Stamper is a 35-year police veteran, and the former police chief for the city of Seattle.

He writes:

Throughout my career I witnessed the manifold harms caused by certain traditions of American law enforcement. The “paramilitary mentality,” fostered by organizational structure and workplace culture, has done grave damage to community-police relations, civil liberties, police crimefighting effectiveness, organizational communication, and the morale and safety of our police officers.

My senior thesis at San Diego State University, back in the early seventies, was entitled “The Community as DMZ: Breaking Down the Police Paramilitary Bureaucracy.” For a more up-to-date version, check out Chapter 16 of my 2005 book, Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Expose of the Dark Side of American Policing — just out in paperback. It’s entitled, “Demilitarizing the Police.”

Having, I hope, “credentialed” myself as a strong proponent of police demilitarization, and finding myself in basic agreement with your general theme, I offer two caveats.

First, officer safety was and remains a paramount concern of mine. I believed it was my responsibility as a police leader in both San Diego and Seattle to do everything I could to foster the health, well-being, and safety of every officer, to help ensure that each would make it home at the end of shift.

Second, there’s no substitute for a well-organized, well-trained, thoroughly disciplined cadre of officers, including snipers, who can be called in to: (1) take out a killer or killers (think schools, day-care centers, a McDonald’s restaurant), (2) secure the capture (or slaying, if necessary) of an armed hostage-taking barricaded suspect, or, yes, (3) serve certain high-risk warrants (think armed and dangerous bank robbers, murder suspects, fugitives, others whose track record makes clear their willingness and/or intent to kill).

Having said that, I believe many if not most police departments have developed an over-reliance on SWAT, using special weapons and tactics in situations where they’re clearly uncalled for, where, as you suggest, they can escalate the dangers of a situation. Employing SWAT and paramilitary tactics to take down a nonviolent drug offender, for example, may help justify the existence or expansion of the SWAT force at budget time, and it may provide a “real-world” training drill for SWAT members. But it can multiply the risk of innocent people being killed or injured, and in the eyes of many it does enormous violence to the image of police officers.

I agree with you: cops are paid to take risks. Too often, patrol officers - every police department’s first responders — hold back, failing to take action when they’re desperately needed. It’s what they’re taught. It’s policy. Wait for SWAT. Tell that to the parents of children killed during that seemingly interminable wait for the specialized paramilitary unit of the local PD. Tell that to a competent, courageous patrol officer whose instinct, and mission, is to save lives. I’m not speaking out of both sides of my mouth: While SWAT’s the right response for established “stand-offs,” there are many situations that demand an immediate, if not laser-like response by patrol officers. (Better police departments across the country have grasped this, and are insisting that first-responders do everything possible to keep a dangerous situation from escalating.)

Of course, many SWAT operations are aimed at taking down drug offenders. Dealers or not, armed or not, violent or not, paramilitary tactics employed in their arrests put them, their neighbors, and the police at enormous risk. And for what? We arrest drug offenders because we believe prohibition is (1) wise and necessary, and (2) a workable solution to the country’s drug problem. In fact, prohibition and the drug war have caused far more harm than good.

An end to that war would strengthen community-police relations, enhance public safety and health, and reduce the numbers of innocent people killed or injured in police paramilitary raids.

Stamper and I are in complete agreement, here. I have no quarrel with the use of SWAT teams in barricade, hostage, or other situations in which the suspect poses an immediate threat to the community. But using them to serve drug warrants — even against dealers presumed to be armed — presents an unnecessary escalation of violence and confrontation.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 8:17 am 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.