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Swat Military - New SWAT documents paint picture of ugly militarization of US police Public records confirm what police reform advocates have long argued: "Special Weapons and Tactics" units respond to low-risk situations that don't require SWAT's military-to-military approach.

Extensive records of SWAT team raids in northeastern Massachusetts released today by the American Civil Liberties Union confirm what police reform advocates have long argued: "Special Weapons and Tactics" units often respond to low-risk situations. A military-to-military approach to SWAT.

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The documents include reports of 79 SWAT operations conducted between August 2012 and June 2014 by the Northeast Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, or NEMLEC, a consortium of police departments covering 925 square miles in Middlesex and Essex counties outside Boston. According to NEMLEC, the SWAT team will respond to "critical incidents," particularly "active shooters, weapons contraband, inmates and terrorists."

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Shows that such significant events are rare in northeastern Massachusetts. However, SWAT teams, driven in BearCat armored response vehicles and armed with flash grenades, often appear in "NEMLEC communities."

Of the 79 SWAT deployments from 2012-14, one was terrorism-related to track down those responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings. Other SWAT operations during this period had no hostage situations, no active shooters, and only 10 non-suicidal barricade subjects.

About half of the remaining work is mundane and often related to police work, including serving warrants, dealing with the expected riots after the 2013 Red Sox World Series game, and providing security for the Dalai Lama's lecture. In one mission, 15 members of the SWAT team searched for "gang activity" at a Salem Halloween party, but were warned by their commander to maintain "professional behavior" because "everyone has a camera and you don't want to be one." On YouTube or in the next news. "

The remaining 37 were SWAT operations, either drug operations or suicide operations by local police.

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Pete Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has spent his career studying the militarization of police, argues that the use of SWAT units in drug busts unnecessarily affects the military in poor communities.

"We have to remember that before the drug war of the 1980s, SWAT teams were limited to reactive and high-risk situations," Kraska said.

. "But in our research today, we find that more than 80 percent of police departments use SWAT teams in active situations. These deployments typically target low-level drug users ... and they often do so to gather evidence -- not even to arrest known, armed, dangerous drug users. "

Indeed, only five of the 21 SWAT drug operations detailed in the documents even mention drug recovery. The largest of these finds was five ounces of cocaine and 61 grams of heroin, nearly a stone's throw from the next Sinaloa Cartel.

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Despite the complexity of their operations, NEMLEC believes the SWAT team's aggressive tactics helped them hunt down Osama bin Laden.

More than half of SWAT teams' drug busts began at 3:30 or 4:00 p.m. In addition, SWAT teams were involved in "no-knock" raids in 14 of the 22 drug operations documented in the documents over a two-year period. and four certified "shock and awe" raids—violent access methods that make national news for accidental killings, injuries, and injuries.

In February 2013, 18 SWAT teams raided a suspected drug den in Lowell, Massachusetts. The department, along with the local police, conducted the raid without a warrant, despite a pre-raid tip indicating the presence of a child. The discovery of a woman who "appeared to be preparing illegal drugs for intravenous administration" led to the arrest of all five adults at the residence on unspecified drug charges.

The team found not one, but three children, removed them from the home, sent them to the hospital and filed a complaint with the Department of Children and Families for child abuse and neglect. A summary of "incidents/notes" in the court report included five arrests and an undisclosed amount of drugs and cash.

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Tom Nolan, an associate professor of criminology at Merrimack College and a former lieutenant in the Boston Police Department, also believes that SWAT units' focus on areas such as homicide is a waste of limited resources and can make many situations worse.

"I'm a Boston police officer and I was in the first SWAT deployment in the '70s. They were only deployed for armed barricades in buildings, the reason we were deployed was for hostage situations or to harm others," Nolan said. "That's why they're organized. What we're starting to see is that in the smaller towns that have NEMLEC jurisdiction, they want their officers on SWAT teams, so they're looking for a way."

"Having a fully armed, militarized SWAT team on a suspected shooter is definitely counterproductive," Nolan said. "I don't know why you can't answer someone who knows the techniques of tank and unarmored negotiation strategy."

Some NEMLEC documents address this issue. During a SWAT operation in August 2012, team members arrived at the home of a man who said his father wanted police to kill him and was barricaded in his bedroom. With the arrival of 18 SWAT officers, referred to in the report as "operators," he almost got his wish. Fearing that he would hang himself, they entered his room and, finding him, "took two large knives and hid them behind the bed," immediately tied him up and stabbed him twice in the chest. The man then jumped through a glass window and lunged at SWAT team members with a knife. Later, when he covered several operators with blood and tried to cut himself, the operator subdued him.

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Numerous officers have been involved in drug busts and assassination operations:

NEMLEC's drug or suicide SWAT operations are often similar. "If armed suspects are confirmed, SWAT teams should be dispatched," Nolan said. "But officers often enter hotels with SWAT teams or if they think there are weapons."

In fact, while police departments cite armed threats to justify SWAT involvement in low-level warrant operations, data from NEMLEC documents show that those threats are inflated. Of the 33 search warrants or arrest warrants conducted by NEMLEC SWAT units between 2012 and 2014, only four resulted in the discovery of a weapon — all of them pistols, rifles or revolvers.

In all four cases, the response is sometimes not commensurate with the risk. For example, in December 2013, a 28-man SWAT team was charged with throwing a disabled man in a wheelchair into a woman's car from a BearCat during an "emergency" call. revolver in the pain medication debate.

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Armed with rocks, long arms, rifles, 40 mm less-lethal rounds, shields and batons, the SWAT team entered the home and freed one of the suspects. When the suspect did not open the door to the room despite his promise, the security team entered to find that the suspect was having difficulty getting up from his bed due to his physical limitations. "The suspect was one of the group and was allowed to undress and remove his catheter," the report said. (The team later found the revolver between the headboard and the wall.)

NEMLEC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a strange twist, when SWAT's documents were requested by the ACLU under the Massachusetts Open Government Act in 2012, NEMLEC ruled it was a private corporation, so the law was invalid. The ACLU filed suit last year, and NEMLEC recently retracted its position on the settlement and published the documents. Cade Crockford, director of the ACLU of Massachusetts' Freedom of Information Project, said: "It's important for the public to have regular reports like this. There's a lot of debate about the militarization of the police, but this should be an accurate picture of tough raids, because we don't hear about SWAT teams being deployed every day in the drug war." transparency is key."

Photo: Members of the NEMLEC SWAT team arrive at a Cambridge location and participate in a training exercise for injured officers inside the building. (Jonathan Wiggs/Boston Globe/Getty)

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