[Ppnews] The Empire Turns Its Guns on the Citizenry

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

January 24, 2007


Your Local Police Force Has Been Militarized


The Empire Turns Its Guns on the Citizenry

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

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 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076152553X/counterpunchmaga>The 
Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: 
<mailto:PaulCraigRoberts at yahoo.com>PaulCraigRoberts at yahoo.com


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