Date: Wed Jul 28 22:29:03 1999 From: freematt@coil.com (Matthew Gaylor) Subject: They Couldn't SWAT a Fly But police commando teams are still a To: freematt@coil.com (Matthew Gaylor)
To: freematt@coil.com From: Jim Bovard <jbovard@his.com> Subject: SWATs as Public Menaces
The American Spectator
August, 1999
SECTION: The Public Policy
LENGTH: 1872 words
HEADLINE: They Couldn't SWAT a Fly But police commando teams are still a menace to society.
BYLINE: by James Bovard. ; James Bovard is the author of Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin's Press). http://www.jamesbovard.com
Federal and Colorado ofcials have transformed the April 20 killings at Columbine High School into a law enforcement triumph. Attorney General Janet Reno praised the local police response as "extraordinary," "a textbook" example of "how to do it the right way." President Clinton declared on the Saturday after the shooting that "we look with admiration atŠthe police ofcers who rushed to the scene to save lives."
In fact, the excruciatingly slow response by Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams and other lawmen to the killings in progress turned a multiple homicide into a historic massacre. And federal aid to local law enforcement, by spawning the proliferation of heavily armed but often şat-footed SWAT teams, may actually undermine public safety.
In Littleton, the sheriff's department has shifted ofcial explanations more often than the Clinton legal defense team. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold began their rampage around 11:20 a.m. on April 20. Jefferson County sheriff's spokesmen initially claimed the killers had committed suicide at around 12:30 p.m. After the police came under harsh criticism for the slowness of their response, spokesmen announced that the killers may have committed suicide much earlier-though no precise information has yet been released. Local ofcials at rst also greatly exaggerated the number of fatalities-thus causing the story to have a greater initial impact.
For the rst four days after the shooting, the sheriff's department claimed that, as the Rocky Mountain News reported, once the boys' attack began, Deputy Neil Gardner "ran into a (school) hallway and faced off with one of the two gun-toting teenagers. Gardner and the gunman shot it out before the Jefferson
County deputy retreated to call for help." Law enforcement was criticized by Denver radio hosts and others for the failure of the deputy to stand his ground. Five days after the shooting stopped, Gardner went on "Dateline NBC" and revealed that he had been outside in his patrol car-had driven up when he heard shooting-and that he stopped 50 yards away and red several shots at Harris, but missed. When I asked him about this discrepancy, Steve Davis, spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department, attributed it to the initial confusion just after the shooting.
Much of the press is treating the lawmen as heroes, or at least failing to challenge their more bizarre claims. For instance, Gardner said on "Dateline": "I think with exchanging re, it did allow some-some people that are-that were şeeing the scene to get out of the building. I always will have to live with the fact that, maybe if I could have dropped him, maybe it would have saved one or two more lives." Yet, at the time of this gunre exchange, the teens had killed only two people. If Gardner had hit Harris, Klebold (described as a follower of Harris) might have been unnerved and surrendered, and thus saved up to eleven lives. Two other ofcers arrived, red at one of the teens, and missed.
Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone later explained: "We had initial people there right away, but we couldn't get in. We were way outgunned." Jefferson County SWAT Commander Terry Manwaring, whose team entered the school but proceeded at a glacial pace, said: "I just knew (the killers) were armed and were better equipped than we were." SWAT team members had şak jackets, submachine guns, and fully automatic M-16s-rather more formidable protection and weaponry than the teenagers' shotguns, semiautomatic rişe, and shoddy TEC-9 handgun (which Clinton ludicrously described as an "assault pistol").
SWAT teams made no effort to confront the killers in action, but devoted their efforts to repeatedly frisking students and marching them out of the building with their hands on their heads. Jefferson County Undersheriff John Dunaway bragged to the Denver Post that the evacuation of students "was about as close to perfect under the circumstances as it could be." Even though none of the SWAT teams came under hostile re, Denver SWAT ofcer Jamie Smith claimed: "I don't know how you could have thrown in another factor that would have made things more difcult for us."
Television cameras captured a SWAT team creeping toward the school behind a retruck, each ofcer taking one small step after another, with the group hunched together as if expecting an attack at any moment. This maneuver occurred long after the perpetrators were dead.
SWAT team members did not reach the room where the killers lay until at least three hours after the shooting stopped. Wounded teacher Dave Sanders died, perhaps because the team took four hours to reach the room he was in, even though students had placed a large sign announcing "1 Bleeding to Death" in the window.
Many local SWAT teams descended on the high school parking lot and vicinity after the shooting started. Police spokesmen said most of the SWAT teams were not sent in "for fear that they might set off a new gunght," as the New York Times reported. Sheriff Stone justied the non-response: "We didn't want to have one SWAT team shooting another SWAT team."
The police response was paralyzed by concerns for "ofcer safety." Sheriff's spokesman Davis said, "We had no idea who was a victim and who was a suspect. And a dead police ofcer would not be able to help anyone." Donn Kraemer of the Lakewood SWAT team explained: "If we went in and tried to take them and got shot, we would be part of the problem. We're supposed to bring order to chaos, not add to the chaos." A former law enforcement ofcer who now helps train Colorado police observed: "Everything the SWAT teams did that day was geared around fear. A great şaw in the training for SWAT teams is that they're so worried about ofcer safety that they've lost their ability to ght."
Law enforcement spokesmen worked overtime to turn the debacle into a triumph. Sheriff Stone proclaimed that "early intervention" by the cops who shot at the killers and missed "saved one heck of a lot of kids' lives, by pinning these guys down (Harris and Klebold spent most of their time in the library, where they killed ten people), by putting them on the defensive, instead of the offensive (except for the 13 murder victims), and subsequently probably led to their suicide." But one of the youths had left a suicide note before the carnage began.
Were any students directly harmed by police action? At 12:20 p.m. on the day of the shooting, police on the scene radioed that they needed to be resupplied with ammunition. This is peculiar because, according to ofcial accounts, Harris and Klebold red only a handful of volleys at lawmen. SWAT teams laid down "cover re" as they advanced towards the building. Spokesman Davis could not estimate how many shots were red by the SWAT teams. Denver attorney Jack Beam stated that the sheriff's department may be a target of lawsuits because of possible "friendly re" casualties.(Jefferson County Coroner Nancy Bodelson persuaded a Colorado judge to seal the autopsy reports on the victims-thus making it much more difcult to determine who shot whom. ) Said Beam: "Public ofcials want to make it like you are anti-victim if you want to get to the facts."
The Colorado debacle is ironic in that SWAT teams are routinely criticized for excessive violence against unarmed civilians. Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University estimated that the use of police SWAT teams has " increased by 538 percent" since 1980. Ninety percent of police departments responding to a 1995 survey by Kraska reported having an active paramilitary unit. Kraska told the Washington Post: "We have never seen this kind of policing, where SWAT teams routinely break through a door, subdue all the occupants and search the premises for drugs, cash, and weapons." (Before being sanitized the SWAT acronym originally stood for "Special Weapons Attack Team.")
SWAT teams are most often used for no-knock raids in drug cases. But now hardware may be driving policy; so many cities have police dressed up for war, it is often easier to rely on massive intimidation rather than old- fashioned police work. No-knock raids have become so common that thieves in some places routinely kick down doors and claim to be police. No-knock raids at wrong addresses have become a national scandal. Naturally, some police departments have responded to the problem by seeking to dene it out of existence. New York City Police Commissioner Howard Sar insists that his ofcers have not wrongfully raided someone's house unless they go to a different address than that typed on the search warrant-regardless of whether they have any justication for busting down doors.
SWAT teams are routinely called to deal with people threatening to take their own lives, often with catastrophic results. As the San Antonio Express- News reported on May 23, "A 48-year-old armed man was killed in a hail of gunre early Saturday by a special operations police squad during what police said was an attempt to stop him from committing suicide."
A Fitchburg, Massachusetts SWAT team attacked an apartment building in December 1996, seeking to arrest a drug dealer. However, one of its stun grenades (similar to those the FBI used at Waco) set re to the building and left 24 people homeless.
Once local governments militarize the police, they nd more and more pretexts to send in the troops, if for nothing else than to keep people in place. How else to explain the practice of St. Petersburg, Florida, in deploying SWAT teams to keep order along a parade route? Or of the Greenwich, Connecticut SWAT deployment for crowd control any time lottery jackpots exceed $1 million, as the New York Times reported? Palm Beach County in Florida has twelve separate such teams; weapons were found in fewer than 20 percent of the locations they raided in 1996.
Massive federal aid is fueling this militarization of local police. Since 1995, the Pentagon has deluged local law enforcement with thousands of machine guns, over a hundred armored personnel carriers, scores of grenade launchers, and over a million other pieces of military hardware. The police arms buildup has also been fueled by federal drug-war aid. Instead of relying on street smarts, police departments are resorting to high-tech weaponry, courtesy of Uncle Sam. This is the same mentality that led to zero American combat casualties during the Kosovo bombing but left the land to be protected a shambles.
SWAT teams are becoming an impediment to public safety. There were probably plenty of policemen with the courage to enter Columbine High School and go after the shooters while the killings continued. But the SWAT teams' military- style command structure and their take-no-casualties mindset led to police dallying while civilians died.
Citizens pay taxes so government will guard their rights and safety, not bully them into submission when they go to a parade or buy a lottery ticket, nor kick down their door every time a neighbor accuses them of drug possession. It is time to remember what peace ofcers were hired for, and end the military build-up on Main Street.
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