THE SWAT SYNDROME

Of all the excuses for weakening the Fourth Amendment, the weirdest
was the one offered by Justice Antonin Scalia last week in a Michigan
drug case.

He wrote the majority opinion allowing police officers to use
evidence found in a home even if they entered without following the
venerable rule to knock first and announce themselves. To reassure
traditionalists, Scalia declared that unreasonable searches are less
of a problem today because of "the increasing professionalism of
police forces."

Well, it's true that when police show up at your home in the middle
of the night, they're better armed and trained than ever. They now
routinely arrive with assault rifles, flash grenades and battering rams.

So if your definition of a professional is a soldier in a war zone,
then Scalia is right. The number of paramilitary raids has soared in
the past two decades as cities, suburbs and small towns have rushed
to assemble their very own SWAT teams.

Some police veterans complain about "militarizing Mayberry," and
can't figure out why towns averaging one homicide a decade need
paramilitary units. But younger cops like the glamour -- our very own
SWAT team, just like on TV! Who wants to patrol a beat when you could
be playing commando?

And who can resist free gear from Washington? Congress encouraged the
SWAT syndrome by directing the Pentagon to give local police
departments old machine guns, armed personnel carriers and
helicopters. The federal government has also helped subsidize drug
raids and encouraged locals to be aggressive by letting them keep a
cut of the drug dealers' assets.

The SWAT teams were originally supposed to deal with extraordinary
threats, like hostage situations, snipers and heavily armed drug
gangs. Since 9/11, of course, they've been justified for combating
terrorists. But such situations are so rare that the teams have had
to invent new missions to keep busy -- and to pay for their
operations by finding assets to seize.

Most of the time they're used simply to carry out searches for drugs,
often on the basis of dubious tips from informants, often against
small-time dealers and other people with no history of violence. The
commandos have a proclivity for going to the wrong address, and they
tend to be impatient with anything that gets in their way. In
articles about SWAT raids, a motif is the shooting of family pets in
front of children.

It's hard to know how many botched and unnecessary raids there have
been, because police don't systematically track their errors, and the
victims often have little recourse. But in a forthcoming report for
the Cato Institute, Radley Balko concludes that mistakes have been
made in more than 200 raids over the past decade.

He finds that overzealous raiders caused the deaths of a dozen
nonviolent offenders, like recreational marijuana smokers and
gamblers. In a Virginia suburb of Washington earlier this year, an
optometrist being investigated for betting on sports was standing
unarmed outside his town house, offering no resistance, when a SWAT
officer's rifle discharged and killed him.

Balko also finds that two dozen people died in raids who were not
guilty of any crime, like a Mexican immigrant killed by Denver police
raiding the wrong home. Some died because they understandably assumed
the masked invaders were criminals and picked up weapons to defend
themselves. Some were innocent bystanders, like an 11-year-old boy
shot in Modesto, Calif., and a 57-year-old woman in Harlem who had a
heart attack when police set off a flash grenade during a raid based
on a faulty tip.

"Prosecutors typically let police officers off the hook when they
mistakenly shoot a civilian," Balko says, "on the theory that
mistakes are understandable during the confusion of a raid. Fair
enough. But civilians don't get the same deference. My research shows
that when someone on the other end of a botched raid mistakes a
police officer for an intruder and shoots in self-defense, his odds
of facing jail time are about one in two."

The best way to avoid these mistakes would be to save SWAT teams for
real crises and let police execute search warrants the old-fashioned
way. They could find out, for instance, if they're at the wrong
address before anyone pulls the trigger.

But thanks to the Supreme Court, they now have less reason to knock
first and shoot later. They can be more professional than ever.