The media spotlight has been focused on the growing militarization of police
-This is the act of paramilitary thugs!
ever since the response to protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.
-This is not the Middle East. The police in these dark pictures are throwing
tear gas at neighbors.
There are tens of thousands of SWAT team raids per year, but it didn’t start out this way.
-Back in the old days, SWAT was used to only handle the most serious situations.
-Dynamite, tear gas, automatic rifles and hand grenades all were used today.
-The bloodiest and most massive gun battle in the history of Los Angeles.
-Now it’s being used to handle all kinds of situations.
-At dawn this morning, the police went to Black Panther headquarters
with warrants for the arrest of two Panthers.
-The intermittent warfare between the Black Panthers and police erupted today in Los Angeles.
-There, a group of them barricaded themselves in their headquarters,
and fought police with automatic weapons and hand grenades.
-I go downstairs to the second floor. We heard all this noise of a helicopter
and we jumped up.
We grabbed the guns.
-There were police officers with rifles across the street on rooftops.
There were police officers in the back.
-They had put a charge on the door, the door blew open, and the police came running in.
-There was heavy gunfire and they shot three police officers.
We saw this little cloud come around the corner. When that tear gas hit you, that tear gas,
it was no joke. We were like rats in a hole, and being shot at for four or five hours.
Freeman and five others surrendered to a police force like they’d never seen before.
-When I came out, and I looked up and saw them in their black uniforms and everything.
I'm like, “Who the hell is this?” Black boots, black pants, black shirts.
They did not look like police at all.
That’s because they were a new kind of cop,
members of a special division of the Los Angeles Police Department who
made their debut at the shoot out.
-It was very similar to a military operation in the tactics and techniques we had to employ.
Five man “SWAT” teams - marksmen trained in special operations - were created to deal
with extraordinary events, such as snipers, hostage situations and other violent confrontations.
The late Daryl Gates, former chief of the LAPD, came up with the name.
His first thought was to call them Special Weapons Attack Teams.
-Someone wiser than I was said no you can’t say “attack,” and when I thought about
it, I thought, you’re right. So it became Special Weapons and Tactics.
The idea for SWAT teams was formed a few years earlier after the police were caught off
guard by the Watts Riots and had to call in more than 14 thousand National Guardsmen.
Ron McCarthy was there.
-The riots in 1965 were a game changer.
A good portion of south Los Angeles was burning to the ground.
-Powerless against snipers, looters and arsonists operating in the dark, police
and National Guardsman had tried mostly to confine the disorder to the 42 square
miles of this area.
Police had no real strategy for how to respond, and were criticized for using excessive force.
After six days, 31 civilians, two cops and a fireman were dead.
-It was a formative experience for the LAPD because they realized they needed
well-trained, well-organized people that could handle that level of conflict.
It wasn’t until several years later that
the LAPD SWAT team would cement its reputation
on the national stage.
-Everything happened in a frantic two hours just before sundown.
SWAT teams led the way as hundreds of cops and FBI agents moved in on a home where members
of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical fringe group known for kidnapping heiress
Patty Hearst, were hiding out.
-Police were receiving heavy weapons fire, which they returned.
-Five suspected members of the Symbionese Liberation Army are dead.
-Miraculously, there were no civilian casualties.
Ron McCarthy was leading a SWAT team during the incident.
-I took a lot of pride in the fact that we did a good job and no citizens were injured.
-A lot of requests came in to the LAPD SWAT team to go to other parts of the country
and train SWAT teams. And so it began to grow.
-Don’t miss! Don’t miss!
-These men are members of a Special Weapons and Tactics team, a SWAT team.
-That really can be culturally intoxicating for a certain type of police officer,
a wannabe soldier police officer.
It didn’t take long for Hollywood producers to take notice of the hometown sharpshooters.
They inspired a popular TV show with a top 40 theme song.
-The first TV series on SWAT was, I think, a real cultural turning point, because it
brought the whole SWAT phenomenon into people’s living rooms and into the cultural consciousness.
As SWAT teams spread across the country,
police were ramping up the war on drugs under President Reagan.
-So when we say no to drugs, it’ll be clear that we mean absolutely none. No exceptions.
-Our society tends to want to solve problems through a very aggressive, vigorous approach.
And oftentimes that’s couched in terms of waging war — the war on drugs,
the war on poverty.
And it’s not just a benign metaphor.
Police were given more authority to enter people’s homes without knocking, to
search for drugs, and that increasingly became the job of SWAT teams.
Peter Kraska has been studying the issue for more than 20 years. He’s found that
not only has the percentage
of small cities with SWAT teams grown from 13 to 80 in 24 years, but more
than 80 percent of deployments are to look for drugs.
-The whole SWAT phenomenon was morphing. SWAT had gone from an entity that was all about
saving lives in real dire circumstances, to prosecuting the drug war
inside people’s residences using SWAT teams.
And they’re more heavily armed, thanks to federal programs that allow the military to
transfer surplus equipment to city and state police forces. The items are free or discounted.
-Humvees, helicopters, automatic weapons.
-The same kinds of things you would see in a military team, you would find
in a SWAT team. They don’t have to be a
particular sized police department.
Basically they just need to apply for these things.
Proponents say a beefed up force is necessary for many drug raids because
they can turn violent.
-When we know that there’s drugs being sold and the drug offender has a history of
violence and he’s armed, then we should use SWAT.
In addition, the threat of terrorism since 9/11 has accelerated the flow of weaponry
to local police, as SWAT teams are often considered the front line of defense for national crises.
-Plenty of appreciation here in Boston for the
SWAT team that swooped in and helped in this manhunt.
But things don’t always go according to plan.
-Police! Search warrant! Police! Search Warrant!
Case in point, the home of Cheye Calvo in Berwyn Heights, Maryland,
where a county SWAT team made what’s called a dynamic entry.
-There were men dressed in black, masks and guns surrounding my house.
I heard the sound of an explosion. It was the sound of my front door being blown
open by a battering ram. And they came in shooting.
Police believed they were about to bust an elaborate marijuana delivery scheme.
-A man immediately grabbed me, pulled my hands behind my back.
My mother-in-law was laying face down on the floor with a gun to her head. My older
black lab, Payton, was in between us laying in an enormous pool of his own blood.
A local police officer came upon the commotion
and asked the county SWAT team what was going on.
One of them said "This guy is crazy. He thinks he’s the mayor.
And Officer Johnson was, was... "He is the mayor!"
Mayor Calvo’s two dogs were killed in the raid and he settled a lawsuit for an
undisclosed amount.
More recently, a Wisconsin family was staying with relatives in Georgia when a SWAT team
barged in, looking for a nephew who had reportedly sold drugs from the house.
They were asleep at 3 AM when the flashbang grenade came through the door.
-The grenade landed right in our baby’s crib with him, where he was sleeping.
It blew a big hole in his pillow. I begged the officer,
"Please, he’s scared, he’s screaming, he needs me. Let me comfort him."
Police rushed the baby to the hospital. It would be hours before Alecia saw him again.
-When I walked into his room, I was so heartbroken. They had him intubated
and in a medically induced coma because his left lung had collapsed,
and so they had him on life support.
A deputy sheriff was later indicted for allegedly falsifying information to justify the raid.
Alecia’s son is recovering, but she struggles with how to explain what the
police did to her toddler.
-I do not believe it is necessary to take a SWAT team into a home, of a family, with children.
They’re supposed to be the good guys.
The role of SWAT teams prompted a national dialogue
after the country watched the police response to
protests in Ferguson, Missouri.
-This is is a place where people work, go to school, raise their families, go to church.
But lately it’s looked a little more like a war zone.
Nine months after Ferguson, President Obama banned local police from receiving
some military style equipment.
We have seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like
there is an occupying force, as opposed to a force that's part of the community
that's protecting them and serving them.
The ban made the front page of newspapers, but critics say it falls short.
And at a time when the nation is grappling with the police’s use of force, it remains
to be seen what role SWAT teams will have in future policing.
-There has always been a debate: is SWAT too militaristic?
SWAT teams are definitely a very important part of the law enforcement response.
-I’m not saying that SWAT teams have no place in law enforcement.
It’s a question of how can we bend the curve of history so that they’re not
continuing to grow and expand.