Steven opens up a post that starts off with a battering ram and ends before an argument can start. But we here at the Ego's Nest don't fear arguments!

There are a couple of problems with militarized police departments. Of course, one of them falls under the "lessons of history" department and is one of the reasons we have, for example, the Posse Comitatus Act et cetera. And this is indeed a good argument.

There's a more practical side, though, and that goes to how police heavy weapon units get deployed.

The original SWAT teams were put together to deal with a particular kind of crime - the hostage situation. The criminals are static, they're communicating with officers (because you can't get ransom if they don't know you want it), and there's a very strong bias toward keeping the situation static and calm, because a lot of the time if you do it right, the criminal will surrender himself without hurting anyone. (And the spread of this book of tactics is one reason that taking hostages is almost unheard of these days; the crook just doesn't win anymore.)

But the steps you take against a hostage-taker are different from the ones you take against a "mucker" (Marc Danziger, the Armed Liberal, started using this to describe the kind of crazy who commits suicide-murder by shooting up a crowd, and it works pretty well). Against a hostage-taker, the most important step is to make sure his escape routes are completely cut off (because he won't kill the hostages unless he's sure he can get away). Against a mucker, if you immediately move to secure the perimeter, by the time you get around to trying to intervene, the mucker has killed everyone he intends to kill and is probably just going to commit suicide.

If your police had a heavy weapons unit that would arrive at scenes like this, charge in and either make sure everyone is all right, or engage Bad Guy With Gun in a firefight, that would be one thing, and it would justify all the automatic weapons and armor and battering rams they could carry. But almost by definition, your heavy weapons unit is a SWAT unit, and so the first thing they do when they get to the scene is make sure nobody gets away... and they do it carefully and methodically, because they're working out of a manual and nobody wants to get shot because they weren't being careful.

And it's not like that isn't a reasonable impulse. Cops don't like getting shot up any more than anyone else.

But the police aren't soldiers, who can justify that sort of thing in terms of force preservation and shrug off the losses. Think of firefighters. When they arrive on the scene of a fire, sure, they don't necessarily charge in like Leeroy Jenkins. But if there's lives at stake, they're expected to risk their own, even if it means going into a burning building that might be ready to come down. There's a manual that says "don't do that!", but firefighters do it anyway, and the ones that do are heroes.

There are heroic cops, too; but SWAT training is completely against "being a hero" in that sense. On average, the SWAT officer is a lot less likely to go in fast when it might save a life; their whole training is only to go in as part of a coordinated, well-planned assault, and that's how they do it, by and large.

On top of that, there's the Rodney Balko problem - police departments get these SWAT teams, and by and large they don't need them for hostage situations (because, well, there are SWAT teams and it doesn't pay!) So they use them for the other dangerous-assault job they have - serving search warrants for drugs, using a quick entry to avoid "flushing the stash". This leads to all sorts of other problems - innocent people shot by police, or shooting police, because all they know is that there are men with guns storming into their house in the middle of the night.

And frankly, that's not worth the cost. I'd rather a lot of people flush their blow when the cops come knocking than have the cops bust down a door, shoot a man's dog, then shoot the man for objecting...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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