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The
Empire Turns Its Guns On The Citizenry
By
Paul Craig Roberts
1-29-7
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
U.S.
today, 75-80 percent 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
U.S.
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
,
Conn.
, told the newspaper, "I was offered tanks, bazookas,
anything I wanted." Balko 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
U.S.
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
,
N.M.
, 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
mindset 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
nighttime 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 whom 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 percent 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.
Link:
http://rense.com/general75/emp.htm
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