Yet another SWAT reality serieis is coming to your television.

If there’s anything more troubling than sending an urban warfare team after nonviolent drug offenders, it’s putting the the entire assault on TV to entertain the masses. I wonder. Will they televise the botched raids, too? The TV show Cops has actually sent cameras on several raids that ended up targeting the wrong address. At the request of police, each time they’ve decided not to air the footage.

If you can’t wait, here’s some scary video from a SWAT bust in Spokane, Washington. Note that the SWAT officers really don’t look any different than a platoon of soldiers. Note also that though the target of this raid may (or may not, for all we know) have been a gang member, they found no drugs and no weapons on him. For all that violence and confrontation, they nabbed him for a few shells they found in his car.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 7:09 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.