Over the past few decades, SWAT teams have gone from a big city thing to an every city thing. Cops with military equipment, training, and even military assistance are no longer rare, they are commonplace. And with the police increasingly looking like a domestic military force, there needs to be accountability and the people need to know just how pervasive it is.
This week the ACLU announced it was launching an investigation into the use of military equipment and tactics by domestic police forces, something that hasn’t yet been done on a national level. While we’ve seen information about some specific departments and the new tanks they’ve purchased or the latest SWAT raid, there are no real statistics on how often these toys and teams are being deployed.
Do local police departments really need tanks?
“Equipping state and local law enforcement with military weapons and vehicles, military tactical training, and actual military assistance to conduct traditional law enforcement erodes civil liberties and encourages increasingly aggressive policing, particularly in poor neighborhoods and communities of color,” said Kara Dansky, from the ACLU’s Center for Justice according to a press release from the organization. “We’ve seen examples of this in several localities, but we don’t know the dimensions of the problem.”
The ACLU has filed requests in 23 states so far, seeking information on: how often and under what circumstances SWAT teams are deployed, what equipment has been purchased with federal Homeland Security dollars, what sort of military training is taking place within departments, what kinds of injuries and deaths have been sustained in militaristic raids, and how often the departments are using things like drones, GPS tracking, and military weaponry and equipment.
The federal government seems to be pushing the militarization of police by offering incentives for agencies to purchase equipment previously only used in foreign conflicts. Forty years ago, for instance, a police department with a tank would have been unheard of.
Originally, as Radley Balko reports, SWAT teams were formed for use in only the most dangerous and specific of circumstances. Now they are largely deployed in drug cases, where the suspect is wanted for a nonviolent crime.
Police militarization isn’t only frightening, it has the potential to infringe on civil liberties and further erode any remaining trust between police and civilians. Also, these tactics are frequently used in poor, urban, and minority communities.
Time will tell how forthcoming the police agencies are with the ACLU’s requests or if they will have to go to court to get the information. Still, their findings will be more than we currently have and will likely trigger a greater movement to oppose further domestic-military action.
About David Matson