BIRTHDAY PARTY RAID IS THE LATEST SWAT FIASCO

[An illustration of a SWAT officer popping out of a cake, holding and
firing an automatic rifle at a party of children.]

A week ago Sunday, a seven-year-old Abbotsford boy had just blown out the
candles on his birthday cake when a police tactical squad crashed his party
and blew away his dog, Cona. The parents of 13 children who were in the
home are furious at the violence of the raid and the danger it presented
the guests.

They have a point. Police may argue that Cona is the author of his own
misfortune (he went out with a mouthful of cop). They may defend the
objective of the raid: Marijuana, heroin, and magic mushrooms were found on
the premises, and if the man of the house is convicted on all counts
there'll be a few more candles on the cake next time he hosts his son's
birthday. But storming a home full of children -- a home the "tactical"
squad supposedly had under surveillance -- is indefensible.

Caught up as we are in hysteria over personal security and crime rates, we
seldom look at the consequences of our cries for aggressive policing. Yet
the frightening fact is that so-called SWAT teams mess up like this all the
time.

A few years ago in Surrey, a 20-minute drive down the Fraser Valley from
Abbotsford, a couple were asleep at home when special forces charged in
looking for suspected drug dealers who'd moved out six months earlier. Not
long before that, a Vancouver tactical squad was caught on videotape
beating a blameless Chinese man they dragged out of an apartment house;
they'd got the wrong address. Also in Vancouver, officers sent to evict
supposedly dangerous squatters from abandoned buildings arrived, armed to
the teeth, to find a ragged bunch of street people banging pots and pans.

But the lower mainland's tactical squads are rather harmless compared to,
say, their Ottawa counterparts.

Two years ago Ottawa tactical officers fired a packet of lead pellets that
finished off a suicidal man who'd refused to drop a knife he was using to
castrate himself. Earlier, they fatally shot a drunken, mentally disturbed,
marginally menacing man who wouldn't drop a gun he'd been alternately
holding on his shoulder and pointing into his own mouth. Before that, in a
drug raid, they plugged a man believed to be carrying a dangerous weapon;
it turned out to be a guitar.

Battling for the title of most dangerous tactical teams in Canada are
Montreal and the Ontario Provincial Police.

In 1995, a SWAT squad, forgoing warrants, launched a drug raid into a
Montreal apartment to find only a frightened mother and child. In 1994 an
elderly and mentally ill Montreal man armed with a cement pick died after
being hit with a barrage of rubber bullets fired by a SWAT team. In 1991, a
tactical squad used an assault rifle to kill a young black Montrealer
they'd mistaken for a suspect in a murder attempt.

Worse still, a Montreal SWAT team burst in on a young family in what a
judge later called "an act of vengeance" for the husband's beating of an
off-duty policeman days earlier. The man was shot to death. The Quebec
Superior Court found that the tactical squad showed "supreme contempt for
the privacy of the home, and in truth, for the . . . lives of the occupants."

As for the OPP, one of its tactical officers was in 1997 found guilty of
criminal negligence causing death in the shooting of Dudley George, an
unarmed native involved in a protest at Ipperwash Provincial Park.

In 1992, a 43-year-old Sarnia man and his wife were sitting in a car by the
St. Clair River eating french fries when a SWAT team opened fire and shot
him in the side. They mistook him for his son, an 18- year-old murder suspect.

And then there is the famous 1988 rural Ontario case of autoworker Bernard
Bastien, who like the birthday boy in Abbotsford watched as a tactical
squad invaded his property and shot his dog, a beagle slow to warm to armed
strangers. Bastien wasn't thrilled at the intrusion either and walked out
of his house with a firearm; he was hit by 13 OPP bullets and killed.
Officers soon determined they'd got the wrong address. They weren't after
Bastien but his suicidal neighbour. They found him down the road and shot
him twice.

There are many more examples of SWAT overkill (I am indebted to reporter
David Pugliese for most of the above). A sniper's near miss on a blameless
target in Gustafsen Lake, B.C. Children at risk in another case of mistaken
identity in Calgary. Members of a Quebec Provincial Police unit charged
with torture, forcible confinement, and assault.

It's perhaps no accident that SWAT units seem at war with the citizenry.
These are paramilitary units, after all, trained in special weapons and
tactics for the purpose of meeting serious violent threats such as
terrorist attacks and hostage takings. They were first formed in Canada in
the mid-1970s to secure the Montreal Olympics against the bloody terror
that befell Munich in 1972. They have a mindset different from conventional
police. As one expert says, they think "not about making an arrest but
instead about crushing the opposition. They treat everything like a
commando raid."

SWAT teams, however, have now proliferated to the point where every
backwater detachment has one, and they're using their submachine guns,
night-vision goggles, and fast trigger-fingers not to battle Palestinian
terrorists but for routine police work. In Edmonton tactical officers
answer an average of 10 calls a week, a small majority of them involving
high risk of violence. Additionally, they turn out in full costume to pull
over drunk drivers and answer domestic disputes.

Tactical squads have no business in day-to-day policing. They are by their
nature provocative. They raise the temperature, up the ante, everywhere
they go, and create all these mini-Wacos as a consequence. These aren't the
'70s. The substantial threats for which SWAT teams were intended have
subsided (if, in most jurisdictions, they ever existed). The majority of
them should be disbanded.

Those cities that have a legitimate call for tactical units need to train
them more carefully and deploy them sparingly. (Toronto, interestingly,
might be an example to the rest of the country. It's Canada's biggest,
nastiest city but I see no instances of SWAT overkill there.)

Meanwhile, Canadians, and especially their political leaders (and foremost
among these the law-and-order lobbies) need to rethink their enthusiasm for
aggressive policing. The same attitudes driving the boom in tactical work
are driving the increases in armed officers on our streets, and our
tendency to respond with "zero-tolerance" measures to all manner of public
threats, perceived or real.

We've convinced ourselves, and our police forces, that Canada is a far more
menacing place than is really the case. Rates of violent crime have fallen
substantially. Canadians are by and large a civil, law- abiding people. At
the moment we're literally overwhelming the federal government with our
readiness to comply with its absurdly stringent gun registration laws.

We can't have it both ways. We can't, on the one hand, call for more
aggressive policing, and, on the other hand, be outraged when Cona gets
popped at a birthday party.

Kenneth Whyte is Editor-in-Chief of the National Post.