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SWATs Gone Wild: Police State Lite Edition
Feral
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You may have heard that the ACLU just ran a report on police militarization in the United States. (PDF Link)
Some highly disturbing - yet sadly unsurprising - things have come out of this report.
Police departments justify the use of SWAT teams by arguing that they need them for taking out heavily armed gangs and cartels. But from the report:
— 62 percent of SWAT raids were for the purpose of conducting drug searches.
— Just 7 percent of SWAT raids were "for hostages, barricade, or active shooter scenarios."
— SWAT raids are directed disproportionately against people of color — 30 percent of the time the "race of individual people impacted" was black, 11 percent of the time Latino, 20 percent white and 30 percent unknown.
— Armored personnel vehicles that local law enforcement agencies have received through grants from the Department of Homeland Security are most commonly used for drug raids and not school shootings and terrorist situations.
— In cases in which police cited the possible presence of a weapon in the home as a reason for utilizing a SWAT team, weapons were found only 35 percent of the time.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/06/24/325236889/report-points-to-dangerous-militarization-of-u-s-law-enforcement
62 percent of the SWAT raids surveyed were to conduct searches for drugs.
Just under 80 percent were to serve a search warrant, meaning eight in 10 SWAT raids were not initiated to apprehend a school shooter, hostage taker, or escaped felon (the common justification for these tactics), but to investigate someone still only suspected of committing a crime.
In fact, just 7 percent of SWAT raids were “for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.”
In at least 36 percent of the SWAT raids studies, no contraband of any kind was found. The report notes that due to incomplete police reports on these raids this figure could be as high as 65 percent.
SWAT tactics are disproportionately used on people of color.
65 percent of SWAT deployments resulted in some sort of forced entry into a private home, by way of a battering ram, boot, or some sort of explosive device. In over half those raids, the police failed to find any sort of weapon, the presence of which was cited as the reason for the violent tactics.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/06/24/new-aclu-report-takes-a-snapshot-of-police-militarization-in-the-united-states/
And to make things even worse, some SWAT teams have incorporated themselves so they can gain the benefits of being a private company... with none of the drawbacks.
Some of these LECs [Law Enforcement Councils] have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations, not government agencies. And therefore, they say they’re immune from open records requests. Let’s be clear. These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they’ve incorporated, they’re immune to Massachusetts open records laws. The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get or who they’re primarily used against.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/06/26/massachusetts-swat-teams-claim-theyre-private-corporations-immune-from-open-records-laws/
I'm not going to mince words: this is what a proto-police-state looks like. It may feel like dystopian fiction because if you're white and not-poor, you're mostly insulated from it.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
+1
Posts
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
It's not unreasonable to say, based on this data, that SWAT is deployed in the U.S. about once per day. I hope that strikes the reader as really fucking crazy.
Many problems could be fixed if we had the political will to fix them.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/26/pentagon-war-zone-main-street-america-militarized-police-forces
Yeah but this would be relatively simple. Just a law that boils down to "don't do that shit."
Whereas things like the disproportionate impact on minorities, the overuse of SWAT on drug raids, and the general militarization of police agencies are tied into larger problems with the culture of US criminal justice.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
In London alone, you saw 407 deployments in the fy 2006-2007 by SFOs (SWAT equivalent - the number of AFO armed officers attending calls was significantly larger than that, before you bring up the unarmed nature of the police).
Probably because those are exactly the people you want attending a number of high risk calls. Because alongside the equipment provided, they are orders of magnitude better trained in resolving a decent number of high risk situations.
I would imagine that statistic is pretty much the same across the board for similar countries.
Gotta justify that budget somehow.
First, this is not better training. This may be more intense training, but intensive =/= better.
Second, they are not being deployed in high-risk situations. Approximately 35% of homes in the US have guns. SWAT teams find guns in about 35% of raids. In other words, SWAT teams could be battering doors down by blind random selection and have exactly the same results.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It's well-established that police departments exaggerate the threats they face in order to secure funding for specialized pseudomilitary units. This is a problem I've posted about many times before.
This is effectively a police-industrial state. Exaggerate threats to buy toys, then once you have the toys, you gotta use them, right?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It seems reasonable to me that you would deploy assets like armored vehicles & high caliber rifles against persons who are both heavily armed & demonstrably dangerous (The Branch Davidians, for example, or any number of batshit crazy militia groups in the U.S.). Those groups are not especially large in number & do not launch daily raids into communities - so, I would expect that the deployment of SWAT using IFVs / .50 cal / high explosives / etc would likewise be pretty rare.
When you have the police shooting their way into homes on a daily basis to find nothing, and with essentially no cause, that speaks to a relationship between the general public & police that's totalitarian in nature. They're using force for the sake of using it, and why not? There are no consequences for it (quite the contrary: it's increasingly becoming encouraged, and the nonsense is fed into by defense interests who want to sell or re-sell military toys to wannabe GI Joes).
It's worth noting here that the number of people killed by Jihadists in the U.S. is about even with the number of people killed by neo fascist militia, with the latter having a slight edge. If accumulating weapons / armored vehicles & offering special training to police really was about combating terrorism, you would think that the police instruction seminars would be about breaking-up militia compounds rather than anticipating some ridiculous fantasy scenario about Jihadists attacking schools en masse (and you'd also expect to see that the majority of SWAT raid occur on rural militia compounds rather than run down homes in poor neighborhoods).
*cough*
Cliven Bundy
*cough cough*
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I mean, note too that the almost universal understanding during the stand-off in Nevada was that the solution to that problem was not, "Roll in guns blazing!", with the police echoing concerns about public (and personal) safety. They didn't call for IFVs to be deployed or respond to the militia thugs aiming guns at them by immediately turning the area into a bloody warzone, and nobody (well, nobody worth talking about) suggested that this would be the appropriate response.
It's almost as if what the police (and to at least some extent the public) see as reasonable force is entirely calibrated by whether or not the gangsters being confronted are white guys.
The other stuff is harder to deal with. IMO local police departments should be barred from having SWAT teams. Overall, I think justice and the public would be better served if those were made part of the state police. The state would be in a better position to make sure their SWAT members are properly trained and understand the rules, at least in a much better situation than most localities. Being at the state level also might curtail some abuse, since that's more visible than buttfuck nowhere. Plus, at the state level they can set up the SWAT teams so they cover a reasonable area and not be in the situation where they have to choice between likely having all the expenses be a waste of tax payer money because funnily enough even armed drug cartels have no fucking interest in buttfuck nowhere or constantly busting down the doors of unarmed, innocent Americans, who happen to be a minority, so they can claim that they aren't wasting tax payer money. AKA I'm pretty sure most, if not all the states, could do the logistics where their SWAT teams see enough use, without having to fabricate bullshit to justify the costs (Okay, some probably won't properly fund them and keep them underfunded, but that's probably an improvement, if the alternative is local LEOs resorting to abuse to justify the local SWAT team).
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
...I honestly don't even know what effective oversight for police amounts to. Just about everything we've used that was thought would be a great tool for positively modifying police behavior (dash cameras, auditing committees, ethics departments, counselors, etc) has been co-opted into just another political tool (cameras are use to propagandize police actions, committees turn into lobbying bodies for any police activity, ethics departments get filled with quacks and are used to rubber-stamp basically any local policy the police want, counselors are only leveraged to tell boo hoo stories to the public about the difficulties of police work, etc) that benefits police abuse.
It seems to me that revisiting exactly what powers, privileges & duties the police have would be more effective than trying to control expansive police powers / capabilities via whatever channels of oversight.
Those quotes are deeply problematic, but a handful of anecdotes doesn't exactly reflect standard training practices, and the idea that for example NYPD SWAT teams are not better trained than your average team officer at dealing with armed situations is simply not true. Maybe with all those statisitics you're quoting you could try to dig out some on how equal situations are resolved between the two different training levels.
And those stats don't say anything about the judgement of how dangerous the situation is. You're ignoring any number of variables (location, and the percentage of homes raided and whether they can legally possess firearms both jump out to me), and the fact that the proper risk assessment doesn't speak to the outcome of the situation. The situation where the radicalised top tier gang nominal with a history of violence, and access to military weapon gets his home raided and happens to not be there, falls under your figure there.
Like you appreicate "they have guns" is not the single and only factor to judge how dangerous the situation they're going into is right.
Frankly, I have trouble being charitable to your post, because it seems haven't bothered to read the report, or you haven't read it very closely. Some of your criticisms are addressed directly.
Examples, color-coded to make it easy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It's more narrative and opinion piece than it is actually substantial report.
Would you like specific examples?
Oh wait, you already dismissed specific examples as "anecdotes."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
the Concord, North Carolina, threat matrix considers
“religious extremist” to be a risk factor. In addition to
possibly violating the First Amendment,97 predicting risk
on the basis of religious ideology is ineffective for two
reasons: (1) there is no simple link between the adoption
of an ideology and violent action; and (2) it is exceedingly
difficult to craft a coherent model of the kinds of ideologies
or beliefs that could be expected to lead to violence" would probably be a good starting point. More proper citations (nice blog post would follow), and actual analysis of the risk assessment matrix being used would be helpful. Preferably with people who actually know what they're talking about, comparison to other forces they think did things more effectivley etc etc.
As well as less hopping from anecdotes into the vague for example "In
one case, the officer completing the threat matrix, and
perhaps knowing that the woman who was the subject
of the warrant had no serious criminal history, included
the histories of other people (not even confined to other
people at the residence) in calculating the threat score." because my reading of this is that they criticising the fact that the history of other people living at the address being relevant?
It's also got a laundy list of other failings, such as the comparison between intelligence recieved on a live operation, and a pre-planned warrant when they're simply not comparable.
Why is that 'shit'?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
They did post citations for their sources & analysis of their findings. You're using qualifiers like 'people who know what they're actually talking about' or 'REAL citations', and i suspect what you actually mean is, 'things / persons that agree with my opinions / bias' (a No True Scotsman fallacy).
The VERA II model is currently in vogue (in a meta sense, obviously it's always heavily modified both as a whole, and to bend it in line with the working practices of the relevant countries) if you're all that interested.
That doesn't get to be batted off by claiming it's a subjective assessment.
See that paragraph I pulled? That nice blog comment isn't talking about the article, it's talking about the inline citation for the section - which is literally to their own blog.
Naming a threat assessment model that isn't being used by the police forces in question has nearly zero relevance.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
And how do you know that a variation isn't being used? (we'll ignore the fact that the article doesn't seem to be talking about whether it's effective in a specific situation as used by a specific force, but it as an entire idea)
You're not an expert in the field in question, so...
...Your reading / interpretation of it is irrelevant.
I have this suspicion that, whatever VERA II is, the 'studies' that make it 'well backed' are not academic in nature & that it is simply a model that confirms to your personal ideology.
This is the VERA (according to this paper).
One of these deals with personal attitudes towards violence in a somewhat rigorous manner.
The other does not.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The culture of corruption and the " us vs them blue line " shit is to deeply ingrained for any meaningful attempt at change to take root without eradication of the entire system, and a complete rebuild from the ground up using all new personnel trained and ingrained with a new way of thinking.
It's in the report. I just took a screenshot from the PDF and posted it.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I don't. Nor do I know that there isn't a teapot in precisely opposite orbit from the Earth, but when you start positing entities beyond necessity that's a sign you're toeing denialist-level sophistry.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This is literally the only thing called 'VERA' on the FBI's webpage, and I have a feeling that ' Voluntary Early Retirement Authority' is not what is being referenced. :P
EDIT: I mean, the paper linked to by Feral does not read like an academic script to me. There aren't nearly enough charts, for starters. :P
Just because the working protocols on deciding whether any of those elements is in play isn't literally written into the threat assessment itself doesn't mean they haven't been used at all, and the officer isn't answerable to them*. In good faith they're probably not as detailed as VERA and do simplify, but to what extent can't be judged solely from that form.
Ender google takes like two seconds, and breaking things down into sentence by sentence to answer things is obnoxious as hell. Hope that helps.
But yes whether they're suggesting that the criminal history of other people at the address, and the risk factors they pose plays a part in the risk assessment for a warrant obviously matters, and weakens your case if you suggest it doesn't.
*This is by leaps and bounds the most shocking part of the article, which is the importance of indepth accountability, and the seeming failings in a number of forces.
I shouldn't have to do the legwork for something that YOU are claiming is an expert study. You make the claim, you can provide the link that backs your claim up.
From Feral's link:
The Canadian Center for Security and Intelligence Studies is not an academic institute or journal. It's not even a policing agency - it's just an ideological think tank.
From the same link:
Yeah, so it's not an objective tool intended for practical use in the field (and they probably have to toss that disclaimer in there to dodge lawsuits).
VERA = Violent Extremist Risk Assessment and the paper I linked is literally the start of it.
The VERA paper also explicitly corroborates the paragraph in the ACLU paper that Leitner criticized...
In other words, VERA is meant to be used to assess the dangerousness of people already known to be terrorists, whereas the Concord threat assessment is being used for search warrants.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.