From a 1999 article in the San Antonio News-Express (no link — found it on Lexis)

A 48-year-old armed man was killed in a hail of gunfire early Saturday by a special operations police squad during what police said was an attempt to stop him from committing suicide.

Well, I guess it worked. They certainly prevented him from committing suicide. This is actually getting increasingly common — sending SWAT teams to deal with suicide cases. Seems to me it’s a self-evidently bad idea. One of the more famous incidents took place in Albuquerque at about the same time as the case above. From a New York Times article:

Late on a chilly October night three years ago, Larry Harper told his family that life was no longer worth living and headed out the door with a handgun. He had slipped back to using crack cocaine after being in drug treatment and was ashamed to face his wife and brother.

The family called the Albuquerque police for help. In response, a paramilitary unit, nine men clad in camouflage and armed with automatic rifles and stun grenades, stormed into the park where Mr. Harper had gone in despair.

”Let’s go get the bad guy” were the last words Hope Harper heard as the Special Weapons and Tactics squad brushed by her on a hunt for her husband, leaving the family in the dark at the edge of the park. Police marksmen chased Mr. Harper through the woods, found him cowering behind a juniper tree and shot him to death from 43 feet away. He had committed no crime and had threatened only himself. The police said the fact that he was holding a gun made him a target.

Albuquerque’s SWAT team was notorious in the 1990s for being quick to pull the trigger. The city had more than 40 police shootings over a period of about four years, including 11 by the SWAT team — remarkable numbers for a city of its size. After a series of lawsuits and scathing independent reviews, the city put in some reforms, though it looks like in at least one case, by 2004 the SWAT team was back to answering suicide calls.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2006 at 6:38 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.