New SWAT Documents Detail the Brutal Reality of U.S. Police Militarization

Friday, July 10, 2015
By Paul Martin

By Carey Wedler
Global Research
July 10, 2015

Massachusetts SWAT teams made headlines last year when they refused to grant a public information request to the ACLU, claiming they were “private companies” and, therefore, exempt from such inquiry. The ACLU subsequently sued, and last month, it received access to the documents it requested. The documents confirm that broad overreach, unnecessary and overblown tactics, and an eagerness to attack are increasingly present in law enforcement establishments around the country.

The NEMLEC, or Northeastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, encompasses multiple SWAT teams across that region of the state. According to the documents it tried to suppress, NEMLEC conducted 79 SWAT raids from August 2012 to June 2014. Though the NEMLEC (along with SWAT teams around the country) claims SWAT teams are only used for “active shooters, armed barricaded subjects, hostage takers, and terrorists,” the data reveals a different story.

Though the NEMLEC touts its operations as reserved for “critical” situations, only one of the 79 incidents actually involved a terrorist attack: SWAT teams were deployed to assist in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. In that same 2012 to 2014 time period, there were noactive shooter situations, no hostage situations, and only 10 cases of barricaded subjects.

According to The Intercept, half of the remaining cases were for everyday policing activities, including “executing warrants, dealing with expected rioting after a 2013 Red Sox World Series game, and providing security for a Dalai Lama lecture.”

That leaves 37 of 79 raids that were either drug-related, initiated by local police, or responses to suicidal individuals.

The use of SWAT teams for drug raids has been widely criticized as superfluous and outside the duties of SWAT. Professor Pete Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University, who specializes in police militarization, told The Intercept that
“It is really significant to remember that SWAT teams prior to the 1980s drug war were confined strictly to reactive, dangerous situations,…But in our research today we find that over 80 percent of the time police departments are using SWAT teams for proactive cases. These deployments are generally targeted at low-level drug dealers … and usually they’re just doing it for collecting evidence — not necessarily to even arrest a well-known, armed, dangerous drug dealer.”

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