The town of Paradise, California (pop. 26,000) just got its own SWAT team. Note in the article about how the SWAT team is training by taking over an empty elementary school the repeated warning about school shootings, and how they can happen “anywhere.” Despite their exceedingly rare frequency, the media frenzy over school shootings in the mid-1990s gave many small towns the impetus to start a paramilitary police team. And of course once in place, the teams were then used primarily for the service of drug warrants.

In any case, the amusing thing about this story is the symbolism in the accompanying photo, in which a SWAT team member appears to be pointing a gun at liberty herself!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 7:43 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.