study found, 89 percent of the nation's police
departments, including 65 percent of smaller towns in the
25,000-50,000 population range, had a paramilitary unit.

As the violence-prone '60s faded away, SWAT squads found a new lease
on life in the emerging tough-on-drugs culture of the 1970s.

By 1995, serving search warrants, especially in no-knocks "drug
raids," accounted for 75 percent of the actions of the nation's SWAT squads.

These SWAT squads have become more and more of a threat to our civil liberties.

First, they depend on notoriously unreliable informants when picking
raid targets.

Self-serving and ill-informed sources often send raids to wrong addresses.

Second, SWAT teams trained by the U.S. Army Ranger and Navy Seal
units blur the line between war and law enforcement.

Citizens are then treated as if they are, in fact, combatants.

Third, the use of military assault weapons and tactics - nighttime
raids, crashing through front doors and setting off stun grenades
inside homes - actually turn otherwise nonviolent situations into
violent confrontations when startled occupants try to arm and defend
themselves.

Finally, by 1990 (the last year for which information has been made
public) 38 percent of all police departments, 51 percent of all
sheriff departments and 94 percent of all state police departments in
the U.S. received money from the sale of boats, cars and other assets
seized during drug raids.

This money is then used to outfit more SWAT teams for more
asset-seizing raids - a practice that serves as a license for SWAT
teams to confiscate private property for their own use.

To rein in out of control SWAT units, Texas state and local
governments should limit the use of these squads to their original
purposes; end corrupting asset forfeiture policies; and pass laws
that safeguard families' rights to the privacy and sanctity of their homes.