By Blaine Stum
The sun pokes through the blinds of a silent house at 6 a.m.. You and your children are sound asleep. You think you hear voices at the door, but because you are half asleep, you are not sure if it’s a dream. Then a crash rings through the house and jolts you up. A flashbang grenade shatters your bedroom window and temporarily blinds you. You stumble out of bed, confused, afraid and worried that your children are in danger. You manage to grab the children and run to the living room only to see six men dressed in battle dress uniforms with assault rifles trained on you. The red dots from their laser sights mark your children. For the next two hours, you and your children are confined to the living room. You cannot speak or go to the bathroom. You have no idea what you, or anyone in your family, has done to warrant this.
This might sound like fiction to some people. However, the sad reality is that the story above describes a case recently filed in District Court in which the plaintiff sues Spokane County for using excessive force and unlawfully detaining her and her children. Since the raid, her family has lived under a cloud of fear and intense anxiety. Welcome to the world of militarized police. Fueled by cash and handouts from the federal government’s racist War on Drugs, local police departments across the country have been not-so-slowly collecting military grade weaponry and equipment to unleash in raids and standoffs. Paramilitary units such as the SWAT Team are a regular fixture of local police departments, where they used to be rare. The grotesque effects of this increasing militarization were on full display in Ferguson recently when protesters demanding justice for Michael Brown were met with excessive, often injurious, force. Many people were witnessing a trend they knew little about, even though certain communities have lived with this for decades.
The Spokane Police Department (SPD) as well as the Spokane County Sheriff Department (SCFD) have come along for the ride on this trend like so many other police departments across the country. SCFD recently had two new military choppers given to them and have been the owners of a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle for several years. The SPD has an Armored Personnel Carrier, several 37mm and 40mm grenade launchers for chemical munitions such as tear gas, and a SWAT Team with extensive military training fitted in battle ready uniforms. If this is not what you envision when you hear the word “police,” you are not alone. SWAT Teams were created for the purpose of handling extreme situations: shootouts, hostage rescue and rioting. They were a part of the police department, and yet they took on a different set of skills and duties than a traditional police officer would. Now they are used most often for routine warrant service. In an analysis of 110 SWAT Raids from 2011, 2012 and 2013, I found that 59 percent of all SWAT activations were for warrant service. Of those 59 percent that were for warrant service, 78 percent were specifically for drug warrants. While it’s certainly true that dealers and addicts can get violent, the idea that a couple of strung out heroin addicts or two small-time dealers with a pistol two rooms away from them require the same equipment and blunt force we often used against insurgents and paramilitary groups in Iraq and Afghanistan seems more than a little far-fetched.
Beyond constituting excessive force, there is also the issue of whom these raids impact the most. Twenty-four percent of all SWAT raids that occurred at a residence in the time frame analyzed took place with children inside. It’s not hard to imagine they will have a difficult time trusting law enforcement after experiencing a raid like the one described at the beginning of this post. The vast majority of these raids also took place in Census tracts where the percentage of people living below the poverty line was greater than 17 percent and in Census tracts with a higher number of African American or Latino residents. This is despite the fact that there is very little difference in rates of drug use between the poor and the rich or Whites, Latinos and African Americans. As a community, we have been lucky enough to not experience a situation like Ferguson, but that does not mean we will stay lucky. Unchecked or unchallenged, police militarization has the ability to further decrease trust between the police departments and the citizens they serve and increase the likelihood of a spiral of violence. This should concern everyone in our community.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/21/1379248/-Detroit-police-officer-who-shot-7-year-old-girl-in-botched-raid-returns-to-duty
This is just one example of the potential “side-effects” of military-style policing (and the no-knock entries that many departments justify).
Within my own family, one of my foster sisters developed a deep mistrust of the police after she witnessed police brutality aimed at her own parents when she was younger than 5 years-old. When “peacekeepers” are armored like storm troopers, their humanity is lost in the eyes of impressionable children. And, unfortunately, with the recent string of publicized police brutality, there are more and more questions arising about their ability to serve as peacekeepers. The combination will continue to lead to a deep mistrust of those mandated to protect and serve.
Blaine, how many police officers have you personally sat down with to discuss this so-called “militarization?” Michael Brown’s death has been deemed justified according to everyone except those who failed to read the facts of the case, and when townspeople riot — no matter the reason — the police *ought* to respond with commensurate force to restore order.
Your article amounts to little more than a propagandized witch hunt, based on a sandy foundation of media narrative and out-of-context statistics. So what if 59% of those raids were to serve warrants and 79% were for drug warrants? If those warrants were for people marked as “armed and dangerous”, I’d want all the protection I could get too. Just because the police force takes necessary precaution to keep their men safe (to get home to their own families, perhaps?) doesn’t indicate militarization, and its damaging to society as a whole (and, I think, to your credibility) to suggest such things.
Guilty people are guilty people, no matter what color their skin is. Sure there are some (emphasis on *some* – not all, not most) police situations that are unfortunate and sad situations, but police are still doing their jobs the vast majority of the time.
Besides, if you were being robbed at gunpoint, who are you gonna call if not the police?
Greetings,
I’ve actually had occasion to discuss this issue with numerous police officers, including the Chief of Police of the City of Spokane, who sees militarization of police departments as a significant problem in maintaining good community-law enforcement relations.
It absolutely matters that most SWAT callouts are for routine warrant service. SWAT was never meant to supplant the duties of regular officers; and most of the people who were served warrants in the data the ACLU and I analyzed were not armed and dangerous as you infer with no evidence. As a matter of fact, many of them didn’t even have a weapon on premises. SWAT callouts occur based on a subjective scoring matrix used by police departments. For instance, on the matrix used by SPD, if you have “a history of mental illness” you score 8 points, which is more points than someone with a history of violent offending, or someone affiliated with a gang. The idea that a mental illness, in and of itself, is a predictor of violence is not supported by *any* research. (It’s also worth noting that SCSD’ matrix ranks the same categories differently….).
I’m not anti-police Matthew. I actually work with members of our PD extensively. I’ve helped train them as a matter of fact, and have good relationships with many officers. That does not mean I am going to refrain from criticizing police based on what I and many others believe is a problem.