Today’s count is surely much higher.īalko’s book offers a depressingly abundant supply of all-too-real examples of city and county police officers shooting innocent citizens, getting shot themselves, dispatching beloved family pets, doing major damage to private dwellings, shredding the Constitution, souring relations between police and community, and scarring families for life. And in 2005, the last year of collected data, there were more than 50,000 SWAT operations. By the ’80s the number had grown to approximately 3,000. In the ’70s, the nation’s roughly 18,000 municipal, county, and state police forces conducted a few hundred such operations a year. (Slumbering across town, occupants of the “right” house, including a suspected low-level, nonviolent drug offender, were shortly after awakened by the same occupying force.)Īs Radley Balko points out in his superb book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, SWAT incidents of the type fictionalized above are proliferating at a frightening pace. Nor was it comforting to learn, once the gun and grenade smoke had settled, that the cops had hit the wrong house. To say the SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) raid was the most astonishing, traumatic experience of your life is an understatement. 40 caliber shot to the head, another to the chest. With a Glock semiautomatic, one of the cops silences Boomer: a. Your son follows, wailing hysterically.įinally comes Boomer, the family’s gentle seven-year-old Golden Retriever, bounding down the hall, voicing his own concern about the invasion. As you’re being shoved to the floor, your partner rushes from the bedroom, screaming your name, demanding to know what is happening. “Hands behind your head!” belts out the uniformed chorus. The knife in question? A standard, dullbladed utensil you’d been using to slather mustard and mayo on the sandwiches.
“Drop the knife! Drop the knife!” roar his nine fellow officers, each pointing a rifle or a pistol at your chest.
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