How to Rein in Overzealous SWAT Teams

Call it a severe case of mission creep. First, there was that February SWAT raid in Columbia, Missouri, when police decided to pepper the bodies of two family dogs full of bullets — in full view of the suspect's wife and young son. Then there was the case of the SWAT team that raided the wrong Georgia house, giving the 76-year-old woman inside a heart attack. More recently, there was the harrowing Detroit case of Aiyana Stanley Jones, in which a grenade-tossing team of police ended up killing the 7-year-old in a late-night raid.

What's going on? Police bashing down doorways en masse, brandishing guns before young kids — these aren't scenes that most people associate with U.S. law enforcement.  But as a new DRCNet feature reports, if U.S. voters aren't already paying attention to these under-the-radar headlines, they should be.

SWAT teams were first created to handle very specific cases: terrorist incidents, for example. Hostage situations. But the average shift doesn't see too many of those. So these days, SWAT teams are getting sent out to serve search warrants on routine cases, even those that hardly merit door-busting and anti-riot regalia. Though back in 1980, some 2,884 SWAT deployments occurred nationwide, today, that figure exceeds an estimated 50,000.

One state, though, is pushing back. And all it took to inspire change was a team of SWAT agents who erroneously busted into a local mayor's home.

Back in 2008, the Prince George's County, Maryland SWAT team was tracking a package containing marijuana. In the course of the operation in Berwyn Heights, though, the team ended up mistakenly rushing into Mayor Cheye Calvo's home, where they manhandled the mayor and his mother-in-law and proceeded to shoot and kill Calvo's two dogs.

That got some state legislators thinking. ("Gee, if the town mayor isn't safe from SWAT teams run amok, am I?") And last year, after listening to literally hours of testimony by victims like Calvo, Maryland legislators became the first in the nation to successfully push for more SWAT accountability. The bill they passed requires each agency with a SWAT team to annually lodge reports about their activities. (Not radical, right? But law enforcement opposed it anyway.)

"It's not just the number of raids, it's that 92% of them are for search warrants, not hostage situations or bank robberies or the like," Calvo says. "It's that two times out of three, they kick in the door."

Greater transparency is one major step for SWAT teams — oversight is crucial. Other important reforms include: only using SWAT teams when the threat level actually warrants it (i.e., don't use them to serve simple search warrants for nonviolent crimes), using better surveillance to figure out who's actually there and instituting appropriate command, control and supervision.

It's not just SWAT teams who are at issue here, though. When it comes to forceful entry, the use of flash-bang grenades and no-knock raids, it doesn't matter who's using them, whether they're part of a regular police unit or a SWAT team.

And either way, says criminologist David Klinger, formerly of the Los Angeles Police Department, the system has gotten out of control. "I don't know why they're shooting dogs," Klinger tells DRCNet. "Just take a fire extinguisher with you and zap the dog with it. Shooting dogs unnecessarily suggests a lack of training about how to discern what is and is not a threat."

Exactly.

Photo Credit: oregondot