SWAT Raids, Stun Guns, and Pepper Spray: Why Has the Government Been Ramping Up the Use of Force?

Question by : SWAT Raids, Stun Guns, And Pepper Spray: Why has The Government been Ramping Up The Use Of Force?
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http://www.theagitator.com/2011/12/05/swat-teams-stun-guns-and-pepper-spray/
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According to Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Peter Kraska, the number of SWAT raids carried out each year in America has jumped dramatically over the last generation or so, from just a few thousand in the 1980s to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s, when Kraska stopped his survey. He found that the vast majority of the increase is attributable to the drug war — namely warrant service on low-to-mid-level drug offenders. A number of federal policies have driven the trend, including offering domestic police departments military training, allowing training with military organizations, using “troops-to-cops” programs and offering surplus military equipment and weaponry to domestic police police departments for free or at major discounts. There has also been a constant barrage of martial rhetoric from politicians and policymakers.

Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a “war,” and the consequences are predictable. These policies have taken a toll. Among the victims of increasingly aggressive and militaristic police tactics: Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Md., whose dogs were killed when Prince George’s County police mistakenly raided his home; 92-year-old Katherine Johnston, who was gunned down by narcotics cops in Atlanta in 2006; 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda, who was killed by Modesto, Calif., police during a drug raid in September 2000; 80-year-old Isaac Singletary, who was shot by undercover narcotics police in 2007 who were attempting to sell drugs from his yard; Jonathan Ayers, a Georgia pastor shot as he tried to flee a gang of narcotics cops who jumped him at a gas station in 2009; Clayton Helriggle, a 23-year-old college student killed during a marijuana raid in Ohio in 2002; and Alberta Spruill, who died of a heart attack after police deployed a flash grenade during a mistaken raid on her Harlem apartment in 2003. Most recently, voting rights activist Barbara Arnwine was raided by a SWAT team in Prince George’s County, Md., on Nov. 21. Police were looking for Arnwine’s nephew, a suspect in an armed robbery.*

The drug war has been the primary policy driving the trend but, since 2001, the federal government has also used the threat of terror attacks to further militarize domestic law enforcement. This includes not only finding new sources of funding for armor, weapons and gear, but also claiming new powers for the “War on Terror” that are then inevitably used in more routine law enforcement.

But paramilitary creep has also spread well beyond the drug war. In recent years, SWAT teams have been used to break up neighborhood poker games, including one at an American Legion Hall in Dallas. In 2006, Virginia optometrist Sal Culosi was killed when the Fairfax County Police Department sent a SWAT team to arrest him for gambling on football games. SWAT teams are also now used to arrest people suspected of downloading child pornography. Last year, an Austin, Texas, SWAT team broke down a man’s door because he was suspected of stealing koi fish from a botanical garden.

Best answer:

Answer by Smells like New Screen Names
Kraska is an idiot.

“he number of SWAT raids carried out each year in America has jumped dramatically over the last generation or so, from just a few thousand in the 1980s to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s”

The problem being that SWAT didn’t exist till the late sixties and didn’t receive much notice till after 1974, when they decided to base a tv show on the idea. This is a bit like studying that after their invention, fast food restaurants spread across the nation. More communities realized that armed response requires cops trained for it, rather than just random ticket writing schmucks.

Then to take heavily armed tactical units and lump them in with non-violent means like pepper spray and stun guns? Just makes the entire conjecture stupid. Pepper spray and stun guns are far less violent than sending in marginally trained officers to crack heads with clubs.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!

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