Rise of the Warrior Cop (38 page)

Yet as
Chicago Tribune
columnist Clarence Page pointed out, heavily armed INS SWAT teams had been breaking into private homes and businesses to snatch up nonviolent but undocumented immigrants for years, thanks to policies passed and funded by the Republican Congress, and with the full support of anti-immigration conservatives.
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Meanwhile, on the left, former Clinton solicitor general Walter Dellinger pointed out that
of course
SWAT teams like the one in the González photo look scary. That’s the whole point. “A great show of force can often avoid violence,” Dellinger said on ABC’s
This Week
. “It allowed [the INS agents] to get in and out in three minutes. . . . Look again at that iconographic picture and you will see that Mr. Dalrymple . . . is stunned by the officer in his display of a weapon. . . . His jaw goes slack, his arm loses its grip, and that avoided a physical tug-of-war.”
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Slate
writer Will Saletan explained that the INS agents were “heavily armed because Justice Department officials had heard there might be weapons in the house. They were wrong. But they weren’t reckless.”
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These are the very same justifications SWAT teams across the country give for conducting violent, heavily armed raids on people suspected of nonviolent drug crimes.

As police militarization began to creep beyond the drug war into other police actions in the 1990s, the country’s major political ideologies continued to react through the prism of partisan affiliation. When George W. Bush moved into the White House in 2001,
conservatives stopped caring about police heavy-handedness (though there were a few exceptions). Progressives then rose up to decry the raids on medical marijuana clinics and the disproportionate use of SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics against minority groups, on immigration raids, and at political protests.

Both sides were capable of righteous anger when the opposing party was in power and using big guns to enforce policies they found objectionable. And at the same time, both sides were more than willing to endorse the use of heavy-handed police tactics on their political opponents. It’s a trend that continues today, and further enables domestic police militarization to continue to flourish.

I
N
1989
A FRIEND ASKED
P
ETER
K
RASKA IF HE WANTED TO TAG
along for a US Coast Guard exercise on Lake Erie.
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Kraska is a criminologist at the University of Eastern Kentucky; his students describe him as demanding, whip-smart, and, in the words of one female student, “a strangely hot lumberjack.” He agreed to go along, mostly out of curiosity. While on that trip, Kraska learned that the Coast Guard worked closely with the US Navy on drug interdiction efforts. The Navy itself would intercept boats or ships that fit drug courier profiles, but would then have Coast Guard personnel on board to conduct the actual searches, seizures, and arrests. One Coast Guard officer flatly admitted to Kraska that the procedure was a way of getting around the Navy’s policy prohibiting its personnel from participating in civil police actions.

Kraska was both alarmed and intrigued. The experience started him down a road of scholarship focused on examining the ways in which the US military was increasingly being drawn into enforcing drug laws. In particular, Kraska began looking into indirect militarization: the rise of SWAT teams and other paramilitary police teams; what might be called the criminal-justice-industrial complex; and the increasing tendency of public officials to address social problems with martial rhetoric and imagery and to suggest military-like solutions,
from the “wars” on crime and drugs, to the heavy weaponry and vehicles that police were beginning to use, to the proposals that juvenile offenders be punished in “boot camps.” Kraska obtained funding to conduct two broad surveys of police departments on their use of SWAT teams. His resulting reports systematically documented a previously unheeded, two-decade insurgence of militarism into just about every city and county in America.

The numbers were staggering. By 1995, 89 percent of American cities with 50,000 or more people had at least one SWAT team, double the percentage from 1980. Among smaller cities (populations between 25,000 and 50,000), 65 percent had a SWAT team by 1995, a 157 percent increase over ten years. Nearly 20 percent of all police officers in these towns served on the SWAT team, a phenomenon that Kraska dubbed “the militarization of Mayberry.” By 1995, combining these figures for cities and towns, 77 percent of all American cities with over 25,000 people had a SWAT team.

Kraska then asked police departments that had maintained SWAT teams going back to the early 1980s to report how many times the teams had been deployed over the years, and for what reasons. Again, the numbers were jaw-dropping. In the early 1980s, the aggregate annual number of SWAT deployments was just under 3,000. By 1995 it was just under 30,000. In fifteen years, the number of annual SWAT team deployments in America had jumped by 937 percent. Some SWAT teams, Kraska found, were conducting up to 700 raids per year. What was precipitating the surge in SWAT activity? The drug war, almost exclusively.

Logan, Utah, is a typical example of the phenomenon. As of 2011, the city had just under 50,000 people, hadn’t had a murder in five years, and had recently been rated the “safest city in America.” Yet, since the mid-1980s, Logan has had its own SWAT team. What does a SWAT team do in a city with no violent crime? It creates violence out of nonviolent crime. “We haven’t really had a whole lot of barricaded subjects, and certainly we haven’t had an active gunman shooter,” a department spokesman told the local paper. But it was nice to have the SWAT team around just in case. In
the meantime, he said, it’s “mostly used for assistance on high-risk search warrants”—“high-risk” meaning all or most drug warrants. “We’ve destroyed some doors over the years that maybe wouldn’t have gotten destroyed if there wasn’t a SWAT team, but it’s all in the name of trying to make a high-risk situation more safe for everyone.”
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Some 43 percent of the police departments in Kraska’s survey told him they had used active-duty military personnel to train the SWAT team when it was first started, and 46 percent were training on a regular basis “with active-duty military experts in special operations,” usually the Army Rangers or Navy Seals. This was the goal of the joint task forces set up during the Bush administration—to encourage cooperation between local police, federal police, and the military in order to foster a battlefield approach to drug enforcement. In a follow-up interview, one department’s SWAT commander told Kraska:

We’ve had special forces folks who have come right out of the jungles of Central and South America. These guys get into the real shit. All branches of military service are involved in providing training to law enforcement. US Marshals act as liaisons between the police and military to set up the training—our go-between. . . . We’ve had teams of Navy Seals and Army Rangers come here and teach us everything. We just have to use our judgment and exclude the information like: “at this point we bring in the mortars and blow the place up.”
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The commander added that he had received a letter from a four-star general expressing concern about the sort of training the department was getting. Back in the 1850s, the Cushing Doctrine had allowed federal marshals to summon US troops to enforce domestic law. More than a hundred years after the controversial policy was repealed by the Posse Comitatus Act, federal marshals were now soliciting elite US military personnel again—not to enforce domestic law themselves, but to teach civilian police officers how to enforce the laws
as if they
were in the military.

Perhaps most disturbing was Kraska’s finding that these paramilitary police teams and aggressive tactics were increasingly being used even for regular patrols. By 1997, 20 percent of the departments he surveyed used SWAT teams or similar units for patrol, mostly in poor, high-crime areas. This was an increase of 257 percent since 1989.

SWAT proponents argued that all of this buildup was in response to a real problem—after all, violent crime had soared in the 1980s and early 1990s. But the SWAT teams weren’t generally responding to violent crime. They were usually serving drug warrants. When Kraska and colleague Louie Cubellis compared changes in violent crime rates to changes in the use of SWAT teams in the jurisdictions they surveyed, they found that only 6.63 percent of the rise in SWAT deployments could be explained by the rising crime rate.
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Kraska’s findings prompted a surge of media interest in the phenomenon of police militarization. The
New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, National Journal
, and ABC News all covered Kraska’s study—and also ran their own investigations into the issue. But nothing really changed. Politicians and policymakers didn’t seem to notice—or if they did, they didn’t much care. Kraska noted the fizzling out of the issue in a self-deprecating footnote in a book he edited a few years later. “What exactly all this media attention accomplished is not quite clear. It resulted in no fame, no money, and no appreciable difference in the phenomenon itself.”
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Of course, that wasn’t Kraska’s fault. Congress, state legislatures, and other politicians either weren’t paying attention or just didn’t find the reports particularly troubling.

In fact, the phenomenon only continued to pick up momentum. The year before Kraska’s reports were published, Congress had passed the National Defense Authorization Security Act of 1997, the biennial bill to fund the Pentagon. One provision in the bill created what is now usually called “the 1033 program,” named for the section of US Code assigned to it. The provision established the Law Enforcement Support Program, an agency headquartered in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Its mission? To further grease the pipeline through which hard-core military gear flows to civilian police agencies.

It certainly accomplished its mission. In its first three years, the office handled 3.4 million orders for Pentagon gear from 11,000 police agencies in all fifty states. By 2005, the number of police agencies serviced by the office hit 17,000.
National Journal
reported in 2000 that between 1997 and 1999 the office doled out $727 million worth of equipment, including 253 aircraft (notably, six- and seven-passenger airplanes and UH-60 Blackhawk and UH-1 Huey helicopters), 7,856 M-16 rifles, 181 grenade launchers, 8,131 bulletproof helmets, and 1,161 pairs of night-vision goggles.
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With all that military gear, plus the federal drug policing grants and asset forfeiture proceeds, just about anyone running a police department who wanted a SWAT team could now afford to start and fund one. And so the trend crept into smaller and smaller towns. By the mid-2000s, SWAT had come to Middleburg, Pennsylvania (population: 1,363); Leesburg, Florida (17,000); Mt. Orab, Ohio (2,701); Neenah, Wisconsin (24,507); Harwich, Massachusetts (11,000); and Butler, Missouri (4,201), among others. In research for his ethnography on militarization, Kraska spent a good deal of time with cops and SWAT teams in these smaller cities. One general dynamic he observed was a kind of masculinity-infused arms race between police agencies that could often lead to an inferiority complex at smaller departments. “These officers strongly believed that small municipalities and county police were being left behind by not having special tactical teams,” Kraska writes. Smaller departments may have started acquiring SWAT teams not because of a sudden surge in violence, or hostage takings, or even drug activity. The towns’ police departments simply saw that other police departments had them, so they wanted one too.

Neill Franklin, a former narcotics cop in Maryland, also witnessed the dynamic over the course of his career. “It’s almost like they would get their own high off the money and the equipment. And then the agencies would get competitive. If a city department had a SWAT team, the county wanted one. If one department upgraded to a more powerful gun, or got an APV, all the departments nearby
had to get the same thing.”
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Stephen Downing, who worked in the same LAPD patrol bureau as Daryl Gates while Gates was developing his SWAT idea, explains how the move to smaller police departments makes already dangerous SWAT raids even more perilous. “You’d have this ‘I want one too’ phenomenon,” Downing says. “And so the SWAT teams get bigger, and they start to spread. And standards would start to drop. You have to be very careful about who you put on the SWAT team. The guys who want it most are the last ones who should be given a spot. At LAPD, you were choosing from a force of nine thousand strong. You’re getting elite, disciplined officers, and the pool is big enough that you can screen them. For fitness and marksmanship and all the usual stuff. But also for attitude and psychology.”