*** ...Special weapons and tactics squads, once used exclusively for the rare urban terrorist incident or shootout, transformed themselves through the crack years into everyday parts of city life. In large urban areas, paramilitary units now do everything from routine street patrols to nightly raids of houses. Even small towns have formed paramilitary police units. The Cape Cod town of Harwich, Mass, population 11,000, for example, has trained a 10-member SWAT team.
Encouraged by Federal grants, surplus equipment handed out by the military and seizure laws that allow police departments to keep much of what their special units take in raids, the Kevlar-helmeted brigades have grown dramatically, even in the face of plummeting crime figures....
Professor [Peter B.] Kraska found that nearly 90 percent of the police departments he surveyed in cities of over 50,000 people had paramilitary units, as did about 75 percent of the departments of communities under 50,000.
In South Bend, Ind., the police have used SWAT teams to serve warrants on small-time marijuana dealers. In St. Petersburg, Fla., the teams were deployed, to considerable criticism, to insure order during a civic parade.
Dressed in black or olive camouflage known as battle dress uniforms, the paramilitary squads use armored personnel carriers, stun grenades and Heckler & Koch MP5's, which are submachine guns advertised to police departments with the line, "From the Gulf War to the Drug War--battle proven."...
Most of the squads stay in existence because there is too much incentive not to, police officers say. Forfeiture laws passed by Congress at the height of the crack scare were designed to take the profit out of drug dealing; assets like cars, boats, guns and cash can be seized, regardless of whether the person who owns them is later convicted.
But the laws have given the police a certain profit motive for fighting drugs, because their departments can use what they seize to subsidize their budgets or to buy extra equipment.
And since the end of the cold war, the military's giveaway of surplus hardware has proved irresistible to many SWAT teams. An amphibious armored personnel carrier was just picked up by the Boone County Sheriff's office in Indiana, and bayonets were recently accepted, then rejected, by the police in Los Angeles.
"I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted," said Nick Pastore, former Police Chief of New Haven. "I turned it all down, because it feeds a mind-set that you're not a police officer serving a community, you're a soldier at war."
...Now in Meriden, [Conn.], as in Fresno, the [SWAT] team arrests people for minor offenses, attacking small crimes as a way to send a larger message about who is in control. About 90 percent of the unit's deployments, Lieutenant [Steve] Lagere [who heads the Meriden SWAT team] said, involve drug-related work, primarily in the city's housing projects and surrounding neighborhoods, which tend to be black and Hispanic.
Professor Kraska's survey found that paramilitary units in small and medium-sized communities were most often used to knock down the doors of houses to search for drugs....
[Critics of a heavy SWAT presence] point to two cases in New England. When the SWAT team in Fitchburg, Mass., stormed an apartment looking for a drug dealer in December 1996, it ended up gutting an entire apartment house. A stun grenade, designed as distraction, flahsed in a predictable burst but also ignited a sofa, which grew into a fire that consumed the apartment house. Six officers were injured, and 24 people were left without a home.
In another case, a SWAT team's drug raid on the wrong apartment in Boston led to the death of a minister, the Rev. Accelyne Williams, from a heart attack. A settlement with Mr. Williams's widow cost the city $1 million....
What fed the expanding role of SWAT teams across the country were the forfeiture laws that allow the police to keep much of what they take in raids. There are no figures on the total amount of property seized by all police departments nationwide, but the Federal Government seized more than $4 billion in assets from 1986 to 1996....
The Supreme Court has upheld the forfeiture laws, but at least four states, including California, have changed the statutes so that a conviction is required before the police can keep the property.
Surplus military gear has also flooded into SWAT squads' lockers. Between 1995 and 1997 alone, the Department of Defense gave police departments 1.2 million pieces of military hardware, including 73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers.... ***
Yoshie