LOCAL SWAT TEAMS CAN DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD

You and your law-abiding neighbors in Ohio might be just one street
address away from a life-threatening, midnight raid by a local
paramilitary police unit. As these so-called SWAT squads increasingly
become America's favored 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 a 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 officers but as soldiers, invade their homes.

Botched Ohio Raids

In Elyria earlier this year, Balko reports, police smashed through
Jerry Agee's front door at 6 a.m. while Agee was cooking eggs. Agee's
girlfriend had just taken a shower and was ordered to come out of the
bedroom nude, with her hands up. Police refused to let her get
dressed. After the police realized they had raided the wrong home,
they searched a while longer and then left without an apology.

In 1993, Akron police, clad in black, knocked down the front door and
rushed into the apartment of a 32-year-old woman and her three young
children. She did not realize the invaders were the police until her
children were forced, face-down, onto the floor at gunpoint. The
police had raided the wrong house, and later said, "It didn't look
like any drug house."

SWAT Origins

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, mostly in no-knock "drug raids," accounted
for 75 percent of the actions of the nation's SWAT squads.

Threats To Liberty

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 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 the 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, Ohio's 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.