September 12, 1999|By Diane Cecilia Weber
In the military mind set, the "drug war" has moved from metaphor to real life, with American streets as the "front," American citizens as the "enemy" and law enforcement officers as the warriors.
This mind set has been fed by the Department of Justice. "So let me welcome you to the kind of war our police fight every day," Attorney General Janet F. Reno told a group of defense and intelligence experts in 1994, in preparation for a technology transfer agreement. "And let me challenge you to turn your skills that served us so well in the Cold War to helping us with the war we're now fighting daily in the streets of our towns and cities across the nation."
SWAT units, originally created in the 1960s to deal with special situations such as snipings, hijackings and hostage takings, have become an everyday part of American policing.
As crime rates have plummeted, these paramilitary units have expanded their original mission and are deployed for routine police functions such as "warrant work" -- i.e., no-knock entries to serve arrest or search warrants. Other teams, such as the 34-member SWAT unit in Fresno, Calif., are used -- in full battle dress, armed with machine guns -- to patrol the inner-city "war zone."
What's wrong with this picture? Plenty. A soldier and a law enforcement officer serve completely different functions, and fusing their identities presents a serious, long-term danger to a free society. A soldier does not think; he initiates violence on command and doesn't worry about Miranda rights. Being a killing machine is necessary to the survival of the warrior, and to the survival of the nation at war.
A law enforcement officer, however, is a citizen like the rest of us, subject to the same laws. The job of the police is to react to the violence of others, to apprehend criminal suspects and deliver them over to a court of law. This defines a nation under the rule of law -- as opposed to a nation under martial law -- and the distinction goes as far back as 13th-century common law.
When police act like soldiers, bad things happen, not only to the nation's social health but to innocent individuals. Until a few years ago, for example, killings by Albuquerque's SWAT unit were "just off the charts," said an outside investigator, Sam Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska.
The team's final killing -- before it was disbanded and a new police chief was installed -- was of 33-year-old Larry Harper, a sad, desperate man with no criminal record, intent on committing suicide.
When the frightened family called local police, SWAT snipers showed up, followed Harper to the edge of a park and, from 43 feet away, shot and killed the cowering man. According to Walker, the Albuquerque SWAT team "had an organizational culture ... that led them to escalate situations upward rather than de-escalating."
Excessive force
The 10-member La Plata County, Colo., SWAT team stormed Samuel Heflin's 46-acre ranch in Bayfield in April 1996, searching for evidence related to a barroom brawl: a cowboy hat, a shirt and a cigarette pack. In the process, an 8-year-old boy playing basketball was forced down at gunpoint, as was a 14-year-old boy.
Sheriff's deputies then followed screaming Shelby Heflin, 4, into the house with a laser-sighted weapon pointed at her back. The SWAT team ordered everyone to lie face down, and when Heflin asked to see a search warrant, he was told to "shut the f--- up." The family has filed an excessive force suit against the county's SWAT team.
In 1997, the SWAT team of Dinuba, Calif. (population 15,000), broke into the home of Ramon Gallardo, looking for his son, and shot the unarmed Gallardo 15 times. A jury awarded the family $12.5 million, which exceeded the town's insurance coverage. The town has disbanded its SWAT unit.
There have been other victims of wrongful deaths, including the Rev. Accelyne Williams, who died from a heart attack when Boston's SWAT unit raided the wrong apartment, and 64-year-old Mario Paz, shot twice in the back when the El Monte, Calif., SWAT team blew the locks off his doors with a shotgun, looking for someone who had used that address.
Doubtless the will be more such cases, and citizens will grow warier of the law enforcement establishment. The military mentality, along with machine guns and grenade launchers, have no place in a free society.
When police think and act like soldiers, they generate mistrust among their constituents, which in turn pushes law enforcement agencies further into an elitist, impersonal enclave.
Luckily, our democratic process has remedies. Congress can, and should, eliminate exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act and redefine the military's mission to defend the nation against foreign aggressors. Joint Task Forces in the Department of Defense should be abolished, and police agencies -- federal, state and local -- should be forced to return military hardware, especially automatic weapons, or destroy it.
Americans have to ask themselves whether the "drug war" is really worth altering our society beyond recognition. Defining our nation's drug woes as a public health problem, and not as a crime problem, might be a start.
Diane Cecilia Weber is a Virginia writer on criminal justice and the Second Amendment. This article has been adapted from a longer paper published by the Cato Institute, "WarriorCops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments."
