Rise of the Warrior Cop (42 page)

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Authors: Radley Balko

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In the fifteen years since it happened, the North Hollywood Shoot-out has become the go-to incident for proponents of police militarization. For years now it has been regularly cited as the prime example of why cops need bigger guns, and why police departments need SWAT teams. There’s some merit to these arguments. A strong argument could be made, for example, for allowing patrol officers to store powerful weapons in the trunks of their squad cars in the event that they’re the first on the scene of such an incident—and the SWAT team is still ten or twenty minutes away. But the incident isn’t an argument for the proliferation of SWAT teams to small towns, for more militarized uniforms, or for using increasingly militarized tactics for increasingly petty crimes.

Given that the only two fatalities at North Hollywood were the criminals themselves and that the incident happened fifteen years ago, the incident’s staying power as an anecdote is in some ways puzzling. But in other ways, perhaps it isn’t. That the best anecdote defenders of police militarization can come up with is fifteen years old may attest to the rarity of such incidents. In any case, even most critics of the SWAT phenomenon acknowledge that there are some situations where a paramilitary police response is appropriate—and a heavily armed bank robbery would be right at the top of that list. The criticism of SWAT proliferation is that the overwhelming majority of SWAT deployments today are to break into private residences to serve search warrants for nonviolent crimes. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu committed armed robberies, crimes for which violence is a prerequisite.

The other major incident from the late 1990s that proponents of militarization often cite in justifying SWAT teams is the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. But if
the justification for SWAT teams is to have a team of brave, highly trained, highly professional, well-armed, and well-protected cops to intervene in such tragedies, Columbine is a particularly unfortunate example. Though there were eventually eight hundred police officers and eight SWAT teams on the Columbine campus, the SWAT teams held off from going inside to stop shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris because they deemed the situation too dangerous. A spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department justified the SWAT team’s actions after the shooting. “A dead police officer would not be able to help anyone.” Added SWAT team leader Donn Kraemer, “If we went in and tried to take them and got shot, we would be part of the problem.” David Kopel of the Independence Institute in Colorado explained how that panned out for the victims:

While one murder after another was being perpetrated, a dozen police officers were stationed near [the] exit. These officers made no attempt to enter the building, walk 15 steps, and confront the murderers. (According to police speaking on condition of anonymity, one Denver SWAT officer did begin to enter but was immediately “ordered down” by commanders.)
Twenty minutes after the rampage began, three SWAT officers were finally sent into the building—on the first floor, on the side of the building furthest from the library, where killings were in progress. Finding students rushing out of the building, they decided to escort students out, rather than track down the killers. This began a police program to “contain the perimeter.”

Instead of confronting the killers, then, the SWAT team frisked the victims. They then passed on another chance to confront Harris and Klebold.

The two murderers eventually tired of the library killings, and went downstairs to the cafeteria. More students were hiding in a room nearby, with the door locked. The two murderers attempted to shoot off the lock, and enter that room.
Students in the room had called 911 and the line was open, so again the killers’ location was known. Many officers were massed near the cafeteria door. They knew where the murderers were. They knew that the murderers were attempting to get into a room to kill more people. The police stood idle.

Harris and Klebold killed themselves in the library. Not knowing that, and still considering it too dangerous to enter the portions of the building where there had been known gunfire, it took more than three hours for the SWAT team to finally reach the victims. In the meantime, science teacher David Sanders bled to death on the second floor. He might have survived had he received reasonably prompt medical attention—he was still alive when police finally reached him, three hours after he’d been shot. He died during the additional forty-five minutes it took paramedics to reach him. Students in his classroom had put up a sign in the window to alert the police to his condition. It read: “1 bleeding to death.”

The LAPD SWAT team was later asked to review the actions of their colleagues in Jefferson County. They found that the officers had followed standard procedure. Perhaps that was just an act of professional courtesy. If not, consider the implications. Columbine was precisely the sort of incident for which the SWAT team had been invented. It was the sort of incident often cited by defenders of SWAT teams to justify their existence. And it was the sort of incident for which even critics of SWAT teams concede the use of a SWAT team would be appropriate. Yet not only did the SWAT teams at the scene not confront the killers, potentially costing innocent lives, but the most respected SWAT team in the country then reviewed the Jefferson County team’s actions and found their actions were appropriate.
64

In the following years, Littleton and North Hollywood would be cited ad nauseam by police officials in towns and counties across the country agitating for their own SWAT team, or defending or arguing for more weaponry for the one they already had. When the town
of Ithaca, New York, reformulated its SWAT team in 2000, for example, Assistant Commander Peter Tyler was asked why a college town with virtually no violent crime needed a SWAT team in the first place. He pointed to Columbine and similar mass shootings. “I think it’s naive for anyone to think it couldn’t happen here in Ithaca,” he said. Perhaps. But in a different context, Ithaca Police Chief Richard Basile later explained that the reformulated SWAT team would save taxpayers money because its smaller size made it more efficient at its primary duty—serving drug warrants.
65
A 2002
Miami Herald
article on the spread of SWAT teams in Florida noted that “police say they want [SWAT teams] in case of a hostage situation or a Columbine-type incident. But in practice, the teams are used mainly to serve search warrants on suspected drug dealers. Some of these searches yield as little as a few grams of cocaine or marijuana.”
66
As recently as July 2012, Portland, Maine, police chief Michael Sauschuck cited both incidents to justify his department’s acquisition of a military-grade armored truck.
67

There have, of course, been a number of other school shootings since Columbine, on both high school and college campuses. And some, like Virginia Tech, have ended with horrifically high body counts. But most such shootings are also over within seconds, far less time than it would take a typical SWAT team to scramble to the scene. (One possible exception is Newtown, where a Connecticut State Police SWAT team arrived quickly, and their presence reportedly persuaded shooter Adam Lanza to kill himself instead of killing more children.) It’s also important to note that though they make huge headlines and spark weeks of breathless coverage, school shootings (and mass shootings in general) are exceedingly rare. University of Virginia psychologist and education professor Dewey Cornell, who studies violence prevention and school safety, has estimated that the typical school campus can expect to see a homicide about once every several thousand years—hardly justification to rush out to get a SWAT team.
68
Yet many college campuses now have their own paramilitary police teams, and many cited Columbine and Virginia Tech as the reason they needed one. A recent example is the
University of North Carolina–Charlotte Campus Police Department, which started a SWAT team in 2011. Lt. Josh Huffman explained why it was necessary: “The purpose for creating the UNCC SWAT Team is to protect the community and prevent the loss of life. We must be prepared to respond to high risk situations such as those tragedies that occurred at Virginia Tech and Columbine.”
69

The number of campuses that will ever host a mass shooting or hostage taking may be vanishingly small, but most campuses produce more than enough pot smokers—and thus dealers to supply them—to keep the SWAT team busy once it’s up and running.

O
DDLY ENOUGH, THE MOVE TOWARD AGGRESSIVE EVEN
preventative crackdowns on protesters by cops decked out in riot gear kicked into high gear during protests in a city whose police chief was a self-described “progressive hippie.” The head of the Seattle Police Department during the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests was Norm Stamper, the same guy who pioneered community policing and tried to demilitarize the police in San Diego.

It wasn’t that the police in Seattle weren’t prepared. The police department had gone through ten thousand hours of training in the weeks leading up to the event. The state-of-the-art riot gear they had ordered gave them a look that Stamper likened, in his book
Breaking Rank
, to Darth Vader. When the police come to a protest dressed like that, armed, and expecting confrontation, both police and protesters start to think that a confrontation is inevitable. This was why, at the height of the often-violent protests of the 1970s, Washington, DC, police chief Jerry Wilson put cops in traditional police blues on the front lines, but kept his riot squad on buses parked on side streets—ready, but out of sight.

Stamper says today that he didn’t have the luxury of keeping the cops clad in riot gear off to the side while putting uniformed guys on the front lines; he simply didn’t have enough personnel to do both. It was a large event for a city of Seattle’s size, but there were also reports
that law enforcement officials (and there were at least a dozen agencies handling security at the conference) vastly overestimated the size of the protests—again, an indication that
over
preparation by the security planners may have given the cops who worked the event a distorted impression of what they were about to face, an impression that then became self-fulfilling. After all the training the department had gone through was done and the event was just days away, Stamper writes,
he
, as a commander, was feeling confident.
We’ve got this sucker covered
, he recalls thinking. But the cops themselves were less assured. “They appreciated the training, they loved the new equipment,” Stamper writes, “but they were convinced that the city was in for a real shitstorm.”

And that’s what they got. Midmorning on the first day, demonstrators surged into an intersection and took a seat, locking arms to form what Stamper called “one massive knot of humanity.” A police department field commander told them they’d be arrested. When they didn’t move, he warned them again—and several more times. Then he hit them with gas.

Despite the hours and hours of training, the cops lobbed the tear-gas canisters behind the frontline protesters, giving them the option of either running into plumes of gas, or surging into a line of police officers. That created chaos.

By the time the first day turned to evening, Seattle mayor Paul Schell had declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew, and banned protests in and around the conference. He also made it a crime to possess a gas mask, an order that almost certainly exceeded his authority and was probably unconstitutional. Rioters and cops continued to clash. The next day Washington governor Gary Locke called in the National Guard.

A Seattle City Council investigation would later find that the police who handled the event were panic-stricken, driven by exaggerated crowd estimates and unfounded rumors. (One such rumor later determined to be untrue was that protesters were tossing Molotov cocktails.) The riots resulted in $20 million in damage to local businesses. But even the vandals, looters, and anarchists never turned violent. There were no fatalities and fewer than 100 injuries, the most
serious of which was a broken arm. In 2004 the city reached a financial settlement with 157 protesters who had been illegally arrested. And in 2007 a federal jury found that the city had violated the Fourth Amendment rights of 170 more.

Norm Stamper took responsibility for the disaster and resigned as Seattle police chief. Though he defended the decision to tear-gas peaceful protesters in his 2005 book, he now says he was wrong. In fact, he says, it was the worst mistake of his career.

“I changed my mind during my book tour,” Stamper says. “After I had given a talk in Seattle to promote the book, a guy who had been gassed at the protests in Seattle came up to me and said to me in a soft voice, ‘I had such hope and such respect for you, and I just lost it. I just can’t accept your explanation for why you used tear gas on nonviolent people. I just can’t accept that.’”

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