The Empire Turns Its Guns on the Citizenry, Militarized Police, Paul Craig Roberts

[align=left]The Empire Turns Its Guns on the Citizenry
Your Local Police Force Has Been Militarized [/align]
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | January 24, 2007
In recent years American police forces have called out SWAT teams 40,000 or
more times annually. Last year did you read in your newspaper or hear on TV
news of 110 hostage or terrorist events each day? No. What then were the
SWAT teams doing? They were serving routine warrants to people who posed no
danger to the police or to the public.
Occasionally Washington think tanks produce reports that are not special
pleading for donors. One such report is Radley Balko's "Overkill: The Rise
of Paramilitary Police Raids in America" (Cato Institute, 2006).
This 100-page report is extremely important and should have been published
as a book. SWAT teams (Special Weapons and Tactics) were once rare and used
only for very dangerous situations, often involving hostages held by armed
criminals. Today SWAT teams are deployed for routine police duties. In the
US today, 75-80% of SWAT deployments are for warrant service.
In a high percentage of the cases, the SWAT teams forcefully enter the wrong
address, resulting in death, injury, and trauma to perfectly innocent
people. Occasionally, highly keyed-up police kill one another in the
confusion caused by their stun grenades.
Mr. Balko reports that the use of paramilitary police units began in Los
Angeles in the 1960s. The militarization of local police forces got a big
boost from Attorney General Ed Meese's "war on drugs" during the Reagan
administration. A National Security Decision Directive was issued that
declared drugs to be a threat to US national security. In 1988 Congress
ordered the National Guard into the domestic drug war. In 1994 the
Department of Defense issued a memorandum authorizing the transfer of
military equipment and technology to state and local police, and Congress
created a program "to facilitate handing military gear over to civilian
police agencies."
Today 17,000 local police forces are equipped with such military equipment
as Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, grenade launchers, battering rams,
explosives, chemical sprays, body armor, night vision, rappelling gear and
armored vehicles. Some have tanks. In 1999, the New York Times reported that
a retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the newspaper, "I was
offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted." Balklo reports that in 1997,
for example, police departments received 1.2 million pieces of military
equipment.
With local police forces now armed beyond the standard of US heavy infantry,
police forces have been retrained "to vaporize, not Mirandize," to use a
phrase from Reagan administration defense official Lawrence Korb. This
leaves the public at the mercy of brutal actions based on bad police
information from paid informers.
SWAT team deployments received a huge boost from the Byrne Justice
Assistance Grant program, which gave states federal money for drug
enforcement. Balko explains that "the states then disbursed the money to
local police departments on the basis of each department's number of drug
arrests."
With financial incentives to maximize drug arrests and with idle SWAT teams
due to a paucity of hostage or other dangerous situations, local police
chiefs threw their SWAT teams into drug enforcement. In practice, this has
meant using SWAT teams to serve warrants on drug users.
SWAT teams serve warrants by breaking into homes and apartments at night
while people are sleeping, often using stun grenades and other devices to
disorient the occupants. As much of the police's drug information comes from
professional informers known as "snitches" who tip off police for cash
rewards, dropped charges, and reduced sentences, names and addresses are
often pulled out of a hat. Balko provides details for 135 tragic cases of
mistaken addresses.
SWAT teams are not held accountable for their tragic mistakes and gratuitous
brutality. Police killings got so bad in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for
example, that the city hired criminologist Sam Walker to conduct an
investigation of police tactics. Killings by police were "off the charts,"
Walker found, because the SWAT team "had an organizational culture that led
them to escalate situations upward rather then de-escalating."
The mind-set of militarized SWAT teams is geared to "taking out" or killing
the suspect-- thus, the many deaths from SWAT team utilization. Many
innocent people are killed in night time SWAT team entries, because they
don't realize that it is the police who have broken into their homes. They
believe they are confronted by dangerous criminals, and when they try to
defend themselves they are shot down by the police.
As Lawrence Stratton and I have reported, one of many corrupting influences
on the criminal justice (sic) system is the practice of paying "snitches" to
generate suspects. In 1995 the Boston Globe profiled people who lived
entirely off the fees that they were paid as police informants. Snitches
create suspects by selling a small amount of marijuana to a person who they
then report to the police as being in possession of drugs. Balko reports
that "an overwhelming number of mistaken raids take place because police
relied on information from confidential informants." In Raleigh-Durham,
North Carolina, 87% of drug raids originated in tips from snitches.
Many police informers are themselves drug dealers who avoid arrest and knock
off competitors by serving as police snitches.
Surveying the deplorable situation, the National Law Journal concluded:
"Criminals have been turned into instruments of law enforcement, while law
enforcement officers have become criminal co-conspirators."
Balko believes the problem could be reduced if judges scrutinized unreliable
information before issuing warrants. If judges would actually do their jobs,
there would be fewer innocent victims of SWAT brutality. However, as long as
the war on drugs persists and as long as it produces financial rewards to
police departments, local police forces, saturated with military weapons and
war imagery, will continue to terrorize American citizens.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan
administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial
page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The
Tyranny of Good Intentions.
Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate.