POLICE POWERS

At first glance,the photograph of helmeted, assault-rifle-toting
military personal on the front page of Saturday's Register looked like
a photograph of peacekeeping forces in Bosnia. But a closer look
revealed that the invasion force was a SWAT team descending on an
Anaheim neighborhood.

The Anaheim SWAT team, the county bomb squad, Irvine police and FBI
agents raided the home of 70-year-old surgeon Jerry D. Nilsson, an
associate of Dr. Larry Ford, the Diofem founder who killed himself
last month.

This increasingly bizarre case has all the makings of a TV
mini-series. A family man, Dr. Ford committed suicide days after his
partner was shot. Caches of weapons, explosives and chemicals were
found at his suburban home. And now there's the military-esque raid of
Dr. Nilsson, who had recently lost his medical licence for unrelated
allegations.

The mystery will no doubt continue. But appearances can be deceiving.
Even. unusual findings - buried guns, chemicals, explosives - can have
innocent explanations. And just because law enforcement has a big show
of force doesn't mean that the target necessarily has done anything
illegal.

Irvine police officials, who directed the Nilsson raid, didn't return
our calls. But an Anaheim police spokesman told us that the SWAT team
would have been used if law enforcement has "information that it was a
high-risk entry," and that Dr. Nilsson "had a big interest in firearms."

Yet soon after the high-profile raid, police released Dr. Nilsson and said
they found no explosives. The surgeon told the Register: "It's the
damnedest thing I've ever seen in my whole life. ... They told me they
thought I had a bomb. It was a big overreaction."

The Anaheim incident was no fluke. Increasingly police forces, federal
agents and sheriff's departments take a militaristic approach to local
law enforcement that stands in contrast to the more traditional
cop-on-a-beat approach.

There's been a major "sea change" in police thinking, Joe McNamara
told us; he is a fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, a
former police chief in San Jose and Kansas City and longtime New York
City policeman. "They're more in a military mind-set and everyone [is
viewed] as a potential suspect."

The SWAT-team concept, he explained, was developed in the 1960s
because police weren't able to effectively handle hostage and other
high-risk situations. It was a good approach in rare instances, but
now departments are using it for routine arrests - something he
describes as "bizarre."

"The amount of force routinely used today [by police] would have
triggered a congressional investigation in my early days of policing,"
he said. But these days Congress is funding these types of
activities. Because of the drug war, he said, police too often view
themselves as an invading army rather than as servants of the
community. And that drug-war thinking - the sense of being under
siege, the hair-trigger mentality - spills into non-drug-related
cases. On a more practical level, Mr. McNamara worries that "It's not
just the dollar cost, but the cost of taking those uniformed officers
off the street where they're available for citizens." The answer is to
demilitarize police departments by calling an end to the drug war. In
the meantime, police officials should at least think twice about
military-style raids unless they are dealing with hostage situations
or other extreme circumstances.