ACLU Report on Militarized Policing: SWAT Team Deployments, Federal Programs Foster Warrior Mentalit [View all]

[WillyT]

ACLU Report on Militarized Policing: SWAT Team Deployments, Federal Programs Foster Warrior Mentality
By: Kevin Gosztola - FDL
Tuesday June 24, 2014 11:45 am


Police in South Carolina pose with a BearCat (from ACLU’s report on police militarization)

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The American Civil Liberties Union has released a report on the militarization of local law enforcement in the United States, which shows how the vast majority of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team deployments are for executing search warrants for drugs and the federal government is incentivizing the use of military-grade weaponry.

A statistical analysis [PDF] of around 800 SWAT deployments from 2011-2012 and conducted by 20 law enforcement agencies formed the basis for most of the report. It found that, even though SWAT teams originally created to handle hostage and emergency situations, 79% of incidents the ACLU studied involved a SWAT team being deployed to conduct a search of a person’s home. More than 60% of the incidents examined involved a search for drugs.

“Of the incidents studied in which SWAT was deployed to search for drugs in a person’s home, the SWAT teams either forced or probably forced entry into a person’s home using a battering ram or other breaching device 65 percent of the time,” according to the ACLU’s report. “For drug investigations, the SWAT teams studied were almost twice as likely to force entry into a person’s home than not, and they were more than twice as likely to use forced entry in drug investigations than in other cases.”

The use of tactical weapons in drug searches primarily impacts people of color. Increasingly, SWAT teams are being deployed to engage in violent tactics when children are present.

For example, in 2010, 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley Jones was killed just after midnight when a SWAT team threw a flashbang grenade into the living room where she was sleeping. The grenade burned her blanket and a member of the SWAT team burst into the home, fired a single shot and killed her.

More recently, in May 2014, a toddler in Atlanta, Georgia, “a team of SWAT officers armed with assault rifles burst into the room where the family was sleeping. Some of the kids’ toys were in the front yard, but the Habersham County and Cornelia police officers claimed they had no way of knowing children might be present. One of the officers threw a flashbang grenade into the room.”

The grenade gave 19-month-old Bou Bou third-degree burns, and he was placed into a medically-induced coma. The blast wounded him so severely that a hole in his chest exposed his ribs...

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More: http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/06/24/aclu-report-on-militarized-policing-swat-team-deployments-federal-programs-foster-warrior-mentality/

ACLU Report (.pdf file): https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/jus14-warcomeshome-report-web-rel1.pdf