SWAT raids threaten
our safety and civil liberties
RONALD FRASER, Home
News Tribune Online, September 22, 2006
You and your law-abiding neighbors in
New Jersey might be just one street address away from a life-threatening,
midnight raid by a local paramilitary police unit. As these so-called SWAT
squads increasingly become America's favored search warrant delivery service,
bungled raids — including many to the wrong address — have skyrocketed. In
these assaults on private property, scores of innocent citizens, police officers
and nonviolent offenders have died.
In a recent CATO Institute report titled "Overkill: The Rise of
Paramilitary Police Raids in America," Radley Balko describes how, "Over the
last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law
enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of
paramilitary police units for routine police work. The most common use of
SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced,
unannounced entry into the home."
These raids — as many as 40,000 per year — terrorize nonviolent drug offenders,
bystanders and wrongly targeted civilians who are awakened in the dead of night
as teams of heavily armed paramilitary units, dressed not as police officers but
as soldiers, invade their homes.
Botched N.J. raids
During 2005 — a very bad year for SWAT teams in New Jersey — Paterson police
stormed the home of Michelle Clancy at 5:30 a.m. with a drug warrant, breaking
off the doorknob on their way in. Clancy, her 65-year-old father and her
13-year-old daughter were home at the time. The police, having raided the
wrong apartment, later said, "These things do happen."
In Newark, police officers raided the home of 59-year-old Cedelle Pompee,
looking for drugs and guns only to discover that they were on the wrong street.
A Morris County paramilitary drug raid also went wrong. At 4:45 a.m.
officers erroneously assaulted the apartment of Fernando Lopez and held him at
gunpoint. When Lopez was finally allowed to see the warrant, he pointed
out that they had targeted the wrong apartment.
SWAT origins
Originally, Los Angeles officials formed the nation's first SWAT units in
response to civil riots and hostage-taking and bomb-toting radical groups in the
1960s. But by 1995, one study found, 89 percent of the nation's police
departments, including 65 percent of smaller towns in the 25,000 to 50,000
population range, had a paramilitary unit.
As the violence-prone '60s faded away, SWAT squads found a new lease on life in
the emerging tough-on-drugs culture of the 1970s. By 1995, serving
warrants, mostly in no-knock "drug raids," accounted for 75 percent of the
actions of the nation's SWAT squads.
Threats to liberty
These SWAT squads have become more and more of a threat to our civil liberties.
First, they depend on notoriously unreliable informants when picking raid
targets. Self-serving and ill-informed sources often send raids to wrong
addresses.
Second, SWAT teams trained by U.S. Army Ranger and Navy Seal units blur the line
between war and law enforcement. Citizens are then treated as if they are,
in fact, combatants.
Third, the use of military assault weapons and tactics — nighttime raids,
crashing through front doors and setting off stun grenades inside homes —
actually turn otherwise nonviolent situations into violent confrontations when
startled occupants try to arm and defend themselves.
Finally, by 1990 (the last year for which the information has been made public)
38 percent of all police departments, 51 percent of all sheriff departments and
94 percent of all state police departments in the United States received money
from the sale of boats, cars and other assets seized during drug raids.
This money is then used to outfit more SWAT teams for more asset-seizing raids —
a practice that serves as a license for SWAT teams to confiscate private
property for their own use.
To rein in out-of-control SWAT units, New Jersey's state and local governments
should limit the use of these squads to their original purposes, end corrupting
asset forfeiture policies and pass laws that safeguard families' rights to the
privacy and sanctity of their homes.
Ronald Fraser, Ph.D., writes on public policy issues for the
DKT Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization.
Write him at fraserr@erols.com.
|
