What happened to SWAT?

[Christian Liberty]

I know all of this is just personal anecdote, but I'm curious what you guys think of it nonetheless.

Back in 2011, before I became a consistent libertarian (I supported Ron at the time but was more constitutionalist than minarchist, and the idea that the entire system was evil and messed up hadn't really crossed my mind yet... I was still among the most libertarian in my class...), I took a Law Enforcement class, with my goal being to ultimately become an attorney. Our teacher was a former cop, in his early 60's, who had been both a street officer and a member of SWAT.

Now, when I think of SWAT, justified or not, I think of people getting murdered by cops. Yet, this guy (according to his own claims, I suppose its possible that he was lying... but I kind of doubt it) had never shot at anybody, and had only been shot at one time.

Mind you, I'm not saying working for the police department was ever justified, but what happened? Apparently this guy was actually on SWAT and yet never fired a bullet. And now we see it happening all the time.

Has a lot changed in a relatively short time? IIRC he had retired in like 2006, but I'm not sure.

[jkr]

they know now their time is short and the asset grab is on (more supply if less demand i.e. people)

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

That TV show went off in the 1970s. The show was, of course, so damn cool that some people just could not let it go. Crime actually started to go down shortly after that, so the people who turned fantasy into reality had to start manufacturing criminals.

[CPUd]

The original purpose of SWAT was for hostage situations. They would only bust down a door if they knew they could go in and get the drop on the suspects. Otherwise, they would just surround the place until someone could talk the suspects into giving up. Then they started using SWAT to serve warrants for drug stings.

[Zippyjuan]

The times they don't shoot anybody doesn't make as much news so it may just seem like more people get killed.

[FindLiberty]

...it may just seem like more people get killed.

Yea, 50% is attributable to "seems like" news and xx% more may be an actual recent increase.

Long term (40 years?), it "seems like" the comparison is very dramatic.

Need hard #'s!

[Anti Federalist]

I know all of this is just personal anecdote, but I'm curious what you guys think of it nonetheless.

Back in 2011, before I became a consistent libertarian (I supported Ron at the time but was more constitutionalist than minarchist, and the idea that the entire system was evil and messed up hadn't really crossed my mind yet... I was still among the most libertarian in my class...), I took a Law Enforcement class, with my goal being to ultimately become an attorney. Our teacher was a former cop, in his early 60's, who had been both a street officer and a member of SWAT.

Now, when I think of SWAT, justified or not, I think of people getting murdered by cops. Yet, this guy (according to his own claims, I suppose its possible that he was lying... but I kind of doubt it) had never shot at anybody, and had only been shot at one time.

Mind you, I'm not saying working for the police department was ever justified, but what happened? Apparently this guy was actually on SWAT and yet never fired a bullet. And now we see it happening all the time.

Has a lot changed in a relatively short time? IIRC he had retired in like 2006, but I'm not sure.

Quite a bit has changed.

But the fact is, as I've often said, that most encounters with cops will not go badly.

Nor are the numbers of cop killings going up. They are down, at historic low levels.

Nor or the numbers of Mundanes killed by cops. Those numbers are down, overall, as well.

But this is more reflection of the decline in violent crime as whole.

What IS increasing is the number of SWAT raids, (over 40,000 a year) the number of innocent people subject to being terrorized by heavily armed state raiders, the number of innocent people abused and beaten by cops.

Basically, the increase of militarized policing showing you who the boss is.

[fr33]

You should read Radley Balko's book. http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americas/dp/1610392116

Killing people isn't the only thing they do. They also steal property, frame people, beat people up, land helicopters on lawns, etc etc.

It's not like even a slim majority of people are sitting in their houses prepared to defend their house from SWAT teams. SWAT teams usually perform no-knock raids in the middle of the night while the family is asleep.

[acptulsa]

When it was first created, a SWAT team was a bunch of officers who would converge on a hostage scene or somewhere someone was threatening to shoot up a neighborhood, meet the van, get their special weapons, and transform themselves from beat cops into the SWAT team.

Nowadays we seem to have full time SWAT teams sitting on their asses bored to death and itching for something to do more than three times a year. With bosses who are trying to figure out how to justify the expense. And I'm willing to bet the change came because some Congress decided not to give local departments their portion of the money Congress extorts from their local citizens unless they had full time dedicated boondoggle SWAT teams. Don't know that for sure, but it smells like fedgov.com to me.