SWAT AND THE DRUG WAR: LICENSE TO KILL

As of this morning, over 1.2 million people have clicked on the
YouTube video of the February 11 SWAT raid on a suspected drug
dealer's home in a quiet suburban neighborhood of Columbia, Missouri.
Produced by the police themselves, the video went viral soon after it
was posted earlier this month.

It's a fair guess that many of those clicks represent individuals who,
revolted by what they saw and heard (gunshots, the screaming of a
wounded dog), abruptly stopped viewing the video. What happened to
that Missouri family, a terrifying police paramilitary attack that
left two dogs shot, one dead, and a couple and their seven-year-old
boy in shock, is an all-too common occurrence across the country. It
is also profoundly un-American.

As Radley Balko writes in "Overkill: the Rise of Paramilitary Police
Raids in America," his excellent 2006 Cato Institute report, "These
increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are
needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly
targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while
they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units
dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring
unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many
of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors."

People die in these raids: grandmothers, children, family pets,
suspected drug dealers, police officers. And for what? A pipe, a bud
grinder, a small quantity of weed? Which is what the Columbia cops
recovered from the raid on 25-year-old Jonathan Whitworth's home in
Columbia.

I was a young cop in the San Diego Police Department when in 1967 an
LAPD officer by the name of John Nelson suggested that the LAPD create
a SWAT unit. His boss, then Inspector Daryl Gates, much beloved by his
troops, much behated by civil libertarians, signed off on the
proposal. It made sense. Nowhere in the country did basic police
academy training prepare us beat cops for certain of the situations we
were bound to face.

In a report prepared after the legendary shootout with members of the
Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, LAPD officials listed the four
reasons why they'd formed 15 four-officer Special Weapons and Tactics
teams: (1) riots (Watts was still fresh in their minds), (2) the
emergence of snipers, as well as (3) political assassinations, and (4)
"urban guerilla warfare by militant groups" (think Panthers of
yesteryear, rightwing militias of this era).

Notice there's no mention of the most vital and valuable uses of SWAT,
namely taking down barricaded, hostage-seizing suspects in bank
robberies, domestic violence calls, workplace and school rampages,
terrorist attacks.

Nor is there a single mention in that LAPD document of what has become
the most common reason to call out SWAT: a snitch-manufactured case of
suspected drug trafficking. The cops in Columbia had been told by
their informant that 25-year-old Jonathan Whitworth had a "dealer's
supply" of pot in his home. (For a follow up on what that night was
like for this one American family, read Balko's May 11 account.)

From Richard Nixon's presidency to Barack Obama's, the federal
government has led and promoted a holy war against its own people. I've
written often in this space on the long list of harms caused by U.S.-led
War on Drugs: a trillion dollars squandered since Nixon's famous
declaration of war, tens of millions of Americans incarcerated for
nonviolent drug offenses, otherwise innocent lives brought to ruin,
civil liberties trampled, individuals, neighborhoods, and whole
countries rendered unsafe, environmental devastation, economic and
political destabilization of foreign nations, and on and on.

Since 9/11, "homeland security" dollars, billions upon billions of
them, have found their way from the federal government to local
jurisdictions whose police agencies have fallen all over themselves to
create SWAT units, even in the tiniest of rural communities. And to
use our tax money in the service of paramilitary raids on the
residences of suspected drug traffickers.

Some questions about this practice, and the expenditure of these tax
dollars:

* How many of these raids are predicated on useless, misleading
intelligence, proffered by an informant with an axe to grind or a
criminal charge to mitigate?

* How many are carried out with children or innocent others in the
residence at the time of the raid?

* How many such raids are truly necessary?

The problem is not SWAT per se. SWAT is at its finest when it is
staffed by rigorously selected, vigorously trained, mature and
disciplined personnel whose narrow mission is to save, not needlessly
threaten lives. There's nothing like a well-oiled entry team or a
sharp-shooting sniper--or a superb hostage negotiator--when the
situation demands it.

SWAT members in the San Diego and Seattle police departments, the two
agencies I'm most familiar with, have long prided themselves in
rescuing hostages, and only very rarely being forced to take the life
of an armed perpetrator. But even in these two cities, the most common
SWAT mission is "high-risk warrant service." That's code for a drug
raid.

As long as this country--its electorate, its political
leaders--remains addicted to current drug laws, the police will have
to enforce those laws. But where is it written that they must show up
in the dead of night, armed and armored, in order to do so? What's
wrong with reliable intelligence, expert surveillance, a traffic stop
at three in the afternoon, a court-authorized search of an empty house?