Rise of the Warrior Cop (33 page)

. . . in 1986: 27

. . . in 1995: 55

Percentage of those deployments in 1995 that were only to serve drug warrants: 75.9 percent

Percentage of cities with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 that had a SWAT team in 1980: 13.3 percent

. . . in 1984: 25.6 percent

. . . in 1990: 52.1 percent

Average annual number of times each SWAT team in a city with a population between 25,000 and 50,000 was deployed in 1980: 3.7

. . . in 1985: 4.5

. . . in 1990: 10.3

. . . in 1995: 12.5
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CHAPTER 7

THE 1990S—IT’S ALL ABOUT THE NUMBERS

Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38? With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun.

—US MILITARY OFFICER WHO CONDUCTED TRAINING SEMINARS FOR CIVILIAN SWAT TEAMS IN THE 1990S

T
he 1990s kicked off with a familiar debate: Congress wanted the military to be more involved with the drug war. At the urging of drug czar William Bennett, the Bush administration was waging aggressive antidrug campaigns in Latin America, the most notable of which was the 1989 invasion of Panama to capture military governor Manuel Noriega, who was wanted in the United States for drug trafficking. That action was made possible by an opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; issued a month before the invasion, the opinion concluded that the Posse Comitatus Act didn’t apply outside of US borders. Members of
Congress followed by calling for more policelike actions by US troops to arrest suspected drug dealers in other countries.

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had led the Republican push for the 1988 drug bill that included the death penalty for drug dealers and widespread use of the military for drug interdiction. One Cheney lieutenant, Assistant Secretary of Defense Stephen Duncan, said at a 1991 conference, “We look forward to the day when our Congress . . . allows the Army to lend its full strength toward making America drug free.”
¹
Even some career military officials were starting to come around, mostly out of fear that after the fall of communism in Europe, the military could suffer a loss of stature if it didn’t find a new enemy to engage. “The Soviet threat is being taken away from us,” one DC military scholar explained to the
Chicago Tribune
. “The Department of Defense had better develop some social-utility arguments that match the requirements of the American people.”
²

Even Cheney drew the line at using active-duty troops for civilian policing inside of US borders—but that didn’t seem to stop it from happening. The
Christian Science Monitor
reported in August 1990 that 58 active-duty Army troops had assisted in Operation Clean Sweep, the latest marijuana eradication program in northern California, and another 225 infantry soldiers and aviators and nine UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters from Fort Lewis, Washington, helped find pot plants in Operation Ghost Dancer in Oregon.
³

The early 1990s also saw a new push to find a greater drug war role for the National Guard. “When you have the equipment and trained personnel, you might as well put them to work,” said Rep. Nick Mavroules, a Massachusetts Democrat serving on the House Armed Services Committee. When asked about the traditional line separating the military from domestic policing, Republican representative Duncan Hunter of California snapped, “It depends on which is more sacred, that line or your children’s lives.” One influential Capitol Hill staffer gave an especially confused justification. “We have to take some kind of action, not because it’s going to
solve the problem . . . but because of the fact that the druggies have gotten their fingers into an awful lot of pies.”

Part of the reason why so many politicians were enthusiastic was that National Guard involvement brought increased funding to their states. In 1989, the first year of the program, Congress appropriated $40 million for the National Guard’s drug interdiction efforts. The next year funding jumped to $70 million. Two years later it was up to $237 million.
⁴
Any congressman or senator who opposed Guard troops fighting the drug war out of principle risked leaving his state out of the bounty. In Washington State, for example, the state’s National Guard received just under $1 million for antidrug operations. The next year the state’s congressional delegation signed a letter requesting seven times that amount.

In 1989 in Portland, Oregon, Herb Robinson of the
Seattle Times
noted, fully armed Guard troops had recently been stationed in front of suspected drug houses in a series of drug raids.
⁵
In Kentucky local residents became so enraged by frequent Guard sweeps in low-flying helicopters that they blew up a radio tower used by the Kentucky State Police. In Oklahoma, Guard troops dressed in battle garb rappelled down from helicopters and fanned out into rural areas in search of pot plants to uproot.

National Guard units flew antidrug surveillance helicopters and boarded up crack houses in Washington, DC; flew surveillance helicopters and cruised the streets with infrared gear to spot drug houses in Brooklyn; sealed crack houses in Philadelphia; were sent to support drug raids in Baltimore; and helped serve ninety-four drug warrants during a massive, citywide raid in Pittsburgh. Members of the Pennsylvania Guard assisted in raids of two factories that produced small glass vials. There were no drugs in the vials, but under state law the vials were still illegal because they were primarily used by drug dealers to package crack cocaine.
⁶
In the summer of 1990, an Army helicopter circled overhead as Massachusetts National Guard troops—some in uniform, some undercover—assisted police in Foxboro in identifying potential drug offenders at a Grateful Dead show.
⁷

In rural Maine, the National Guard was assisting in Humboldt County–style raids in rural parts of the state. Guard helicopters would perform flyovers, then raid teams consisting of federal and state officials would swoop in. “The standard operating procedure is to come in with battering rams, weapons out and cocked, shouting profanities,” a marijuana legalization activist in the town of Chesterville told the Associated Press in 1992.
⁸

By the end of 1992, the National Guard’s role in the drug war was fully operational. In that year alone, National Guard troops across the country assisted in nearly 20,000 arrests, searched 120,000 automobiles, entered 1,200 private buildings without a search warrant, and stepped onto private property to search for drugs (also without a warrant) 6,500 times.
⁹

Col. Richard Browning III, head of the organization’s drug interdiction effort, declared that year, “The rapid growth of the drug scourge has shown that military force must be used to change the attitudes and activities of Americans who are dealing and using drugs. The National Guard is America’s legally feasible attitude-change agent.”
¹⁰

Symbolically, the National Guard bridges the gap between cop and soldier. Guard troops train like soldiers and dress like soldiers, and they are regularly called up to fight in wars overseas. But when they are acting under the authority of a state governor, Guard troops aren’t subject to the restrictions of the Posse Comitatus Act. Giving the Guard a more prominent role in the drug war not only escalated the drug fight, it further conditioned the country to the idea of using forces that looked and acted quite a bit like soldiers for domestic law enforcement.

W
ITH MORE AND MORE FUNDS FLOWING TOWARD DRUG
eradication, police agencies began to step on each other’s toes to grab grants and shares of the money earmarked for various antidrug programs. That produced tragic outcomes for any citizens caught in the middle. In January 1990, for example, President Bush initiated
a new plan to crack down on drug smugglers at the border. He designated five border regions as “high-intensity drug-trafficking areas,” making each region eligible for a cut of the $10.6 billion he had requested to fund the plan.