To say that the effects of a Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) team raid are devastating is putting it lightly. Just ask members of the WSU chapter of Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. After witnesses reported seeing a group of underage students consuming what appeared to be alcoholic beverages outside the fraternity, Pullman police summoned a regional team of soldiers in full combat gear to attack the problem. Like, literally, attack it, with, like, stun grenades and AK-47s, ya know?
WSU’s Phi Kappa Sigs have since been suspended and are under investigation by the international fraternity. Never mind the fact that the raid turned up nothing beyond a nominal amount of marijuana and some paraphernalia.
So what does that have to do with you? Lots… who’s to say your door won’t be next?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the use of SWAT when it comes time to respond to the occasional bout of urban guerrilla warfare or domestic terrorism. However, the use of these teams against nonviolent civilians signifies to me that the Police are taking the War on Drugs way too literally. Relying on SWAT to serve search warrants on suspected drug houses and other alleged dens of depravity is now routine.
The secrecy with which these raids are conducted makes it difficult to estimate how many occur in the US each year. Cato Institute policy analyst Radley Balko places the figure at around 40,000, up from 3,000 per year in 1980. That’s over 100 raids a day and puts the odds of the average US household being subject to a raid over the course of a year at 3,160 to one, similar to the odds that you’ll injure yourself while mowing the lawn. You’re way more likely to get you door kicked in by a bunch of guys in riot gear than you are to be struck by lightning (odds 576,000 to one).
As with the Phi Kappa Sig’s raid, deploying SWAT to execute a search warrant on my old apartment seems somewhat excessive. Even if I had been sitting in an apartment stacked floor to ceiling with the stolen computers Bach intended to look for it (and failed to locate), entering unannounced and heavily armed through both doors and three windows would not have been necessary. Like, what’d they expect me to do, sneak out the back door with a bunch of desktop computer systems and displays (that did not in fact exist)?
Bach would no doubt counter something to the effect of, “intelligence indicated several suspects were occupying the premises at the time of entry”. There were no names listed on the search warrant, which implies to me there were no suspects at the time of entry. The fact that the entry team thought there were 5 people inside indicates that they went purely off information provided by their CI, not even bothering to survey the location prior to entering with stun grenades and tear gas.
After totally trashing the place and inflicting permanent structural damage (to the tune of $2,700, just got the bill) on the building, Bach and his posse left it unlocked with broken doors and windows so that by the time I got out of jail it was virtually impossible to tell what had been seized and what had been looted.
To keep public opinion friendly, Bach chatted up the neighbors. Wish I knew what exactly he said to them, but they wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence after I was released from jail.
I remember the first time I saw a SWAT raid with vivid detail. I was walking to QFC past this dilapidated house just after midnight on a random Sunday night when men carrying assault rifles popped out of the bushes, followed by an explosion coupled with a blinding flash of light. Greeted with the barrage of chaos that is a SWAT raid it’s hard not to think, “wow, what did these people do to cause this?” In the case of the raid I witnessed the victim turned out to be an aged black man “known on the streets as Cowboy” who was suspected of selling crack. I remember wondering to myself who paid for the staging of such a raid and why they couldn’t just knock on the guy’s door.
Just because these raids happen to have become routine doesn’t mean that they aren’t a serious violation of the civil liberties America once held so dear. Using SWAT teams to enforce laws governing nonviolent activities is a ridiculous abuse of police power. It’s freedom and justice for the status quo… which might be nice for them but is not he stuff a democracy is made of. As my boy Benjamin Franklin put it, “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty or safety”.
Tags: 4th Amendment, fraternity, police, raid, SWAT, WSU
