Free Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko Page A

police actions.
    Kraska was both alarmed and intrigued. The experience started him down a road of scholarship focused on examining the ways in which the US military was increasingly being drawn into enforcing drug laws. In particular, Kraska began looking into indirect militarization: the rise of SWAT teams and other paramilitary police teams; what might be called the criminal-justice-industrial complex; and the increasing tendency of public officials to address social problems with martial rhetoric and imagery and to suggest military-like solutions,from the “wars” on crime and drugs, to the heavy weaponry and vehicles that police were beginning to use, to the proposals that juvenile offenders be punished in “boot camps.” Kraska obtained funding to conduct two broad surveys of police departments on their use of SWAT teams. His resulting reports systematically documented a previously unheeded, two-decade insurgence of militarism into just about every city and county in America.
    The numbers were staggering. By 1995, 89 percent of American cities with 50,000 or more people had at least one SWAT team, double the percentage from 1980. Among smaller cities (populations between 25,000 and 50,000), 65 percent had a SWAT team by 1995, a 157 percent increase over ten years. Nearly 20 percent of all police officers in these towns served on the SWAT team, a phenomenon that Kraska dubbed “the militarization of Mayberry.” By 1995, combining these figures for cities and towns, 77 percent of all American cities with over 25,000 people had a SWAT team.
    Kraska then asked police departments that had maintained SWAT teams going back to the early 1980s to report how many times the teams had been deployed over the years, and for what reasons. Again, the numbers were jaw-dropping. In the early 1980s, the aggregate annual number of SWAT deployments was just under 3,000. By 1995 it was just under 30,000. In fifteen years, the number of annual SWAT team deployments in America had jumped by 937 percent. Some SWAT teams, Kraska found, were conducting up to 700 raids per year. What was precipitating the surge in SWAT activity? The drug war, almost exclusively.
    Logan, Utah, is a typical example of the phenomenon. As of 2011, the city had just under 50,000 people, hadn’t had a murder in five years, and had recently been rated the “safest city in America.” Yet, since the mid-1980s, Logan has had its own SWAT team. What does a SWAT team do in a city with no violent crime? It creates violence out of nonviolent crime. “We haven’t really had a whole lot of barricaded subjects, and certainly we haven’t had an active gunman shooter,” a department spokesman told the local paper. But it was nice to have the SWAT team around just in case. Inthe meantime, he said, it’s “mostly used for assistance on high-risk search warrants”—“high-risk” meaning all or most drug warrants. “We’ve destroyed some doors over the years that maybe wouldn’t have gotten destroyed if there wasn’t a SWAT team, but it’s all in the name of trying to make a high-risk situation more safe for everyone.” 44
    Some 43 percent of the police departments in Kraska’s survey told him they had used active-duty military personnel to train the SWAT team when it was first started, and 46 percent were training on a regular basis “with active-duty military experts in special operations,” usually the Army Rangers or Navy Seals. This was the goal of the joint task forces set up during the Bush administration—to encourage cooperation between local police, federal police, and the military in order to foster a battlefield approach to drug enforcement. In a follow-up interview, one department’s SWAT commander told Kraska:
We’ve had special forces folks who have come right out of the jungles of Central and South America. These guys get into the real shit. All branches of military service are involved in providing training to law enforcement. US Marshals