The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments by Diane Cecilia Weber
Introduction http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/The_Law/paramilitarism_in_p olice2.htm
One of the most alarming side effects of the federal government's war on drugs is the militarization of law enforcement in America. There are two aspects to the militarization phenomenon. First, the American tradition of civil-military separation is breaking down as Congress assigns more and more law enforcement responsibilities to the armed forces. Second, state and local police officers are increasingly emulating the war-fighting tactics of soldiers. Most Americans are unaware of the militarization phenomenon simply because it has been creeping along imperceptibly for many years.
To get perspective, it will be useful to consider some recent events:
The U.S. military played a role in the Waco incident. In preparation for their disastrous 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound, federal law enforcement agents were trained by Army Special Forces at Fort Hood,
Texas. And Delta Force commanders would later advise Attorney General
Janet Reno to insert gas into the compound to end the 51-day siege. Waco resulted in the largest number of civilian deaths ever arising from a law enforcement operation.1

Between 1995 and 1997 the Department of Defense gave police departments 1.2 million pieces of military hardware, including 73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers. The Los Angeles Police
Department has acquired 600 Army surplus M-16s. Even small-town police departments are getting into the act. The seven-officer department in
Jasper, Florida, is now equipped with fully automatic M-16s.2
In 1996 President Bill Clinton appointed a military commander, Gen. Barry
R. McCaffrey, to oversee enforcement of the federal drug laws as the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.3
Since the mid-1990s U.S. Special Forces have been going after drug dealers in foreign countries. According to the U.S. Southern Command,
American soldiers occupy three radar sites in Colombia to help monitor drug flights. And Navy SEALs have assisted in drug interdiction in the port city of Cap-Haitien, Haiti.4
The U.S. Marine Corps is now patrolling the Mexican border to keep drugs and illegal immigrants out of this country. In 1997 a Marine anti-drug patrol shot and killed 18-year-old Esequiel Hernandez as he was tending his family's herd of goats on private property. The Justice Department settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the Hernandez family for $1.9 million.5
In 1998 Indiana National Guard Engineering Units razed 42 crack houses in and around the city of Gary. The National Guard has also been deployed in

Washington, D.C., to drive drug dealers out of certain locations.6
In 1999 the Pentagon asked President Clinton to appoint a "military leader" for the continental United States in the event of a terrorist attack on
American soil. The powers that would be wielded by such a military commander were not made clear. 7
What is clear — and disquieting — is that the lines that have traditionally separated the military mission from the police mission are getting badly blurred. Over the last 20 years Congress has encouraged the U.S. military to supply intelligence, equipment, and training to civilian police. That encouragement has spawned a culture of paramilitarism in American police departments. By virtue of their training and specialized armament, state and local police officers are adopting the tactics and mindset of their military mentors. The problem is that the actions and values of the police officer are distinctly different from those of the warrior. The job of a police officer is to keep the peace, but not by just any means. Police officers are expected to apprehend suspected law breakers while adhering to constitutional procedures. They are expected to use minimum force and to deliver suspects to a court of law. The soldier, on the other hand, is an instrument of war. In boot camp, recruits are trained to inflict maximum damage on enemy personnel. Confusing the police function with the military function can have dangerous consequences. As Albuquerque police chief Jerry Glavin has noted, "If [cops] have a mindset that the goal is to take out a citizen, it will happen."8

The lines that have traditionally separated the military mission from the police mission are getting badly blurred. Paramilitarism threatens civil liberties, constitutional norms, and the well-being of all citizens. Thus, the use of paramilitary tactics in everyday police work should alarm people of goodwill from across the political spectrum.
This paper will examine the militarization of law enforcement at the local level, with particular emphasis on SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) units. The paper will conclude that the special skills of SWAT personnel and their military armaments are necessary only in extraordinary circumstances.
The deployment of such units should therefore be infrequent.More generally, Congress should recognize that soldiers and police officers perform different functions. Federal lawmakers should discourage the culture of paramilitarism in police departments by keeping the military out of civilian law enforcement.
A Brief History of the Relationship between the Military and
Civilian Law Enforcement
The use of British troops to enforce unpopular laws in the American colonies helped to convince the colonists that King George III and
Parliament were intent on establishing tyranny.9
The Declaration of Independence specifically refers to those practices, castigating King George for "quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops

among us" and for "protecting [soldiers], by mock Trial, from Punishment, for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these
States." The colonists complained that the king "has kept among us, in
Times of peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of, and superior to, the
Civil Power."
After the Revolutionary War, Americans were determined to protect themselves against the threat of an overbearing military. The Founders inserted several safeguards into the Constitution to ensure that the civilian powers of the new republic would remain distinct from, and superior to, the military:
The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War . . . To raise and support Armies . . . To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and Naval Forces . . . To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia.10
No State shall, without the consent of Congress, . . . keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, . . . or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.11
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the
United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.12
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the

right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.13
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.14
It is important to emphasize that those provisions were not considered controversial.3 The debate was only with respect to whether those constitutional safeguards would prove adequate. 15
After the Revolutionary War, Americans were determined to protect themselves against the threat of an overbearing military..
During the Civil War period the principle of civil-military separation broke down. President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and citizens were arrested and tried before military tribunals.
After the Civil War, Congress imposed martial law in the rebel states. And to shield the military's reconstruction policies from constitutional challenges, Congress barred the Supreme Court from jurisdiction over federal appellate court rulings involving postwar reconstruction controversies.17
The Army enforced an array of laws in the South and, not surprisingly, became politically meddlesome. In several states the Army interfered with local elections and state political machinery. Such interference during the presidential election of 1876 provoked a political firestorm.18

The Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote while the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, garnered more electoral votes. The Republican victory was tainted by accusations that federal troops had stuffed the ballot box in a few southern states to favor Hayes.
Negotiations between the political parties ensued and a compromise was reached. The Democrats agreed to concede the election to "Rutherfraud"
Hayes (as disgruntled partisans nicknamed him) on the condition that federal troops be withdrawn from the South.19
The Republicans agreed.
The Army's machinations in the South also set the stage for a landmark piece of legislation, the Posse Comitatus Act.20
The one-sentence law provided, "Whoever, except in cases and under such circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or by Act of
Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined no more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."21
Southern Democrats proposed the Posse Comitatus bill in an effort to get
Congress to reaffirm, by law, the principle of civil-military separation.
President Hayes signed that bill into law in June 1878. Federal troops have occasionally played a role in quelling civil disorder — without prior congressional authorization — in spite of the plain terms of the Posse
Comitatus Act. The U.S. Army, for example, was used to restore order in industrial disputes in the late 19th and early 20th century. Except for the

illegal occupation of the Coeur d'Alene mining region in Idaho in 1899-
1901, army troops were used by presidents to accomplish specific and temporary objectives — after which they were immediately withdrawn.22
Federal troops and federalized National Guardsmen were called upon to enforce the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957; in
Oxford, Mississippi, in 1962; and in Selma, Alabama, in 1963.
Over the past 20 years there has been a dramatic expansion of the role of the military in law enforcement activity. In 1981 Congress passed the
Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act.23
That law amended the Posse Comitatus Act insofar as it authorized the military to "assist" civilian police in the enforcement of drug laws. The act encouraged the military to (a) make available equipment, military bases, and research facilities to federal, state, and local police; (b) train and advise civilian police on the use of the equipment; and (c) assist law enforcement personnel in keeping drugs from entering the country. The act also authorized the military to share information acquired during military operations with civilian law enforcement agencies.
As the drug war escalated throughout the 1980s, the military was drawn further and further into the prohibition effort by a series of executive and congressional initiatives: In 1986 President Ronald Reagan issued a
National Decision Security Directive designating drugs as an official threat to "national security," which encouraged a tight-knit relationship between

civilian [police and the military].4
As the drug war escalated throughout the 1980s, the military was drawn further and further into the prohibition effort..law enforcement and the military.24
In 1987 Congress set up an administrative apparatus to facilitate transactions between civilian law enforcement officials and the military. For example, a special office with an 800 number was established to handle inquiries by police officials regarding acquisition of military hardware.25
In 1988 Congress directed the National Guard to assist law enforcement agencies in counter-drug operations. Today National Guard units in all 50 states fly across America's landscape in dark green helicopters, wearing camouflage uniforms and armed with machine guns, in search of marijuana fields.26
In 1989 President George Bush created six regional joint task forces (JTFs) within the Department of Defense.
Those task forces are charged with coordinating the activities of the military and police agencies in the drug war, including joint training of military units and civilian police. JTFs can be called on by civilian law enforcement agencies in counter-drug cases when police feel the need for military reinforcement.27
In 1994 the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense signed a memorandum of understanding, which has enabled the military to

transfer technology to state and local police departments. Civilian officers now have at their disposal an array of high-tech military items previously reserved for use during wartime.28
All of those measures have resulted in the militarization of a wide range of activity in the United States that had been previously considered the domain of civilian law enforcement. As one reporter has observed, "Not since federal troops were deployed to the former Confederate states during
Reconstruction has the U.S. military been so intimately involved in civilian law enforcement."29
The Militarization of the Police Department
Not only is the military directly involved in law enforcement; police departments are increasingly emulating the tactics of the armed forces in their everyday activities. This aspect of the militarization phenomenon has gone largely unnoticed.
The Early American Police Force
In one sense, the paramilitarism in today's police departments is a consequence of the increasing professionalism of police in the 20th century. Professionalism essentially grants a monopoly of specialized knowledge, training, and practice to certain groups in exchange for a commitment to a public service ideal. While that may sound desirable for law enforcement officers, the effects of professionalism have, in many respects, been negative. Over the last century police departments have

evolved into increasingly centralized, authoritarian, autonomous, and militarized bureaucracies, which has led to their isolation from the citizenry.
Early police departments were anything but professional. Officers were basically political appointees, with ties to ward bosses. Officers also had strong cultural roots in the neighborhoods they patrolled. Police work was more akin to social work, as jails provided overnight lodging and soup kitchens for tramps, lost children, and other destitute individuals.
Discipline was practically nonexistent, and law enforcement was characterized by an arbitrary, informal process that is sometimes dubbed
"curbside justice." Barely trained and equipped, police aimed at regulating rather than preventing crime, which, in the previous century, meant something closer to policing vice and cultural lifestyles.
On the positive side, the early police forces were well integrated into their communities, often solving crimes by simply chatting with people on the street corners. On the negative side, the police were suspicious of and often hostile to strangers ....immigrants, and, having strong loyalties to the local political machine, they were susceptible to bribery and political influence. 5
Police departments have evolved into increasingly centralized, authoritarian, autonomous, and militarized bureaucracies. Throughout the
19th century police work was considered casual labor, making it difficult for either municipalities or precinct captains to impose any uniform standards on patrolmen. Police did not consider themselves a self-contained body of

law officers set apart from the general populace.
The initial round of professionalization took place during the Progressive
Era with the appearance of early police literature, fraternal organizations, and rudimentary recruitment standards — all of which suggest the emergence of a common occupational self-consciousness. Internal and external pressures forced the depoliticization and restructuring of police departments, which gradually reformed into centralized, depersonalized, hierarchical bureaucracies. To gain control of the rank and file, police chiefs assigned military ranks and insignia to personnel, and some departments required military drills. "Military methods have been adopted and military discipline enforced," wrote Philadelphia police superintendent James
Robinson in his department's 1912 annual report.30
A wave of police unionism from 1917 to 1920 was a strong indication that police not only were acquiring a shared occupational outlook but had come to regard policing as a full-time career. Two events, however, signaled the break-away of police from their communities and into their modern professional enclave. In 1905 the first truly modern state police force was formed in Pennsylvania. Ostensibly created to control crime in rural areas, the Pennsylvania State Police was used mainly in labor disputes, since the state militias and local police (who were more likely to sympathize with strikers) had been ineffective. That centralized organization, under one commander appointed by the governor, recruited members from across the state so that no more than a handful of officers had roots in any single community. This new force was considered so militaristic that the

Pennsylvania Federation of Labor referred to it as "Cossacks." Despite the misgivings of many people, Pennsylvania started a trend. Other states began to emulate Pennsylvania's state police force.
The other significant event was J. Edgar Hoover's directorship of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. By raising standards of training and recruitment, Hoover rescued federal law enforcement from its former state of corruption and mismanagement. Hoover imbued his agents with a moral zeal to fight crime, and in 1935 he opened the National Police Academy, which has exerted tremendous influence on police training generally.31
Hoover's FBI acquired a prestige that made it the model police organization
Elite SWAT Units Created
There is agreement in police literature that the incident that inspired the
SWAT concept occurred in 1966. In August of that year a deranged man climbed to the top of the 32-story clock tower at the University of Texas in
Austin. For 90 minutes he randomly shot 46 people, killing 15 of them, until two police officers got to the top of the tower and killed him. The
Austin episode was so blatant that it "shattered the last myth of safety
Americans enjoyed [and] was the final impetus the chiefs of police needed"
32 to form their own SWAT teams. Shortly thereafter, the Los Angeles
Police Department formed the first SWAT team and, it is said, originated the acronym SWAT to describe its elite force. The Los Angeles SWAT unit acquired national prestige when it was used successfully against the Black
Panthers in 1969 and the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1973.

Much like the FBI, the modern SWAT team was born of public fear and the perception by police that crime had reached such proportions and criminals had become so invincible that more armament and more training were needed. SWAT team members have come to consider themselves members of an elite unit with specialized skills and more of a military ethos than the normal police structure.
Another striking similarity with the FBI is that that SWAT units have gained their status and legitimacy in the public eye by their performance in a few sensational events.
The earliest SWAT teams consisted of small units that could be called into action to deal with difficult situations, such as incidents involving hostages, barricaded suspects, or hijackers. Early SWAT team members were not unlike regular police officers and were only slightly better equipped.
SWAT Teams Everywhere, Doing Everything
The 1980s and 1990s saw marked changes in the number of permanent
SWAT teams across the country, in their mission and deployment, and in their tactical armament. According to a 1997 study of SWAT teams conducted by Peter Kraska and Victor Kappeler of Eastern Kentucky
University, nearly 90 percent of the police departments surveyed in cities with populations over 50,000 had paramilitary units, as did 70 percent of the departments surveyed in communities with populations under 50,000.
33

Although the proliferation of those special units was slow in the late 1960s and early 1970s, their numbers took a leap in the mid-1970s, and growth has remained high since the 1980s. In fact, most SWAT teams have been created in the 1980s and 1990s. Towns like Jasper, Lakeland, and Palm
Beach, Florida; Lakewood, New Jersey; Chapel Hill, North Carolina;
Charlottesville, Virginia; and Harwich, Massachusetts, have SWAT teams.
The campus police at the University of Central Florida have a SWAT unit — even though the county SWAT team is available.
Kraska refers to the proliferation as the "militarization of Mayberry," and he is rightly alarmed that the special units are becoming a normal and permanent part of law enforcement agencies.
Under the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act,
Congress directed the military to make equipment and facilities available to civilian police in the anti-drug effort. As a result, police departments began to acquire more sophisticated tactical equipment: automatic weapons with laser sights and sound suppressors, surveillance equipment such as Laser
Bugs that can detect sounds inside a building by bouncing a laser beam off a window, pinhole cameras, flash and noise grenades, rubber bullets, bullet-proof apparel, battering rams, and more. The Boone County Sheriff's office in Indiana has acquired an amphibious armored personnel carrier.34
In Fresno, California, the SWAT unit has access to two helicopters equipped with night vision goggles and an armored personnel carrier with a

turret.35
According to Cal Black, a former SWAT commander for the FBI, "The equipment SWAT teams use today is many times more sophisticated than it was when I began in SWAT in the 1970s. . . . Because of this high-tech equipment, the ability of SWAT teams has increased dramatically."36
The National Institute of Justice report on the DOJ-DOD technology
"partnership" boasted a number of high-tech items that SWAT teams now have at their disposal. Included among the showcase military technologies deemed applicable to law enforcement were "inconspicuous systems that can detect from more than 30 feet away weapons with little or no metal content as well as those made of metal."37
Other items in the pipeline include "a gas-launched, wireless, electric stun projectile"; a "vehicular laser surveillance and dazzler system";
"pyrotechnic devices such as flash-bang grenades [and] smoke grenades"; instruments of "crowd control"; mobile, even hand-held, systems to locate gunfire; and tagging equipment to locate, identify, and monitor the
"movement of individuals, vehicles and containers."38
Special body armor and helmets are also under consideration.
Nick Pastore, former police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, says: "I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted. . . . I turned it all down because it feeds a mindset that you're not a police officer serving a community, you're a soldier at war."39,7

The 1980s and 1990s saw marked changes in the number of permanent
SWAT teams across the country, in their mission and deployment, and in their tactical armament..An even more disturbing development reported in the Kraska-Kappeler study, however, is the growing tendency of police departments to use SWAT units in routine policing activity. The Fresno
SWAT unit, for example, sends its 40-person team, with full military dress and gear, into the inner city "war zone" to deal with problems of drugs, gangs, and crime. One survey respondent described his department's use of SWAT teams in the following way: "We're into saturation patrols in hot spots. We do a lot of our work with the SWAT unit because we have bigger guns. We send out two, two-to-four- men cars, we look for minor violations and do jump-outs, either on people on the street or automobiles. After we jump-out the second car provides periphery cover with an ostentatious display of weaponry. We're sending a clear message: if the shootings don't stop, we'll shoot someone." 40
A Midwestern community with a population of 75,000 sends out patrols dressed in tactical uniform in a military personnel carrier. The armored vehicle, according to the SWAT commander, stops "suspicious vehicles and people. We stop anything that moves. We'll sometimes even surround suspicious homes and bring out the MP5s (machine gun pistols)." 41
Unfortunately, it is likely that the number of SWAT "patrols" will rise in the future. In their survey, when Kraska and Kappeler asked the question, Is your department using the tactical operations unit as a proactive patrol unit to aid high crime areas? 107 departments indicated that they were. Sixty-

one percent of all respondents thought it was a good idea. In fact, 63 percent of the departments in that survey agreed that SWAT units "play an important role in community policing strategies."42
According to Police magazine, "Police officers working in patrol vehicles, dressed in urban tactical gear and armed with automatic weapons are here
— and they're here to stay."43
Limiting the SWAT Mission to Bona Fide Emergencies
The relatively recent phenomenon of special, commando-type units within civilian law enforcement agencies is occurring on both sides of the Atlantic.
The British counterpart to the SWAT team in America is the Police Support
Unit (PSU). In 1993 the British Journal of Criminology published opposing views on British paramilitarism by P. A. J. Waddington and Anthony
Jefferson. Both scholars agreed that public order policing in Britain by PSUs was becoming paramilitaristic, but they could not agree on a precise definition of "paramilitarism."
While Jefferson defined paramilitarism as "the application of quasi-military training, equipment, philosophy and organization to questions of policing,"
Waddington confined paramilitarism to police methods of riot control, namely, "the coordination and integration of all officers deployed as squads under centralised command and control."44
A third scholar, Alice Hills, has sought the middle ground, rounding off the differences by looking at paramilitary forces of other countries, such as the

French Gendarmerie, the Italian Carabiniere, the Frontier Guards in
Finland, Civil Defense Units in Saudi Arabia, and the National Security
Guards in India. By Hills's reckoning, paramilitarism should "be defined in terms of function . . . and relationships; of the police to the military and to the state, as well as to the legal system and style of political process."45
In general, however, as has been the case in this country, British studies have largely "neglected . . . the relationship of the police to the other uniformed services, particularly the army, in the late twentieth century."46
What is disturbing is that under any of the definitions offered by the British analysts, American SWAT teams can be regarded as paramilitary units. The institutional cooperation between civilian law enforcement and the military has emerged under the direct political sponsorship of elected leaders in the national legislature and the presidency. (In 1981 Congress diluted the
Posse Comitatus Act — a law that was designed to keep the military out of civilian affairs — in order to give the military an active role in the war on drugs, and that role has been expanded by subsequent congressional action and by the support of presidents of both political parties.)8
A disturbing development is the growing tendency of police departments to use SWAT units in routine policing activity.. The military-law enforcement connection is now a basic assumption within the federal government, and it receives enthusiastic support in government literature. For example, in a
1997 National Institute of Justice report on the transfer of military technology to civilian police departments, the Joint Program Steering Group

explained the "convergence in the technology needs of the law enforcement and military communities" as due to their "common missions." In the military's newest
"peacekeeping" role abroad, it is obliged — much as civilian police — to be
"highly discreet when applying force," given the "greater presence of members of the media or other civilians who are observing, if not recording, the situation."47
Moreover, the military's enemy abroad has begun to resemble law enforcement's enemy at home: "Law officers today confront threats that have more and more military aspects" due to the changed "nature of criminals and their crimes." 48
With widespread political sanction, the military is now encouraged to share training, equipment, technology — and, most subtle, mentality — with state and local civilian police. SWAT team members undergo rigorous training similar to that given military special operations units. Training, as one study has noted, "may seem to be a purely technical exercise, [but] it actually plays a central role in paramilitary subculture" 49 and moreover reinforces "the importance of feeling and thinking as a team."50
The research of Kraska and Kappeler revealed that SWAT units are often trained alongside, or with the support of, military special forces personnel.
Of 459 SWAT teams across the country, 46 percent acquired their initial training from "police officers with special operations experience in the military," and 43 percent with "active-duty military experts in special

operations." 51
Almost 46 percent currently conducted training exercises with "active-duty military experts in special operations." 52
Twenty-three respondents to the survey indicated that they trained with either Navy SEALs or Army Rangers.53
One respondent went into greater detail:
"We've had special forces folks who have come right out of the jungles of
Central and South America. . . . All branches of military service are involved in providing training to law enforcement. U.S. Marshals act as liaisons between the police and military to set up the training — our go-between.
They have an arrangement with the military through JTF-6 [Joint Task
Force 6]. . . . I just received a piece of paper from a four-star general who tells us he's concerned about the type of training we're getting. We've had teams of Navy Seals and Special Forces 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."54
Because of their close collaboration with the military, SWAT units are taking on the warrior mentality of our military's special forces. SWAT team organization resembles that of a special combat unit, with a commander, a tactical team leader, a scout, a rear guard or "defenseman," a marksman
(sniper), a spotter, a gasman, and paramedics.
Moreover, SWAT teams, like military special forces, are elite units: Their

rigorous team training; high-tech armament; and "battle dress uniforms," consisting of lace-up combat boots, full body armor, Kevlar helmets, and goggles with "ninja" style hoods, reinforce their elitism within law enforcement agencies. (One commander — who disapproved of proactive
SWAT policing and turned down requests from team members to dress in black battle dress uniforms while on patrol — nevertheless understood its attraction to team members: "I can't blame them, we're a very elite unit, they just want to be distinguishable."55)
Because of their close collaboration with the military, SWAT units are taking on the warrior mentality of our military's special forces. The socalled war on drugs and other martial metaphors are turning high-crime areas into "war zones," citizens into potential enemies, and police officers into soldiers. Preparing the ground for the 1994 technology transfer agreement between the Department of Defense and the Department of
Justice, Attorney General Reno addressed the defense and intelligence community. In her speech, Reno compared the drug war to the Cold War, and the armed and dangerous enemies abroad to those at home: "So let me welcome you to the kind of war our police fight every day. And let me challenge you to turn your skills that served us so well in the Cold War to helping us with the war we're now fighting daily in the streets of our towns and cities across the Nation."56
The martial rhetoric can be found in both political parties. Bill McCollum (R-
Fla.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime of the House Judiciary
Committee, has criticized the Clinton administration for not waging the war

on drugs aggressively enough: "The drug crisis is a top — if not the top — national security threat facing our nation today . . . [the Clinton] administration's clear unwillingness to wage an all-out drug war cannot go unchallenged."57
In the current political climate, anyone who does not support an escalation of the drug war is condemned for being "soft on crime."58
Departmental SWAT teams have accepted the military as a model for their behavior and outlook, which is distinctly impersonal and elitist; American streets are viewed as the "front" and American citizens as the "enemy."
The sharing of training and technology by the military and law enforcement agencies has produced a shared mindset, and the mindset of the warrior is simply not appropriate for the civilian police officer charged with enforcing the law. The soldier confronts an enemy in a life-or-death situation. The soldier learns to use lethal force on the enemy, both uniformed and civilian, irrespective of age or gender. The soldier must sometimes follow orders unthinkingly, acts in concert with his comrades, and initiates violence on command. That mentality, with which new recruits are strenuously indoctrinated in boot camp, can be a matter of survival to the soldier and the nation at war.
The civilian law enforcement officer, on the other hand, confronts not an
"enemy" but individuals who, like him, are both subject to the nation's laws and protected by the Bill of Rights. Although the police officer can use force in life-threatening situations, the Constitution and numerous Supreme

Court rulings have circumscribed the police officer's direct use of force, as well as his power of search and seizure.59
In terms of violence, the police officer's role is — or should be — purely reactive. When a police officer begins to think like a soldier, tragic consequences — such as the loss of innocent life at Waco — will result.
After some controversial SWAT shootings spawned several wrongful death lawsuits against the police department of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the city hired Professor Sam Walker of the University of Nebraska to study its departmental practices. According to Walker: "The rate of killings by the police was just off the charts. . . . They had an organizational culture that led them to escalate situations upward rather than deescalating.The mindset of the warrior is simply not appropriate for the civilian police officer charged with enforcing the law..61"60
The city of Albuquerque subsequently hired a new police chief and dismantled its SWAT unit. The tiny town of Dinuba, California (population
15,000), created a SWAT unit in the spring of 1997. A few months later an innocent man, Ramon Gallardo, was killed by the SWAT team when it raided his home looking for one of his teenage sons. The SWAT unit rushed into the Gallardo household at 7 a.m. wearing hoods and masks, yelling "search warrant." Gallardo and his wife were awakened by the ruckus, but before they could determine what was happening, Ramon was shot 15 times. 10
A police brutality lawsuit was later brought against the city. At trial, the

police said they had to shoot in self-defense because Gallardo had grabbed a knife. Gallardo's wife testified that the knife on the scene did not belong to her husband and alleged that the police had planted it there to legitimize the shooting. The jury awarded the Gallardo family $12.5 million. Because the whopping verdict exceeded the small town's insurance coverage, the city is now in financial straits. After Gallardo's killing, the city fathers of
Dinuba disbanded the SWAT unit and gave its military equipment to another police department.62
Some local jurisdictions may wish to retain SWAT units for the special skills they possess, but the deployment of such units should be limited to extraordinary circumstances — such as a hostage situation. If a SWAT unit is created (or retained), the need for that unit should be assessed annually by locally elected officials. Policymakers must be especially wary of "mission creep" and guard against it. Inactive SWAT teams have a strong incentive to expand their original "emergency" mission into more routine policing activities to justify their existence.
In recent years, city officials in Dallas and Seattle have curtailed the activity of their SWAT units, taking them off drug raids and suicide calls. Other cities should follow their lead by curtailing the SWAT mission — or even dismantling the entire unit as was done in Albuquerque and Dinuba.
Conclusion
The militarization of law enforcement in America is a deeply disturbing development. Police officers are not supposed to be warriors. The job of a

police officer is to keep the peace while adhering to constitutional procedures. Soldiers, on the other hand, consider enemy personnel human targets. Confusing the police function with the military function can lead to dangerous and unintended consequences — such as unnecessary shootings and killings. The proliferation of SWAT teams is particularly worrisome because such units are rarely needed. SWAT teams are created to deal with emergency situations that are beyond the capacity of the ordinary street cop. But, as time passes, inactive SWAT units tend to jettison their original, limited mission for more routine policing activities.
Local jurisdictions should carefully assess the need for SWAT units and guard against the danger of mission creep. SWAT teams do possess specialized skills, but they should only be deployed on those extraordinary occasions when their skills are necessary — such as a hostage situation.
More generally, Congress should recognize that federal policies have contributed to the culture of paramilitarism that currently pervades many local police departments by restoring the traditional American principle of civil-military separation embodied in the Posse Comitatus Act. The Military
Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act created a dangerous loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act. That loophole should be closed immediately. Congress should also abolish all military-civilian law enforcement joint task forces and see to it that all military hardware loaned, given, or sold to law enforcement agencies is destroyed or returned.

Armored personnel carriers and machine guns, should not be a part of everyday law enforcement in a free society.
Diane Cecilia Weber is a Virginia writer on law enforcement and criminal justice.
Notes
1. See Lee Hancock, "ATF Official Defends Raid Planning," Dallas Morning
News, March 27, 1993, p. 25A; and Janet Reno, Statement, Hearing on
Events Surrounding the Branch Davidian Cult Standoff in Waco, Texas, before the House Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong., 1st sess., 1993
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1995), p. 15. For a thorough account of what took place at Waco, see David B. Kopel and Paul H.
Blackman, No More Wacos(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1997).
2. See Timothy Egan, "Soldiers of the Drug War Remain on Duty," New
York Times, March 1, 1999, p. A1; "Wilson Praises LAPD Acquisition of 600
Army Surplus Assault Rifles," Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1997, p.
A18; and "Gearing Up," 60 Minutes, December 21, 1997, transcript.
3. "Clinton Picks General to Lead War on Drugs," New York Times, January
24, 1996, p. A15. General McCaffrey retired from the Army after the Senate approved his appointment.
4. See Dana Priest and Douglas Farah, "U.S. Force Training Troops in
Colombia," Washington Post, May 25, 1998, p. A1; and "U.S. Military Fights

Drugs in Haiti," Reuters News Service, May 15, 1997.
5. See Sam Howe Verhovek, "In Marine's Killing of Teen-Ager, Town
Mourns and Wonders Why," New York Times, June 29, 1997, p. A1; and
William Branigin, "Questions on Military Role Fighting Drugs Ricochet from a Deadly Shot," Washington Post, June 22, 1997, p. A3.
6. "Drug House Razed with Federal Money," New York Times, January 19,
1998; and Bill Miller, "Nuisance Law Claims Its First Success," Washington
Post, June 2, 1999, p. B1.
7. See William J. Broad and Judith Miller, "Pentagon Seeks Command for
Emergencies in the U.S.," New York Times, January 28, 1999, p. A19.
Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessment, believes the federal government will establish a
"Homeland Defense Command," with a four-star general at its head within two years. See The McLaughlin Group, April 3, 1999, transcript.
8. Quoted in Egan.
9. For additional background, see John Phillip, In Defiance of the Law: The
Standing-Army Controversy, the Two Constitutions, and the Coming of the
American Revolution(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
10. Article I, section 8.
11. Article I, section 10.
12. Article II, section 2. For a fuller discussion of the war power under the

U.S. Constitution, see Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power(Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1995).
13. Amendment II. For a fuller discussion of the history of the Second
Amendment, see Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The
Evolution of a Constitutional Right(Oakland, Calif.: Independent Institute,
1994); and Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an
Anglo-American Right (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
14. Amendment III.
15. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wanted an explicit protection against standing armies. See Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787, in
Jefferson Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 914.
16. See William H. Rehnquist, All the Laws But One (New York: Knopf,
1998), pp. 59-74.
17. See David Engdahl, "Soldiers, Riots, and Revolution: The Law and
History of Military Troops in Civil Disorders," Iowa Law Review 57 (1971):
58.
18. See generally Jerry M. Cooper, "Federal Military Intervention in
Domestic Disorders" in The United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989, ed. Richard H. Kohn (New York: New York
University Press, 1991).
19. See Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men:

A History of the American Civil War (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), pp. 320-
21.
20. The term "posse comitatus" is defined as a "group of people acting under authority of police or sheriff and engaged in searching for a criminal or in making an arrest." Black's Law Dictionary(St. Paul: West, 1983), p.
606. "In ancient Rome, governmental officials were permitted to have retainers accompany and protect them on their travels throughout the
Empire. This practice was known as 'comitatus.' In medieval England, the sheriff could require the assistance of able-bodied men in the county over the age of fifteen in suppressing small insurrections and capturing fugitives. This civilian force was called the 'posse comitatus,' deriving its name from the old Roman practice."
Note, "Fourth Amendment and Posse Comitatus Act Restrictions on Military
Involvement in Civil Law Enforcement," George Washington Law Review 54
(1986): 406 (citations omitted).
21. 18 U.S.C. § 1385. In 1956 the act was updated to include the Air Force, and a DOD directive added the Navy and the Marine Corps. See Richter
Moore Jr., "Posse Comitatus Revisited: The Use of the Military as Civil Law
Enforcement," Journal of Criminal Justice15 (1987): 376.
When Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) discovered that an active duty Army colonel was serving at the Federal Bureau of Investigation as deputy chief of a counterterrorism unit, he asked the Justice Department for an explanation. Assistant Attorney General Andrew Fois replied that the colonel was not "directly" involved in law enforcement activity. See

Benjamin Wittes, "A Posse Comitatus Crusade," Legal Times, September 1,
12.1997, p. 8.
22. Cooper, pp. 129-35.
23. 10 U.S.C. §§ 371-74.
24. See Keith B. Richburg, "Reagan Order Defines Drug Trade as Security
Threat," Washington Post, June 8, 1986.
25. Kopel and Blackman, p. 341.
26. See Ted Galen Carpenter and R. Channing Rouse, "Perilous Panacea:
The Military in the Drug War," Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 128,
February 15, 1990.
27. Kopel and Blackman, p. 341.
28. U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Defense,
Department of Justice and Department of Defense Joint Technology
Program: Second Anniversary Report (Washington: U.S. Department of
Justice, February 1997), pp. 8-18.
29. David C. Morrison, "Police Action," National Journal, February 1, 1992, p. 267. See also Jim McGee, "Military Seeks Balance in Delicate Mission:
The Drug War," Washington Post, November 29, 1996, p. A1.
30. Quoted in Sam Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform: The
Emergence of Professionalism (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1977),

p. 63.
31. Ibid., pp. 151-60
32. Robert Snow, SWAT Teams: Explosive Face-Offs with America's
Deadliest Criminals(New York: Plenum, 1996), p. 7.
33. Peter Kraska and Victor Kappeler, "Militarizing American Police: The
Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units," Social Problems44 (1997): 5-
6.
34. Egan
35. Ibid.
36. Quoted in Robert Snow, "The Birth and Evolution of the SWAT Unit,"
Police21 (1997): 24.
37. U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Defense, p. 9.
38. Ibid., pp. 11-18.
39. Quoted in Egan.
40. Quoted in Kraska and Kappeler, p. 10 (emphasis added).
41. Quoted in ibid.
42. Quoted in ibid., p. 13.
43. Cited in ibid., p. 9.

44. Quoted in Alice Hills, "Militant Tendencies: 'Paramilitarism' in the British
Police," British Journal of Criminology35 (1995): 450-51.
45. Ibid., p. 457.
46. Ibid., p. 451.
47. U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Defense, pp. 1, 5.
48. Ibid., pp. 5-6.
49. Kraska and Kappeler, p. 11.
50. Peter Kraska, "Enjoying Militarism: Political/Personal Dilemmas in
Studying U.S. Police Paramilitary Units," Justice Quarterly13 (1996): 417.
51. Kraska and Kappeler, p. 11.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Quoted in ibid., p. 12.
55. Quoted in ibid., p. 11.
56. Quoted in "Technology Transfer From Defense: Concealed Weapon
Detection," National Institute of Justice Journal, no. 229 (August 1995):
35.
57. Bill McCollum, "Waving the White Flag in Drug War?" Washington

Times, March 10, 1998, p. A17.
58. Lieutenant Steve Lagere, who heads the SWAT team in Meriden,
Connecticut, says: "We ought to be looking at some other options. . . . It's politically incorrect to say that as a cop. You really can't discuss it much here, because people will think you're soft on drugs. But I don't see crack use going up or down, no matter what we've tried to do." Quoted in Egan.
59. See, for example, Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985); and Wilson v. Arkansas, 514 U.S. 927 (1995).
60. Quoted in Egan.
61. See Mark Arax, "Small Farm Town's SWAT Team Leaves a Costly
Legacy,"Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1999, p. A1.
62. Ibid. 13.14
Published by the Cato Institute , Cato Briefing Papers is a regular series evaluating government policies and offering proposals for reform. Nothing in Cato Briefing Papers should be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Cato Institute or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress.
Additional copies of Cato Briefing Papers are $2.00 each ($1.00 in bulk). To order, or for a complete listing of available studies, write the Cato Institute,

1000 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001, call (202)
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Contact the Cato Institute for reprint permission.
3 September 1999

REPORTERS NOTEBOOK: ALARMING RATE AT WHICH AMERICAN
LAW ENFORCEMENT IS BECOMING MILITARIZED http://dmnewsi.com/2013/02/15/reporters-notebook-alarmingrate-at-which-american-law-enforcement-is-becomingmilitarized/
A future in which unmanned drones are as common in U.S. skies as helicopters and airliners has moved a step closer to reality with a government request for proposals to create six drone test sites around the country. The Federal Aviation Administration made the request Thursday, kicking off what is anticipated to be an intense competition among states hoping to win one of the sites. The FAA also posted online a draft plan for protecting people’s privacy from the eyes in the sky. The plan would

require each test site to follow federal and state laws and make a privacy policy publicly available. Privacy advocates worry that a proliferation of drones will lead to a “surveillance society” in which the movements of
Americans are routinely monitored, tracked, recorded and scrutinized by authorities.
One of the most alarming side effects of the federal government’s war on drugs is the militarization of law enforcement in America. There are two aspects to the militarization phenomenon. First, the American tradition of civil-military separation is breaking down as Congress assigns more and more law enforcement responsibilities to the armed forces. Second, state and local police officers are increasingly emulating the war-fighting tactics of soldiers. Most Americans are unaware of the militarization phenomenon simply because it has been creeping along imperceptibly for many years.
Riot police officers tear-gassing protesters at the Occupy movement in
Oakland, Calif. The surprising nighttime invasion of Zuccotti Park in Lower
Manhattan, carried out with D-Day-like secrecy by officers deploying klieg lights and a military-style sound machine. And campus police officers in helmets and face shields dousing demonstrators at the University of
California, Davis with pepper spray. Is this the militarization of the
American police? Police forces undeniably share a soldier’s ethos, no matter the size of the city, town or jurisdiction: officers carry deadly weapons and wear uniforms with patches denoting rank. They salute one another and pay homage to a “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” hierarchical culture.

But beyond such symbolic and formal similarities, American law and tradition have tried to draw a clear line between police and military forces.
To cast the roles of the two too closely, those in and out of law enforcement say, is to mistake the mission of each. Soldiers, after all, go to war to destroy, and kill the enemy. The police, who are supposed to maintain the peace, “are the citizens, and the citizens are the police,” according to Chief Walter A. McNeil of Quincy, Fla., the president of the
International Association of Chiefs of Police, citing the words of Sir Robert
Peel, the father of modern-day policing.
Yet images from Occupy protests streamed on the Internet — often in real time — show just how readily police officers can adopt military-style tactics and equipment, and come off more like soldiers as they face down citizens.
Some say this adds up to the emergence of a new, more militaristic breed of civilian police officer. Others disagree. What seems clear is that the

terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and the federal Homeland Security dollars that flowed to police forces in response to them, have further encouraged police forces to embrace paramilitary tactics like those that first emerged in the decades-long “war on drugs.”
Both wars — first on drugs, then terror — have lent police forces across the country justification to acquire the latest technology, equipment and tactical training for newly created specialized units. “There is behind this, also, I think, a kind of status competition or imitation, that there is positive status in having a sort of ‘big department muscle,’ in smaller departments,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California,
Berkeley. “And then the problem is, if you have those kinds of specialized units, that you hunt for appropriate settings to use them and, in some of the smaller police departments, notions of the appropriate settings to use them are questionable.”

Radley Balko, a journalist who has studied the issue, told a House subcommittee on crime in 2007 that one criminologist found a 1,500 percent increase in the use of SWAT (special weapons and tactics) teams in the United States in roughly the last two decades. The Posse Comitatus
Act of 1878 generally bars the military from law enforcement activities within the United States. But today, some local and city police forces have rendered the law rather moot. They have tanks — yes, tanks, often from military surplus, for use in hostage situations or drug raids — not to mention the sort of equipment and training one would need to deter a
Mumbai-style guerrilla assault.
Such tactics are used in New York City, where Police Commissioner
Raymond W. Kelly (whose department has had armored vehicles for decades) has invoked both the 19th-century military strategist Carl von
Clausewitz and the television series “24” in talking about the myriad threats his city faces — both conventional and terrorist. After the would-be Times
Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was arrested aboard a plane at Kennedy
Airport in 2010, Mr. Kelly calculated the plot-to-capture time: slightly more than 53 hours. “Jack Bauer may have caught him in 24,” said Mr. Kelly, who served as a Marine commander in Vietnam. “But in the real world, 53’s not bad.”
In truth, a vast majority of Mr. Kelly’s 35,000-member force are not specialized troops, but rank-and-file beat cops. But that did not stop Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg from sounding like Patton at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology last week, when he boasted, “I have my own army

in the N.Y.P.D.,” suggesting his reasons for preferring City Hall to the
White House. More disturbing than riot gear or heavy-duty weapons slung across the backs of American police officers is a “militaristic mind-set” creeping into officers’ approach to their jobs, said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
“It is in the way they search and raid homes and the way they deal with the public,” he said.
The more the police fail to defuse confrontations but instead help create them — be it with their equipment, tactics or demeanor — the more ties with community members are burned, he said. The effect is a loss of civility, and an erosion of constitutional rights, rather than a building of

good will. “What is most worrisome to us is that the line that has traditionally separated the military from civilian policing is fading away,”
Mr. Lynch said. “We see it as one of the most disturbing trends in the criminal justice area — the militarization of police tactics.”
Police officials insist they are not becoming more militarized — in their thinking or actions — but merely improving themselves professionally against evolving threats. This is the way to protect citizens and send officers home alive at the end of shifts in an increasingly dangerous world, they say. Of course, in the event of a terrorist attack, they have to fill the breach until federal or National Guard troops can rush in. “If we had to take on a terrorist group, we could do that,” said William Lansdowne, the police chief in San Diego and a member of the board of the Major Cities
Chiefs Association. Though his force used federal grants to buy one of those fancy armored vehicles — complete with automatic-gun portals — he said the apparatus was more useful for traditional crime-busting than counter-terrorism. “We are seeing suspects better armed than ever before,” Chief Lansdowne said.
Now the Occupy movement and highly publicized official responses to it are forcing the public to confront what its police forces have become. But analysts say that even here the picture of policing is mixed. While scenes from Oakland were ugly, the police in Los Angeles and Philadelphia last week evacuated Occupy encampments relatively peacefully; Los Angeles officers used a cherry picker to pluck protesters from trees. Police officers are not at war, said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police

Executive Research Forum, and cannot imagine themselves as occupying armies. Rather, they must approach any continuing Occupy protests, now or in the spring, with a respect for the First Amendment and a realization that protesters are not enemies but people the police need to engage with up the road.
“You can have all the sophisticated equipment in the world, but it does not replace common sense and discretion and finding ways to defuse situations,” Mr. Wexler said. “You can’t be talking about community policing one day and the next day have an action that is so uncharacteristic to the values of your department.” What is clear — and disquieting — is that the lines that have traditionally separated the military mission from the police mission are getting badly blurred. Over the last 20 years Congress has encouraged the U.S. military to supply intelligence, equipment, and training to civilian police. That encouragement has spawned a culture of paramilitarism in American police departments. By virtue of their training and specialized armament, state and local police officers are adopting the tactics and mindset of their military mentors. The problem is that the actions and values of the police officer are distinctly different from those of the warrior.
The job of a police officer is to keep the peace, but not by just any means.
Police officers are expected to apprehend suspected law breakers while adhering to constitutional procedures. They are expected to use minimum force and to deliver suspects to a court of law. The soldier, on the other hand, is an instrument of war. In boot camp, recruits are trained to inflict

maximum damage on enemy personnel. Confusing the police function with the military function can have dangerous consequences. As Albuquerque police chief Jerry Glavin has noted, “If [cops] have a mindset that the goal is to take out a citizen, it will happen.”
The lines that have traditionally separated the military mission from the police mission are getting badly blurred. Paramilitarism threatens civil liberties, constitutional norms, and the well-being of all citizens. Thus, the use of paramilitary tactics in everyday police work should alarm people of goodwill from across the political spectrum. Drones, which range from the size of a hummingbird to the high-flying Global Hawks that weigh about
15,000 pounds without fuel, also are often cheaper than manned aircraft.
The biggest market is expected to be state and local police departments.
Industry experts predict the takeoff of a multibillion-dollar market for civilian drones as soon as the FAA completes regulations to make sure they don’t pose a safety hazard to other aircraft.
The FAA plans to begin integrating drones starting with small aircraft weighing less than about 55 pounds. The agency forecasts an estimated
10,000 civilian drones will be in use in the U.S. within five years. The FAA is required by a law enacted a year ago to develop sites where civilian and military drones can be tested in preparation for integration into U.S. airspace that’s currently limited to manned aircraft. The law also requires that the FAA allow drones wide access to U.S. airspace by 2015, but the agency is behind schedule on that. The test sites are planned to evaluate what requirements are needed to ensure the drones don’t collide with

planes or endanger people or property on the ground. Remotely controlled drones don’t have a pilot who can see other aircraft the way an onboard plane or helicopter pilot can.
There’s also concern that links between drones and their on-the-ground operators can be broken or hacked, causing the operator to lose control of the aircraft. “This research will give us valuable information about how best to ensure the safe introduction of this advanced technology into our nation’s skies,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement.
The test sites are also expected to boost the local economy of the communities where they are located. Customs and Border Patrol uses drones along the U.S.-Mexico border. And the FAA has granted several hundred permits to universities, police departments and other government agencies to use small, low-flying drones. For example, the sheriff’s department in Montgomery County, Texas, has a 50-pound ShadowHawk helicopter drone intended to supplement its SWAT team.
The sheriff’s department hasn’t armed its drone, although the
ShadowHawk can be equipped with a 40 mm grenade launcher and a 12guage shotgun. The prospect of armed drones patrolling U.S. skies has alarmed some lawmakers and their constituents. More than a dozen bills have been introduced in Congress and state legislatures to curb drone use and protect privacy. President Obama was asked Thursday about concerns that the administration believes it’s legal to strike American citizens abroad with drones and whether that’s allowed against citizens in the U.S. “There’s never been a drone used on an American citizen on American soil,” the

president said, speaking during an online chat sponsored by Google in which he was promoting his policy initiatives. “We respect and have a whole bunch of safeguards in terms of how we conduct counterterrorism operations outside of the United States. The rules outside of the United
States are going to be different than the rules inside the United States, in part because our capacity, for example, to capture terrorists in the United
States are very different than in the foothills or mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan.” He said he would work with Congress to make sure the
American public understands “what the constraints are, what the legal parameters are, and that’s something that I take very seriously.”
SWAT Teams Everywhere, Doing Everything
The 1980s and 1990s saw marked changes in the number of permanent
SWAT teams across the country, in their mission and deployment, and in their tactical armament. According to a 1997 study of SWAT teams conducted by Peter Kraska and Victor Kappeler of Eastern Kentucky
University, nearly 90 percent of the police departments surveyed in cities with populations over 50,000 had paramilitary units, as did 70 percent of the departments surveyed in communities with populations under 50,000.
Although the proliferation of those special units was slow in the late 1960s and early 1970s, their numbers took a leap in the mid-1970s, and growth has remained high since the 1980s. In fact, most SWAT teams have been created in the 1980s and 1990s. Towns like Jasper, Lakeland, and Palm
Beach, Florida; Lakewood, New Jersey; Chapel Hill, North Carolina;
Charlottesville, Virginia; and Harwich, Massachusetts, have SWAT teams.

The campus police at the University of Central Florida have a SWAT unit — even though the county SWAT team is available.
Kraska refers to the proliferation as the “militarization of Mayberry,” and he is rightly alarmed that the special units are becoming a normal and permanent part of law enforcement agencies. Under the Military
Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act, Congress directed the military to make equipment and facilities available to civilian police in the anti-drug effort. As a result, police departments began to acquire more sophisticated tactical equipment: automatic weapons with laser sights and sound suppressors, surveillance equipment such as Laser Bugs that can detect sounds inside a building by bouncing a laser beam off a window, pinhole cameras, flash and noise grenades, rubber bullets, bullet-proof apparel, battering rams, and more. The Boone County Sheriff’s office in
Indiana has acquired an amphibious armored personnel carrier.
In Fresno, California, the SWAT unit has access to two helicopters equipped with night vision goggles and an armored personnel carrier with a turret. According to Cal Black, a former SWAT commander for the FBI,
“The equipment SWAT teams use today is many times more sophisticated than it was when I began in SWAT in the 1970s. . . . Because of this hightech equipment, the ability of SWAT teams has increased dramatically.”
The National Institute of Justice report on the DOJ-DOD technology
“partnership” boasted a number of high-tech items that SWAT teams now have at their disposal. Included among the showcase military technologies deemed applicable to law enforcement were “inconspicuous systems that

can detect from more than 30 feet away weapons with little or no metal content as well as those made of metal.”
Militarization of Law Enforcement
One of the most alarming side effects of the federal government’s war on drugs is the militarization of law enforcement in America. There are two aspects to the militarization phenomenon. First, the American tradition of civil-military separation is breaking down as Congress assigns more and more law enforcement responsibilities to the armed forces. Second, state and local police officers are increasingly emulating the war-fighting tactics of soldiers. Most Americans are unaware of the militarization phenomenon simply because it has been creeping along imperceptibly for many years.
To get perspective, it will be useful to consider some recent events:
The U.S. military played a role in the Waco incident. In preparation for their disastrous 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound, federal law enforcement agents were trained by Army Special Forces at Fort Hood,
Texas. And Delta Force commanders would later advise Attorney General
Janet Reno to insert gas into the compound to end the 51-day siege. Waco resulted in the largest number of civilian deaths ever arising from a law enforcement operation.1
Between 1995 and 1997 the Department of Defense gave police departments 1.2 million pieces of military hardware, including 73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers. The Los Angeles Police
Department has acquired 600 Army surplus M-16s. Even small-town police

departments are getting into the act. The seven-officer department in
Jasper, Florida, is now equipped with fully automatic M-16s.2
In 1996 President Bill Clinton appointed a military commander, Gen. Barry
R. McCaffrey, to oversee enforcement of the federal drug laws as the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.3
Since the mid-1990s U.S. Special Forces have been going after drug dealers in foreign countries. According to the U.S. Southern Command,
American soldiers occupy three radar sites in Colombia to help monitor drug flights. And Navy SEALs have assisted in drug interdiction in the port city of Cap-Haitien, Haiti.4

The U.S. Marine Corps is now patrolling the Mexican border to keep drugs and illegal immigrants out of this country. In 1997 a Marine anti-drug patrol shot and killed 18-year-old Esequiel Hernandez as he was tending his family’s herd of goats on private property. The Justice Department settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the Hernandez family for $1.9 million.
5
In 1998 Indiana National Guard Engineering Units razed 42 crack houses in and around the city of Gary. The National Guard has also been deployed in
Washington, D.C., to drive drug dealers out of certain locations.6
In 1999 the Pentagon asked President Clinton to appoint a “military leader” for the continental United States in the event of a terrorist attack on
American soil. The powers that would be wielded by such a military commander were not made clear. 7
What is clear — and disquieting — is that the lines that have traditionally separated the military mission from the police mission are getting badly blurred. Over the last 20 years Congress has encouraged the U.S. military to supply intelligence, equipment, and training to civilian police. That encouragement has spawned a culture of paramilitarism in American police departments. By virtue of their training and specialized armament, state and local police officers are adopting the tactics and mindset of their military mentors. The problem is that the actions and values of the police officer are distinctly different from those of the warrior. The job of a police officer is to keep the peace, but not by just any means. Police officers are expected to apprehend suspected law breakers while adhering to

constitutional procedures. They are expected to use minimum force and to deliver suspects to a court of law. The soldier, on the other hand, is an instrument of war. In boot camp, recruits are trained to inflict maximum damage on enemy personnel. Confusing the police function with the military function can have dangerous consequences. As Albuquerque police chief Jerry Glavin has noted, “If [cops] have a mindset that the goal is to take out a citizen, it will happen.”8
The lines that have traditionally separated the military mission from the police mission are getting badly blurred. Paramilitarism threatens civil liberties, constitutional norms, and the well-being of all citizens. Thus, the use of paramilitary tactics in everyday police work should alarm people of goodwill from across the political spectrum.
This paper will examine the militarization of law enforcement at the local level, with particular emphasis on SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) units. The paper will conclude that the special skills of SWAT personnel and their military armaments are necessary only in extraordinary circumstances.
The deployment of such units should therefore be infrequent.More generally, Congress should recognize that soldiers and police officers perform different functions. Federal lawmakers should discourage the culture of paramilitarism in police departments by keeping the military out of civilian law enforcement.
A Brief History of the Relationship between the Military and Civilian Law
Enforcement

The use of British troops to enforce unpopular laws in the American colonies helped to convince the colonists that King George III and
Parliament were intent on establishing tyranny.9
The Declaration of Independence specifically refers to those practices, castigating King George for “quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us” and for “protecting [soldiers], by mock Trial, from Punishment, for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these
States.” The colonists complained that the king “has kept among us, in
Times of peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of, and superior to, the
Civil Power.”
After the Revolutionary War, Americans were determined to protect themselves against the threat of an overbearing military. The Founders inserted several safeguards into the Constitution to ensure that the civilian powers of the new republic would remain distinct from, and superior to, the military:
The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War . . . To raise and support Armies . . . To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and Naval Forces . . . To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia.10
No State shall, without the consent of Congress, . . . keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, . . . or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.11

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the
United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.12
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.13
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.14

It is important to emphasize that those provisions were not considered controversial.3 The debate was only with respect to whether those constitutional safeguards would prove adequate. 15
After the Revolutionary War, Americans were determined to protect themselves against the threat of an overbearing military..
During the Civil War period the principle of civil-military separation broke down. President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and citizens were arrested and tried before military tribunals.
After the Civil War, Congress imposed martial law in the rebel states. And to shield the military’s reconstruction policies from constitutional challenges, Congress barred the Supreme Court from jurisdiction over federal appellate court rulings involving postwar reconstruction controversies.17
The Army enforced an array of laws in the South and, not surprisingly, became politically meddlesome. In several states the Army interfered with local elections and state political machinery. Such interference during the presidential election of 1876 provoked a political firestorm.18
The Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote while the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, garnered more electoral votes. The Republican victory was tainted by accusations that federal troops had stuffed the ballot box in a few southern states to favor Hayes.
Negotiations between the political parties ensued and a compromise was reached. The Democrats agreed to concede the election to “Rutherfraud”

Hayes (as disgruntled partisans nicknamed him) on the condition that federal troops be withdrawn from the South.19
The Republicans agreed.
The Army’s machinations in the South also set the stage for a landmark piece of legislation, the Posse Comitatus Act.20
The one-sentence law provided, “Whoever, except in cases and under such circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or by Act of
Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined no more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”21
Southern Democrats proposed the Posse Comitatus bill in an effort to get
Congress to reaffirm, by law, the principle of civil-military separation.
President Hayes signed that bill into law in June 1878. Federal troops have occasionally played a role in quelling civil disorder — without prior congressional authorization — in spite of the plain terms of the Posse
Comitatus Act. The U.S. Army, for example, was used to restore order in industrial disputes in the late 19th and early 20th century. Except for the illegal occupation of the Coeur d’Alene mining region in Idaho in 1899-
1901, army troops were used by presidents to accomplish specific and temporary objectives — after which they were immediately withdrawn.22
Federal troops and federalized National Guardsmen were called upon to enforce the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957; in
Oxford, Mississippi, in 1962; and in Selma, Alabama, in 1963.

Over the past 20 years there has been a dramatic expansion of the role of the military in law enforcement activity. In 1981 Congress passed the
Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act.23
That law amended the Posse Comitatus Act insofar as it authorized the military to “assist” civilian police in the enforcement of drug laws. The act encouraged the military to (a) make available equipment, military bases, and research facilities to federal, state, and local police; (b) train and advise civilian police on the use of the equipment; and (c) assist law enforcement personnel in keeping drugs from entering the country. The act also authorized the military to share information acquired during military operations with civilian law enforcement agencies.
As the drug war escalated throughout the 1980s, the military was drawn further and further into the prohibition effort by a series of executive and congressional initiatives: In 1986 President Ronald Reagan issued a
National Decision Security Directive designating drugs as an official threat to “national security,” which encouraged a tight-knit relationship between civilian [police and the military].4
As the drug war escalated throughout the 1980s, the military was drawn further and further into the prohibition effort..law enforcement and the military.24
In 1987 Congress set up an administrative apparatus to facilitate transactions between civilian law enforcement officials and the military. For example, a special office with an 800 number was established to handle inquiries by police officials regarding acquisition of military hardware.25

In 1988 Congress directed the National Guard to assist law enforcement agencies in counter-drug operations. Today National Guard units in all 50 states fly across America’s landscape in dark green helicopters, wearing camouflage uniforms and armed with machine guns, in search of marijuana fields.26
In 1989 President George Bush created six regional joint task forces (JTFs) within the Department of Defense.
Those task forces are charged with coordinating the activities of the military and police agencies in the drug war, including joint training of military units and civilian police. JTFs can be called on by civilian law enforcement agencies in counter-drug cases when police feel the need for military reinforcement.27
In 1994 the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense signed a memorandum of understanding, which has enabled the military to transfer technology to state and local police departments. Civilian officers now have at their disposal an array of high-tech military items previously reserved for use during wartime.28
All of those measures have resulted in the militarization of a wide range of activity in the United States that had been previously considered the domain of civilian law enforcement. As one reporter has observed, “Not since federal troops were deployed to the former Confederate states during
Reconstruction has the U.S. military been so intimately involved in civilian law enforcement.”29

The Militarization of the Police Department
Not only is the military directly involved in law enforcement; police departments are increasingly emulating the tactics of the armed forces in their everyday activities. This aspect of the militarization phenomenon has gone largely unnoticed.
The Early American Police Force
In one sense, the paramilitarism in today’s police departments is a consequence of the increasing professionalism of police in the 20th century. Professionalism essentially grants a monopoly of specialized knowledge, training, and practice to certain groups in exchange for a commitment to a public service ideal. While that may sound desirable for law enforcement officers, the effects of professionalism have, in many respects, been negative. Over the last century police departments have

evolved into increasingly centralized, authoritarian, autonomous, and militarized bureaucracies, which has led to their isolation from the citizenry.
Early police departments were anything but professional. Officers were basically political appointees, with ties to ward bosses. Officers also had strong cultural roots in the neighborhoods they patrolled. Police work was more akin to social work, as jails provided overnight lodging and soup kitchens for tramps, lost children, and other destitute individuals.
Discipline was practically nonexistent, and law enforcement was characterized by an arbitrary, informal process that is sometimes dubbed
“curbside justice.” Barely trained and equipped, police aimed at regulating rather than preventing crime, which, in the previous century, meant something closer to policing vice and cultural lifestyles.
On the positive side, the early police forces were well integrated into their communities, often solving crimes by simply chatting with people on the street corners. On the negative side, the police were suspicious of and often hostile to strangers ….immigrants, and, having strong loyalties to the local political machine, they were susceptible to bribery and political influence. 5
Police departments have evolved into increasingly centralized, authoritarian, autonomous, and militarized bureaucracies. Throughout the
19th century police work was considered casual labor, making it difficult for either municipalities or precinct captains to impose any uniform standards on patrolmen. Police did not consider themselves a self-contained body of law officers set apart from the general populace.

The initial round of professionalization took place during the Progressive
Era with the appearance of early police literature, fraternal organizations, and rudimentary recruitment standards — all of which suggest the emergence of a common occupational self-consciousness. Internal and external pressures forced the depoliticization and restructuring of police departments, which gradually reformed into centralized, depersonalized, hierarchical bureaucracies. To gain control of the rank and file, police chiefs assigned military ranks and insignia to personnel, and some departments required military drills. “Military methods have been adopted and military discipline enforced,” wrote Philadelphia police superintendent James
Robinson in his department’s 1912 annual report.30
A wave of police unionism from 1917 to 1920 was a strong indication that police not only were acquiring a shared occupational outlook but had come to regard policing as a full-time career. Two events, however, signaled the break-away of police from their communities and into their modern professional enclave. In 1905 the first truly modern state police force was formed in Pennsylvania. Ostensibly created to control crime in rural areas, the Pennsylvania State Police was used mainly in labor disputes, since the state militias and local police (who were more likely to sympathize with strikers) had been ineffective. That centralized organization, under one commander appointed by the governor, recruited members from across the state so that no more than a handful of officers had roots in any single community. This new force was considered so militaristic that the
Pennsylvania Federation of Labor referred to it as “Cossacks.” Despite the

misgivings of many people, Pennsylvania started a trend. Other states began to emulate Pennsylvania’s state police force.
The other significant event was J. Edgar Hoover’s directorship of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. By raising standards of training and recruitment, Hoover rescued federal law enforcement from its former state of corruption and mismanagement. Hoover imbued his agents with a moral zeal to fight crime, and in 1935 he opened the National Police Academy, which has exerted tremendous influence on police training generally.31
Hoover’s FBI acquired a prestige that made it the model police organization
Elite SWAT Units Created
There is agreement in police literature that the incident that inspired the
SWAT concept occurred in 1966. In August of that year a deranged man climbed to the top of the 32-story clock tower at the University of Texas in
Austin. For 90 minutes he randomly shot 46 people, killing 15 of them, until two police officers got to the top of the tower and killed him. The
Austin episode was so blatant that it “shattered the last myth of safety
Americans enjoyed [and] was the final impetus the chiefs of police needed”
32 to form their own SWAT teams. Shortly thereafter, the Los Angeles
Police Department formed the first SWAT team and, it is said, originated the acronym SWAT to describe its elite force. The Los Angeles SWAT unit acquired national prestige when it was used successfully against the Black
Panthers in 1969 and the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1973.
Much like the FBI, the modern SWAT team was born of public fear and the perception by police that crime had reached such proportions and criminals

had become so invincible that more armament and more training were needed. SWAT team members have come to consider themselves members of an elite unit with specialized skills and more of a military ethos than the normal police structure.
Another striking similarity with the FBI is that that SWAT units have gained their status and legitimacy in the public eye by their performance in a few sensational events.
The earliest SWAT teams consisted of small units that could be called into action to deal with difficult situations, such as incidents involving hostages, barricaded suspects, or hijackers. Early SWAT team members were not unlike regular police officers and were only slightly better equipped.
SWAT Teams Everywhere, Doing Everything
The 1980s and 1990s saw marked changes in the number of permanent
SWAT teams across the country, in their mission and deployment, and in their tactical armament. According to a 1997 study of SWAT teams conducted by Peter Kraska and Victor Kappeler of Eastern Kentucky
University, nearly 90 percent of the police departments surveyed in cities with populations over 50,000 had paramilitary units, as did 70 percent of the departments surveyed in communities with populations under 50,000.
33
Although the proliferation of those special units was slow in the late 1960s and early 1970s, their numbers took a leap in the mid-1970s, and growth has remained high since the 1980s. In fact, most SWAT teams have been

created in the 1980s and 1990s. Towns like Jasper, Lakeland, and Palm
Beach, Florida; Lakewood, New Jersey; Chapel Hill, North Carolina;
Charlottesville, Virginia; and Harwich, Massachusetts, have SWAT teams.
The campus police at the University of Central Florida have a SWAT unit — even though the county SWAT team is available.
Kraska refers to the proliferation as the “militarization of Mayberry,” and he is rightly alarmed that the special units are becoming a normal and permanent part of law enforcement agencies.
Under the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act,
Congress directed the military to make equipment and facilities available to civilian police in the anti-drug effort. As a result, police departments began to acquire more sophisticated tactical equipment: automatic weapons with laser sights and sound suppressors, surveillance equipment such as Laser
Bugs that can detect sounds inside a building by bouncing a laser beam off a window, pinhole cameras, flash and noise grenades, rubber bullets, bullet-proof apparel, battering rams, and more. The Boone County Sheriff’s office in Indiana has acquired an amphibious armored personnel carrier.34
In Fresno, California, the SWAT unit has access to two helicopters equipped with night vision goggles and an armored personnel carrier with a turret.35
According to Cal Black, a former SWAT commander for the FBI, “The equipment SWAT teams use today is many times more sophisticated than it

was when I began in SWAT in the 1970s. . . . Because of this high-tech equipment, the ability of SWAT teams has increased dramatically.”36
The National Institute of Justice report on the DOJ-DOD technology
“partnership” boasted a number of high-tech items that SWAT teams now have at their disposal. Included among the showcase military technologies deemed applicable to law enforcement were “inconspicuous systems that can detect from more than 30 feet away weapons with little or no metal content as well as those made of metal.”37
Other items in the pipeline include “a gas-launched, wireless, electric stun projectile”; a “vehicular laser surveillance and dazzler system”;
“pyrotechnic devices such as flash-bang grenades [and] smoke grenades”; instruments of “crowd control”; mobile, even hand-held, systems to locate gunfire; and tagging equipment to locate, identify, and monitor the
“movement of individuals, vehicles and containers.”38
Special body armor and helmets are also under consideration.
Nick Pastore, former police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, says: “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted. . . . I turned it all down because it feeds a mindset that you’re not a police officer serving a community, you’re a soldier at war.”39,7

The 1980s and 1990s saw marked changes in the number of permanent
SWAT teams across the country, in their mission and deployment, and in their tactical armament..An even more disturbing development reported in the Kraska-Kappeler study, however, is the growing tendency of police departments to use SWAT units in routine policing activity. The Fresno
SWAT unit, for example, sends its 40-person team, with full military dress and gear, into the inner city “war zone” to deal with problems of drugs, gangs, and crime. One survey respondent described his department’s use of SWAT teams in the following way: “We’re into saturation patrols in hot spots. We do a lot of our work with the SWAT unit because we have bigger guns. We send out two, two-to-four- men cars, we look for minor violations and do jump-outs, either on people on the street or automobiles. After we jump-out the second car provides periphery cover with an ostentatious display of weaponry. We’re sending a clear message: if the shootings don’t stop, we’ll shoot someone.” 40

A Midwestern community with a population of 75,000 sends out patrols dressed in tactical uniform in a military personnel carrier. The armored vehicle, according to the SWAT commander, stops “suspicious vehicles and people. We stop anything that moves. We’ll sometimes even surround suspicious homes and bring out the MP5s (machine gun pistols).” 41
Unfortunately, it is likely that the number of SWAT “patrols” will rise in the future. In their survey, when Kraska and Kappeler asked the question, Is your department using the tactical operations unit as a proactive patrol unit to aid high crime areas? 107 departments indicated that they were. Sixtyone percent of all respondents thought it was a good idea. In fact, 63 percent of the departments in that survey agreed that SWAT units “play an important role in community policing strategies.”42
According to Police magazine, “Police officers working in patrol vehicles, dressed in urban tactical gear and armed with automatic weapons are here
— and they’re here to stay.”43
Limiting the SWAT Mission to Bona Fide Emergencies
The relatively recent phenomenon of special, commando-type units within civilian law enforcement agencies is occurring on both sides of the Atlantic.
The British counterpart to the SWAT team in America is the Police Support
Unit (PSU). In 1993 the British Journal of Criminology published opposing views on British paramilitarism by P. A. J. Waddington and Anthony
Jefferson. Both scholars agreed that public order policing in Britain by PSUs was becoming paramilitaristic, but they could not agree on a precise definition of “paramilitarism.”

While Jefferson defined paramilitarism as “the application of quasi-military training, equipment, philosophy and organization to questions of policing,”
Waddington confined paramilitarism to police methods of riot control, namely, “the coordination and integration of all officers deployed as squads under centralised command and control.”44
A third scholar, Alice Hills, has sought the middle ground, rounding off the differences by looking at paramilitary forces of other countries, such as the
French Gendarmerie, the Italian Carabiniere, the Frontier Guards in
Finland, Civil Defense Units in Saudi Arabia, and the National Security
Guards in India. By Hills’s reckoning, paramilitarism should “be defined in terms of function . . . and relationships; of the police to the military and to the state, as well as to the legal system and style of political process.”45
In general, however, as has been the case in this country, British studies have largely “neglected . . . the relationship of the police to the other uniformed services, particularly the army, in the late twentieth century.”46
What is disturbing is that under any of the definitions offered by the British analysts, American SWAT teams can be regarded as paramilitary units. The institutional cooperation between civilian law enforcement and the military has emerged under the direct political sponsorship of elected leaders in the national legislature and the presidency. (In 1981 Congress diluted the
Posse Comitatus Act — a law that was designed to keep the military out of civilian affairs — in order to give the military an active role in the war on drugs, and that role has been expanded by subsequent congressional action and by the support of presidents of both political parties.)8

A disturbing development is the growing tendency of police departments to use SWAT units in routine policing activity.. The military-law enforcement connection is now a basic assumption within the federal government, and it receives enthusiastic support in government literature. For example, in a
1997 National Institute of Justice report on the transfer of military technology to civilian police departments, the Joint Program Steering Group explained the “convergence in the technology needs of the law enforcement and military communities” as due to their “common missions.” In the military’s newest
“peacekeeping” role abroad, it is obliged — much as civilian police — to be
“highly discreet when applying force,” given the “greater presence of members of the media or other civilians who are observing, if not recording, the situation.”47
Moreover, the military’s enemy abroad has begun to resemble law enforcement’s enemy at home: “Law officers today confront threats that have more and more military aspects” due to the changed “nature of criminals and their crimes.” 48
With widespread political sanction, the military is now encouraged to share training, equipment, technology — and, most subtle, mentality — with state and local civilian police. SWAT team members undergo rigorous training similar to that given military special operations units. Training, as one study has noted, “may seem to be a purely technical exercise, [but] it actually plays a central role in paramilitary subculture” 49 and moreover reinforces “the importance of feeling and thinking as a team.”50

The research of Kraska and Kappeler revealed that SWAT units are often trained alongside, or with the support of, military special forces personnel.
Of 459 SWAT teams across the country, 46 percent acquired their initial training from “police officers with special operations experience in the military,” and 43 percent with “active-duty military experts in special operations.” 51
Almost 46 percent currently conducted training exercises with “active-duty military experts in special operations.” 52
Twenty-three respondents to the survey indicated that they trained with either Navy SEALs or Army Rangers.53
One respondent went into greater detail:
“We’ve had special forces folks who have come right out of the jungles of
Central and South America. . . . All branches of military service are involved in providing training to law enforcement. U.S. Marshals act as liaisons between the police and military to set up the training — our go-between.
They have an arrangement with the military through JTF-6 [Joint Task
Force 6]. . . . I just received a piece of paper from a four-star general who tells us he’s concerned about the type of training we’re getting. We’ve had teams of Navy Seals and Special Forces 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.”54
Because of their close collaboration with the military, SWAT units are taking on the warrior mentality of our military’s special forces. SWAT team

organization resembles that of a special combat unit, with a commander, a tactical team leader, a scout, a rear guard or “defenseman,” a marksman
(sniper), a spotter, a gasman, and paramedics.
Moreover, SWAT teams, like military special forces, are elite units: Their rigorous team training; high-tech armament; and “battle dress uniforms,” consisting of lace-up combat boots, full body armor, Kevlar helmets, and goggles with “ninja” style hoods, reinforce their elitism within law enforcement agencies. (One commander — who disapproved of proactive
SWAT policing and turned down requests from team members to dress in black battle dress uniforms while on patrol — nevertheless understood its attraction to team members: “I can’t blame them, we’re a very elite unit, they just want to be distinguishable.”55)
Because of their close collaboration with the military, SWAT units are taking on the warrior mentality of our military’s special forces. The socalled war on drugs and other martial metaphors are turning high-crime areas into “war zones,” citizens into potential enemies, and police officers into soldiers. Preparing the ground for the 1994 technology transfer agreement between the Department of Defense and the Department of
Justice, Attorney General Reno addressed the defense and intelligence community. In her speech, Reno compared the drug war to the Cold War, and the armed and dangerous enemies abroad to those at home: “So let me welcome you to the kind of war our police fight every day. And let me challenge you to turn your skills that served us so well in the Cold War to

helping us with the war we’re now fighting daily in the streets of our towns and cities across the Nation.”56
The martial rhetoric can be found in both political parties. Bill McCollum (R-
Fla.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime of the House Judiciary
Committee, has criticized the Clinton administration for not waging the war on drugs aggressively enough: “The drug crisis is a top — if not the top — national security threat facing our nation today . . . [the Clinton] administration’s clear unwillingness to wage an all-out drug war cannot go unchallenged.”57
In the current political climate, anyone who does not support an escalation of the drug war is condemned for being “soft on crime.”58
Departmental SWAT teams have accepted the military as a model for their behavior and outlook, which is distinctly impersonal and elitist; American streets are viewed as the “front” and American citizens as the “enemy.”
The sharing of training and technology by the military and law enforcement agencies has produced a shared mindset, and the mindset of the warrior is simply not appropriate for the civilian police officer charged with enforcing the law. The soldier confronts an enemy in a life-or-death situation. The soldier learns to use lethal force on the enemy, both uniformed and civilian, irrespective of age or gender. The soldier must sometimes follow orders unthinkingly, acts in concert with his comrades, and initiates violence on command. That mentality, with which new recruits are strenuously indoctrinated in boot camp, can be a matter of survival to the soldier and the nation at war.

The civilian law enforcement officer, on the other hand, confronts not an
“enemy” but individuals who, like him, are both subject to the nation’s laws and protected by the Bill of Rights. Although the police officer can use force in life-threatening situations, the Constitution and numerous Supreme
Court rulings have circumscribed the police officer’s direct use of force, as well as his power of search and seizure.59
In terms of violence, the police officer’s role is — or should be — purely reactive. When a police officer begins to think like a soldier, tragic consequences — such as the loss of innocent life at Waco — will result.
After some controversial SWAT shootings spawned several wrongful death lawsuits against the police department of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the

city hired Professor Sam Walker of the University of Nebraska to study its departmental practices. According to Walker: “The rate of killings by the police was just off the charts. . . . They had an organizational culture that led them to escalate situations upward rather than deescalating.The mindset of the warrior is simply not appropriate for the civilian police officer charged with enforcing the law..61″60
The city of Albuquerque subsequently hired a new police chief and dismantled its SWAT unit. The tiny town of Dinuba, California (population
15,000), created a SWAT unit in the spring of 1997. A few months later an innocent man, Ramon Gallardo, was killed by the SWAT team when it raided his home looking for one of his teenage sons. The SWAT unit rushed into the Gallardo household at 7 a.m. wearing hoods and masks, yelling “search warrant.” Gallardo and his wife were awakened by the ruckus, but before they could determine what was happening, Ramon was shot 15 times. 10
A police brutality lawsuit was later brought against the city. At trial, the police said they had to shoot in self-defense because Gallardo had grabbed a knife. Gallardo’s wife testified that the knife on the scene did not belong to her husband and alleged that the police had planted it there to legitimize the shooting. The jury awarded the Gallardo family $12.5 million. Because the whopping verdict exceeded the small town’s insurance coverage, the city is now in financial straits. After Gallardo’s killing, the city fathers of
Dinuba disbanded the SWAT unit and gave its military equipment to another police department.62

Some local jurisdictions may wish to retain SWAT units for the special skills they possess, but the deployment of such units should be limited to extraordinary circumstances — such as a hostage situation. If a SWAT unit is created (or retained), the need for that unit should be assessed annually by locally elected officials. Policymakers must be especially wary of “mission creep” and guard against it. Inactive SWAT teams have a strong incentive to expand their original “emergency” mission into more routine policing activities to justify their existence.
In recent years, city officials in Dallas and Seattle have curtailed the activity of their SWAT units, taking them off drug raids and suicide calls. Other cities should follow their lead by curtailing the SWAT mission — or even dismantling the entire unit as was done in Albuquerque and Dinuba.
Conclusion
The militarization of law enforcement in America is a deeply disturbing development. Police officers are not supposed to be warriors. The job of a police officer is to keep the peace while adhering to constitutional procedures. Soldiers, on the other hand, consider enemy personnel human targets. Confusing the police function with the military function can lead to dangerous and unintended consequences — such as unnecessary shootings and killings. The proliferation of SWAT teams is particularly worrisome because such units are rarely needed. SWAT teams are created to deal with emergency situations that are beyond the capacity of the ordinary street cop. But, as time passes, inactive SWAT units tend to jettison their original, limited mission for more routine policing activities.

Local jurisdictions should carefully assess the need for SWAT units and guard against the danger of mission creep. SWAT teams do possess specialized skills, but they should only be deployed on those extraordinary occasions when their skills are necessary — such as a hostage situation.
More generally, Congress should recognize that federal policies have contributed to the culture of paramilitarism that currently pervades many local police departments by restoring the traditional American principle of civil-military separation embodied in the Posse Comitatus Act. The Military
Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act created a dangerous loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act. That loophole should be closed immediately. Congress should also abolish all military-civilian law enforcement joint task forces and see to it that all military hardware loaned, given, or sold to law enforcement agencies is destroyed or returned.
Armored personnel carriers and machine guns, should not be a part of everyday law enforcement in a free society.
Diane Cecilia Weber is a Virginia writer on law enforcement and criminal justice.
Notes
1. See Lee Hancock, “ATF Official Defends Raid Planning,” Dallas Morning
News, March 27, 1993, p. 25A; and Janet Reno, Statement, Hearing on
Events Surrounding the Branch Davidian Cult Standoff in Waco, Texas, before the House Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong., 1st sess., 1993

(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1995), p. 15. For a thorough account of what took place at Waco, see David B. Kopel and Paul H.
Blackman, No More Wacos(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1997).
2. See Timothy Egan, “Soldiers of the Drug War Remain on Duty,” New
York Times, March 1, 1999, p. A1; “Wilson Praises LAPD Acquisition of 600
Army Surplus Assault Rifles,” Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1997, p.
A18; and “Gearing Up,” 60 Minutes, December 21, 1997, transcript.
3. “Clinton Picks General to Lead War on Drugs,” New York Times, January
24, 1996, p. A15. General McCaffrey retired from the Army after the Senate approved his appointment.
4. See Dana Priest and Douglas Farah, “U.S. Force Training Troops in
Colombia,” Washington Post, May 25, 1998, p. A1; and “U.S. Military Fights
Drugs in Haiti,” Reuters News Service, May 15, 1997.
5. See Sam Howe Verhovek, “In Marine’s Killing of Teen-Ager, Town
Mourns and Wonders Why,” New York Times, June 29, 1997, p. A1; and
William Branigin, “Questions on Military Role Fighting Drugs Ricochet from a Deadly Shot,” Washington Post, June 22, 1997, p. A3.
6. “Drug House Razed with Federal Money,” New York Times, January 19,
1998; and Bill Miller, “Nuisance Law Claims Its First Success,” Washington
Post, June 2, 1999, p. B1.
7. See William J. Broad and Judith Miller, “Pentagon Seeks Command for
Emergencies in the U.S.,” New York Times, January 28, 1999, p. A19.
Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and

Budgetary Assessment, believes the federal government will establish a
“Homeland Defense Command,” with a four-star general at its head within two years. See The McLaughlin Group, April 3, 1999, transcript.
8. Quoted in Egan.
9. For additional background, see John Phillip, In Defiance of the Law: The
Standing-Army Controversy, the Two Constitutions, and the Coming of the
American Revolution(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
10. Article I, section 8.

11. Article I, section 10.
12. Article II, section 2. For a fuller discussion of the war power under the
U.S. Constitution, see Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power(Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1995).
13. Amendment II. For a fuller discussion of the history of the Second
Amendment, see Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The
Evolution of a Constitutional Right(Oakland, Calif.: Independent Institute,
1994); and Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an
Anglo-American Right (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
14. Amendment III.
15. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wanted an explicit protection against standing armies. See Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787, in
Jefferson Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 914.
16. See William H. Rehnquist, All the Laws But One (New York: Knopf,
1998), pp. 59-74.
17. See David Engdahl, “Soldiers, Riots, and Revolution: The Law and
History of Military Troops in Civil Disorders,” Iowa Law Review 57 (1971):
58.
18. See generally Jerry M. Cooper, “Federal Military Intervention in
Domestic Disorders” in The United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989, ed. Richard H. Kohn (New York: New York
University Press, 1991).

19. See Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men:
A History of the American Civil War (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), pp. 320-
21.
20. The term “posse comitatus” is defined as a “group of people acting under authority of police or sheriff and engaged in searching for a criminal or in making an arrest.” Black’s Law Dictionary(St. Paul: West, 1983), p.
606. “In ancient Rome, governmental officials were permitted to have retainers accompany and protect them on their travels throughout the
Empire. This practice was known as ‘comitatus.’ In medieval England, the sheriff could require the assistance of able-bodied men in the county over the age of fifteen in suppressing small insurrections and capturing fugitives. This civilian force was called the ‘posse comitatus,’ deriving its name from the old Roman practice.”
Note, “Fourth Amendment and Posse Comitatus Act Restrictions on Military
Involvement in Civil Law Enforcement,” George Washington Law Review 54
(1986): 406 (citations omitted).
21. 18 U.S.C. § 1385. In 1956 the act was updated to include the Air Force, and a DOD directive added the Navy and the Marine Corps. See Richter
Moore Jr., “Posse Comitatus Revisited: The Use of the Military as Civil Law
Enforcement,” Journal of Criminal Justice15 (1987): 376.
When Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) discovered that an active duty Army colonel was serving at the Federal Bureau of Investigation as deputy chief of a counterterrorism unit, he asked the Justice Department for an explanation. Assistant Attorney General Andrew Fois replied that the

colonel was not “directly” involved in law enforcement activity. See
Benjamin Wittes, “A Posse Comitatus Crusade,” Legal Times, September 1,
12.1997, p. 8.
22. Cooper, pp. 129-35.
23. 10 U.S.C. §§ 371-74.
24. See Keith B. Richburg, “Reagan Order Defines Drug Trade as Security
Threat,” Washington Post, June 8, 1986.
25. Kopel and Blackman, p. 341.
26. See Ted Galen Carpenter and R. Channing Rouse, “Perilous Panacea:
The Military in the Drug War,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 128,
February 15, 1990.
27. Kopel and Blackman, p. 341.
28. U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Defense,
Department of Justice and Department of Defense Joint Technology
Program: Second Anniversary Report (Washington: U.S. Department of
Justice, February 1997), pp. 8-18.
29. David C. Morrison, “Police Action,” National Journal, February 1, 1992, p. 267. See also Jim McGee, “Military Seeks Balance in Delicate Mission:
The Drug War,” Washington Post, November 29, 1996, p. A1.

30. Quoted in Sam Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform: The
Emergence of Professionalism (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1977), p. 63.
31. Ibid., pp. 151-60
32. Robert Snow, SWAT Teams: Explosive Face-Offs with America’s
Deadliest Criminals(New York: Plenum, 1996), p. 7.
33. Peter Kraska and Victor Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police: The
Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” Social Problems44 (1997): 5-
6.
34. Egan
35. Ibid.
36. Quoted in Robert Snow, “The Birth and Evolution of the SWAT Unit,”
Police21 (1997): 24.
37. U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Defense, p. 9.
38. Ibid., pp. 11-18.
39. Quoted in Egan.
40. Quoted in Kraska and Kappeler, p. 10 (emphasis added).
41. Quoted in ibid.
42. Quoted in ibid., p. 13.

43. Cited in ibid., p. 9.
44. Quoted in Alice Hills, “Militant Tendencies: ‘Paramilitarism’ in the British
Police,” British Journal of Criminology35 (1995): 450-51.
45. Ibid., p. 457.
46. Ibid., p. 451.
47. U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Defense, pp. 1, 5.
48. Ibid., pp. 5-6.
49. Kraska and Kappeler, p. 11.
50. Peter Kraska, “Enjoying Militarism: Political/Personal Dilemmas in
Studying U.S. Police Paramilitary Units,” Justice Quarterly13 (1996): 417.
51. Kraska and Kappeler, p. 11.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Quoted in ibid., p. 12.
55. Quoted in ibid., p. 11.
56. Quoted in “Technology Transfer From Defense: Concealed Weapon
Detection,” National Institute of Justice Journal, no. 229 (August 1995):
35.

57. Bill McCollum, “Waving the White Flag in Drug War?” Washington
Times, March 10, 1998, p. A17.
58. Lieutenant Steve Lagere, who heads the SWAT team in Meriden,
Connecticut, says: “We ought to be looking at some other options. . . . It’s politically incorrect to say that as a cop. You really can’t discuss it much here, because people will think you’re soft on drugs. But I don’t see crack use going up or down, no matter what we’ve tried to do.” Quoted in Egan.
59. See, for example, Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985); and Wilson v. Arkansas, 514 U.S. 927 (1995).
60. Quoted in Egan.
61. See Mark Arax, “Small Farm Town’s SWAT Team Leaves a Costly
Legacy,”Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1999, p. A1.
62. Ibid. 13.14

The Birth and Evolution of the SWAT Unit
Over the past 30 years, SWAT has evolved from an unheard- of concept to being an integral part of every police department. http://www.policemag.com/channel/swat/articles/1997/04/the-birth-andevolution-of-the-swat-unit/page/3.aspx
April 01, 1997 | by Robert L. Snow
On June 30, 1954, Janie Ellis, the wife of a former mental patient, called the police in Indianapolis. She said she needed help right away at her house on Elder Avenue.
Between heavy gasps for breath, she told the dispatcher that she had come home and found her husband, Howard, beating one of their five foster children. When she attempted to stop him, she said he went crazy and tried to kill her with a knife.
In excited tones, she described how she had fought with her husband as he attempted to stab her, and how, after biting him hard enough to make him drop the knife, she had managed to escape out the back door and flee to a neighbor's house. After listening to Ellis' story and finding that Howard

was still in the house and possibly holding several of the foster children hostage, the police dispatcher sent two officers to the scene.
Arriving a few minutes later at the neighbor's house, Officers Chris
Greenwood and Robert Bates listened to Ellis' story and assured her that everything would be OK. They then walked with her back to her house to speak with her husband. As they approached the house, however, Howard fired a shotgun out the window at them, striking his wife in the leg. The officers, stunned for a moment, grabbed her and raced for cover. While on officer attended to the woman's wounds and the other called police headquarters for more help, Howard began barricading himself inside his house.
Within minutes, dozens of police officers began arriving, but because of the possibility that some of the foster children were hostages, they held their fire, even though Howard shot repeatedly at them. When it was discovered, however, that all of the children had escaped and the gunman was in the house alone, the officers began returning fire. Over the next 2
½ hours, more than 200 officers responded to the scene and fired more than 10,000 rounds into the rickety, wood- frame house where the former mental patient, armed only with a rifle and shotgun, was holed up. During this period, Howard shot at and hit any officer foolish enough to expose himself.

Although common today, this type of incident was rare in 1954.
Consequently, the police had no plan for handling it. No one at the scene, including a number of high- ranking officials who answered the call, seemed to know what to do other than continue to fire at the house.
Several times during the standoff, the officers thought they had finally hit the gunman, but more shots came from inside and another officer would fall.
Finally, several officers decided to go in after Howard. Using an armored car as cover, the officers forced their way into the rear of the house where they found the gunman completely untouched by the thousands of rounds.
He leaped out from behind a heavy bookcase and fired at the officer, but luckily, he missed. The officers returned fire and hit him with shots from a
Thompson submachine gun, a shotgun and a revolver. Refusing to fall, though struck by a dozen bullets, he ducked back behind the bookcase, reloaded his shotgun, and jumped out again. The officers escaped being killed only because his shotgun jammed when he pulled the trigger. The officers fired 26 bullets into Howard, who feel dead to the floor.
The heavy human toll of this incident and the enormous expense in manpower and equipment, sent a message to some people in government that the police department was presently ill- equipped to handle such a

high- risk incidents. Requiring 200 officers and over 10,000 rounds of ammunition to neutralize one man demonstrated a significant weakness in police preparedness.
The headline of the Indianapolis Star on July 2, 1954 read: "Big Gun Battle
Prompts Plans For Riot Squad." The article told of the city's plans, in the aftermath of the Elder Avenue shoot- out, to form a team of specially trained and equipped officers to deal with situations like this. Board of
Public Safety President Paul J. Schick says: "There were too many police at the scene and they were not deployed to the best advantage. Our police force has neither the equipment nor the training to handle effectively such a situation."
However, the special team never materialized. In 1954, events such as the shoot-out on Elder Avenue simply didn't occur often enough to justify the expense of creating and maintaining a special unit. And true to what the critics said of the idea, nothing of this scale occurred again for some time.
It would be more than a decade later before a similar incident finally forced
America's police departments to recognize their vulnerability and unpreparedness.
On Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Joseph Whitman took up a position on the observation deck of the clock tower building at the University of Texas in
Austin. He had with him a trunk full of weapons and ammunition. For 90

minutes, from his perch atop the 32-story tower, he randomly shot 46 people, killing 15 of them.
The Austin police in 1966, however, like the Indianapolis police in 1954, had no plan for handling such an incident. So for 90 minutes, they responded to his deadly attack with ineffective gunfire from the ground.
Finally, after watching person after person fall from Whitman's bullets, several officers came up with a plan to use a tunnel system that ran under the campus to slip undetected into the clock tower building. Putting this plan into action, four men managed to get into the clock tower building and up to the observation deck unnoticed by Whitman. Once on the observation deck, two officers engaged ina gun battle and killed him.
While the police in Austin eventually succeeded in neutralizing Whitman, the toll he extracted in human lives and suffering, like the toll in
Indianapolis, was unacceptably high. For 90 minutes the police did not know what to do and consequently, were unable to stop the slaughter. In addition, the plan that finally did succeed in stopping Whitman was developed on the scene and depended too much on luck. This highly publicized incident finally convinced America's police chiefs that they could no longer depend on seat-of-the-pants planning.
"Special weapons and tactics teams moved into a new era after Charles
Whitman climbed into a tower on the first day of August 1966," says Lt. Sid
Heal of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in an article in The
Tactical Edge. "This marked the birthday of the modern police SWAT
(Special Weapons and Tactics) teams concept."

Agreeing in his book, "A Guide to the Development of Special Weapons and
Tactics Teams," retired Captain John A. Kolman, who is also of the Los
Angeles sheriff's department, says, "Prior to 1966, few, if any, law enforcement agencies staffed specialized teams to deal with armed, barricaded suspects. Generally speaking, these assignments were left to the uniformed patrol officer who may or may not have been prepared or equipped to resolve the matter."
It wasn't the tower sniper incident alone, however, that finally convinced
America's police departments that SWAT teams were needed. Other events occuring across the country also had their breath. In 1966, America's inner cities were seething with racial tension and many were poised to explode into mindless violence. In addition, the anitwar movement had recently grown in such numbers and restlessness that America seemed on the verge of plunging into chaos with violence coming from any direction. The incident in Austin was the final impetus America's police chiefs needed.
They knew the violence that had wracked other communities could explode in theirs at any moment. They needed to be ready.
They needed SWAT teams.
Early SWAT
One of the first police departments to form a SWAT team, the Los Angeles
Police Department, is also believed to be the first police department in the
United States to use the acronym SWAT. This unit, formed soon after the
Texas tower sniper incident, met with several early successes, including operations against the Black Panthers in 1969 and the Symbionese

Liberation Army in 1973. The demonstration of what a specially trained and equipped unit could accomplish, encouraged police departments that had been hesitant, to embrace this new concept and form their own SWAT teams. It didn't take long for these police departments to discover the worth of their investments because they quickly found that the high- profile criminal acts, which had previously been occurring in someone else's community, now suddenly began spreading to theirs.
While previous to the 1960s, events such as the Elder Avenue shoot-out occurred only once a decade or so in a community, the Texas tower sniper incident became a watershed in the history of American crime. Suddenly, any highly publicized crime in one part of the country resulted in copycat crimes in other parts. For example, during the 10 years or so following the
1971 hijacking of Northwest Orient Flight 305 out of Portland, Ore., aircraft hijacking became an almost daily occurrence. Then, once police departments learned how to respond successfully to hijackings and they faded in number, hostage- taking became the high-profile crime of choice, which, in turn, was followed by mass killings at post offices and fast food restaurants, and heavily armed criminals shooting it out with police. All of these high- risk events and their copycat offshoots called for more and more use of SWAT teams.
Growing Need for SWAT
This rapid increase in the number of high- risk crimes naturally had an effect on police SWAT teams. Many of the early teams, formed in the late
1960s and early 1970s, began as small units serving only in an on-call

status. These teams carried equipment just a little better than the average street cop carried, and their mission often consisted of simply using brute force to overpower criminal opposition. However, the rapid growth in the number and scope of spectacular and high- risk crimes soon changed this.
In the 1980s and 1990s, police SWAT teams began growing in size and many became permanent, full- time units.
"Our team is half again as large today as it was in the 1980s," said Lt.
Stephen Robertson, tactical commander for the Indianapolis Police
Department SWAT team. "And we've now had to go to full-time status because our call outs have increased so dramatically."
Police SWAT teams, when coming up against barricaded and dangerous criminals, also quickly learned that the better the equipment and technology they used, the better the results of their mission. The more intelligence they could gather, and the better their armament, the more likely their chances of success. Successful SWAT teams, therefore, began acquiring not just high- tech automatic weapons with laser sights and sound suppressors, but also the best in high-tech surveillance and intelligence gathering equipment, and the newest in nonlethal weaponry.
SWAT teams began acquiring and using devices and equipment such as
Laser Bugs that pick up sounds inside a site through a laser beam bounced off of a window, pinhole cameras, flashbangs, rubber impact cartridges, ballistic shields and dozens of other pieces of high- tech equipment.

"The equipment SWAT teams use today is many times more sophisticated than it was when I began in SWAT in the 1970s," Cal Black, former FBI
SWAT commander and now security manager for the National Bank of
Detroit. "Because of this high- tech equipment, the ability of SWAT teams has increased dramatically."
Along with ever- improving equipment, the evolution of police SWAT teams over the last 30 years has also seen a change in how the teams operate.
After a number of early missions, police SWAT teams began learning that, if enough time passed, they could often persuade barricaded criminals and hostages takers to surrender peacefully. The firmest resolve, they discovered, would buckle after enough hours passed, and if presented with an honorable way to surrender, the barricaded criminal or hostage taker would often do so. This led to more and more use of hostage negotiators by SWAT teams.
Police commanders know that hostage negotiators and SWAT tactical officers require individuals with traits and talents that are dramatically different. Hostage negotiators must be able to sit and listen patently for hours, and must have the ability to verbally convince a perpetrator that surrender is in his best interest. Tactical officers, on the other hand, depend on speed, surprise and violence of action to resolve an incident.
Because of this difference, in the first years of police SWAT teams, the hostage negotiators were often a unit separate from the SWAT team and called in only when needed. This, however, has changed. Today, in most
SWAT teams, the hostage negotiators are an integral part of the team.

Hostage negotiators and tactical officers are now all part of one team because SWAT commanders have found through many incidents that, in order to achieve success, each one needs the other. Hostage negotiators need the tactical officers to contain and stabilize and incident before they can go to work, and the tactical officers need the hostage negotiators to peacefully resolve the incident once they have contained it.
Since their success so often depends on each other, hostage negotiators and tactical SWAT officers are not only part of one team, but today, many times they train together in order for each side to see how the other side works. In this way, they can complement and assist each other.
"By training together, you develop an appreciation of each other's mission," said Indianapolis Deputy Chief Jerry Barker, head of the department's hostage negotiators. "By training together, you also tend to gain a lot of insight into how each other operate," he says.
All of these changes and improvements over the last 30 years have changed police SWAT teams from being the loosely bound units they once were where their primary function was to charge in and forcibly overpower their opposition. Now they are teams of highly trained, well- equipped specialists who have a continuum of choices to use when confronting a high- risk incident. The scene on Elder Avenue, of 200 officers firing thousands of rounds with no plan, has become just a memory. While these types of crimes haven't gone away, the police now have proven and tested

plans for handling them. In just a few decades, the dedicated men and women of SWAT have become one of law enforcement's greatest assets.
Robert L. Snow is a 20-year member of the Indianapolis Police Department and is the author of several books, including his latest, "SWAT Teams."