Exploding Number of SWAT Teams Sets Off Alarms

Some Paramilitary Units' Expanding Missions
Eclipse Police Image of Community Outreach

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
—
FRESNO, Calif. Sgt. Wade Engelson is preparing his new
recruits for war.

Dressed in fatigues, sporting buzz hair cuts, the new men are
being trained in the use of submachine guns, explosives and
chemical weapons. They have at their disposal a helicopter
and, soon, an armored personnel carrier.

Engelson's men are not Navy Seals or Army Rangers. They are
members of the Fresno Police Department, whose enemy will
not be found in faraway lands but in the neighborhoods where
the police routinely patrol fully armed and in urban
camouflage.

In their expanding strength and mission, the SWAT team in
Fresno mirrors a growing trend in U.S. law enforcement the
rise in the number of police paramilitary units across the
country and a rapid expansion of their activities, a controversial
trend that police scholars refer to as "the militarization" of
civilian police.

The explosive growth and expanding mission of SWAT teams
has, in turn, led to complaints that an occupying army is
marching through America's streets that they are too
aggressive, too heavily armed, too scary and that they erode
the public's perception of police as public servants.

"It's a very dangerous thing, when you're telling cops they're
soldiers and there's an enemy out there," said Joseph
McNamara, former chief of police in San Jose and Kansas
City who is now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. "I don't like it all."

In a new study, police researcher Peter Kraska and his
colleagues have documented the explosive growth of SWAT,
which stands for Special Weapons and Tactics. In a
nationwide survey of 690 law enforcement agencies serving
cities with populations with 50,000 or more, the researchers
found that 90 percent now have active SWAT teams,
compared to 60 percent in the early 1980s.

Even in rural communities and smaller cities, the researchers
have found that two of every three departments now boast a
SWAT team a phenomenon Kraska compares to
"militarizing Mayberry," he said referring to the fictional small
town in the Andy Griffith television show.

Yet more important than the raw numbers, Kraska says, the
SWAT mission has expanded. Once limited to highly
specialized actions, such as dealing with barricaded gunmen or
hostagetakers, the SWAT teams are now increasingly
engaged in more standard police work. There is a boom in
"high risk warrant work," including "noknock entries." The
work is mostly related to the war on drugs, and by extension,
"gang suppression."

"Where the SWAT teams were once deployed a few times a
year, they are now used for all kinds of police work dozens
of calls, hundreds of calls a year," said Kraska, a professor of
police studies at Western Kentucky University. "In SWAT
units formed since 1980, their use has increased by 538
percent." And some units, like those in Fresno, are being
deployed fulltime as roaming patrols.

The 30 members of Fresno's Violent Crime Suppression Unit
now patrol crimeridden neighborhoods day and night, serving
warrants at homes of suspected drug dealers and criminals,
stopping vehicles, interrogating gang members, showing a
presence.

As they move through the city, they wear subdued
grayandblack urban camouflage and body armor, and have
at the ready, ballistic shields and helmets, M17 gas masks and
rappelling gear. More equipment is carried in a mobile
command SWAT bus that roves the city. The deparment is
purchasing an armored personnel carrier.

The tactical police here also carry an assortment of weaponry
denied the normal beat cop battering rams, diversionary
devices known as "flashbangs," chemical agents, such as
pepper spray and tear gas, and specialized guns, including
assault rifles and most famously, the Heckler and Koch MP5,
the short, highly accurate 9mm, fully automatic submachine
gun used by the Navy Seals.

While the phenomenal rise in SWAT work has drawn some
fire, police officials say the change has been a necessary one
that has made an impact on crime.

Fresno Police Chief Ed Winchester says that a highly armed
and more violent criminal class requires an extreme response.
Fresno formed its SWAT team in 1973, about a decade after
the first such unit appeared in Los Angeles. Its creation
occurred after an officer was shot and killed by a robbery
suspect following a chaotic police response in which patrol
officers fired hundreds of rounds at the suspect, borrowed an
armored car and let fly canisters of tear gas, which then
floated across the neighborhood.

"It was what we would call a fiasco," Winchester said,
convincing everyone that a more highly trained, specialized
and disciplined unit was required.

>From 1973 until 1994, Fresno's SWAT team operated only in
response to very specific callouts, such as barricaded
suspects. But by late 1994, Fresno was experiencing a crime
wave. There were 55 shootings in five months, with 13 people
killed, including three children.

And so Fresno's traditional SWAT unit transformed itself into
the Violent Crime Suppression Unit and took to the streets in
constant patrols.

"The criminals aren't stupid," Winchester said. "They see eight
guys surrounding them, all carrying submachine guns and
wearing black fatigues, they don't want to get killed."

Fresno SWAT member C.D. Smith, writing in Police magazine
in 1995, put it this way: "The streets of Fresno have become a
war zone for cops, who find themselves in the heat of battle
with the bad guys at least once a month."

Winchester credits the unit, in part, with reducing violent crime
in Fresno by 8.7 percent in 1995 and 3.5 percent in 1996.
Now, he is expanding the unit again for day patrols as well
as night.

"Is there a downside? Sure there is," Winchester said. "It's a
sad commentary sad when crime is so bad you got to put a
SWAT unit on the street."

Yet critics warn the growing use of paramilitarystyle police
units threatens the very idea of a civilian police force just as
many law enforcement authorities begin to apply a new
technique known as "community policing," putting more beat
cops on the street and letting them interact more with citizens
to solve problems and well as crimes.

"Despite the conventional wisdom that community policing is
sweeping the nation, the exact opposite is happening," said
McNamara. "The police and their communities ought to think
seriously about this. Is there a need for SWAT teams? Yes, for
highly specialized functions. But the police love these units,
and this is a disastrous image to project."

McNamara and other police scholars say that the positive
impact of the SWAT teams on reducing crime is most likely
shortlived and that the pressure must be maintained. They
also fear that heavily armed, commandostyle police if they
remain in a neighborhood for long will eventually be seen as
an occupying army.

Kraska said his research shows that the rise in SWAT activities
has closely followed the increased resources applied to fight
illegal drug use.

"The drug war created the atmosphere for this kind of
proactive policing," Kraska said. "We have never seen this
kind of policing, where SWAT teams routinely break through a
door, subdue all the occupants and search the premises for
drugs, cash and weapons."

Between 1980 and 1995, for example, Kraska found that
SWAT units were employed in their traditional roles only for a
minority of callouts. Some 1.3 percent of their work was to
quell civil disturbances; 3.6 percent for hostage situations; 13.4
percent for barricaded individuals. But 75 percent of their
mission is now devoted to serve highrisk warrants, mostly
drug raids.

Police chiefs and SWAT officers defend the practice, saying
they are more aggressively rooting out and arresting drug
dealers. And because of the more powerful weapons used by
gangs and dealers, the work should be done by highly trained
SWAT teams.

Fresno Police Chief Winchester says that the SWAT teams,
because of their training and style of assault, actually fire fewer
shots. "They overwhelm suspects," the chief said. "They don't
need to shoot."

Kraska's survey of police departments finds many SWAT
teams are instructed by active and retired U.S. military experts
in special operations. The SWAT teams also receive training
not only from the FBI, the Federal Law Enforcement Training
Center and National Tactical Officers Association, but in
classes organized by private companies.

One of the most popular courses is offered by Heckler and
Koch, which trains hundreds of SWAT officers a year. The
company also offers the units discounts on its popular
weapons, such as the MP5. Kraska points to the private
companies role in the encouragement of SWAT response
as part of a new "crime control industry."

Larry Glick, executive director of the National Tactical Officers
Association, said that some of the private training seminars are
taught by "retired military personnel who don't know what
they're doing." The training offered by Heckler and Koch is
"very successful and credible, among the best," he said.
"Their ultimate goal is to sell their guns."

Kraska and other police scholars said that even with the most
communitysensitive training, the new weaponry and
paramilitarystyle tactics of the SWAT units attract a different
kind of officer less the cop as social worker and more the
cop as an elite special `ops' soldier. And most SWAT officers
are paid a premium for the work.

"The SWAT teams love this stuff," Kraska said. "It's fun to fire
these weapons. It's exciting to train. They use `simmunition'
like the paint balls and play warrior games. This stuff is a rush."

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company