I saw a white man with a gun. I heard a policeman saying, "Place the weapon down on the ground, ple

The country's first official SWAT team started in the late 1960s in Los Angeles. By 1975, there were approximately 500 such units. Today, there are thousands. According to surveys conducted by the criminologist Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University, just 13% of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team in 1983. By 2005, the figure was up to 80%.

The number of raids conducted by SWAT-like police units has grown accordingly. In the 1970s, there were just a few hundred a year; by the early 1980s, there were some 3,000 a year. In 2005 (the last year for which Dr. Kraska collected data), there were approximately 50,000 raids. Some federal agencies also now have their own SWAT teams, including NASA and the Department of the Interior.

giujohn wrote:

I'd rather them not perform their duty as long as they think their duty includes beating the **** out of everybody who looks twice at them. I'd rather them not perform their duty as long as their duty includes killing innocent people and getting a paid vacation, followed by a promotion

(are ya having a senoir moment?)

Quote:

giujohn wrote:

I'd rather them not perform their duty as long as they think their duty includes beating the **** out of everybody who looks twice at them. I'd rather them not perform their duty as long as their duty includes killing innocent people and getting a paid vacation, followed by a promotion

You need to check yourself...I DIDNT WRITE THIS...YOU DID (are ya having a senoir moment?)

Having posted the above about swat teams I take it you are opposed to them. SO...what is YOUR proposal to rectify the situation???

Silly, Giu.

It's psychology. Idiots bring down higher power... with their idiocy.

It's fun to watch.

New ACLU report takes a snapshot of police militarization in the United States

By Radley Balko June 24
The American Civil Liberties Union has released the results of its year-long study of police militarization. The study looked at 800 deployments of SWAT teams among 20 local, state and federal police agencies in 2011-2012. Among the notable findings:

62 percent of the SWAT raids surveyed were to conduct searches for drugs.
Just under 80 percent were to serve a search warrant, meaning eight in 10 SWAT raids were not initiated to apprehend a school shooter, hostage taker, or escaped felon (the common justification for these tactics), but to investigate someone still only suspected of committing a crime.
In fact, just 7 percent of SWAT raids were “for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.”
In at least 36 percent of the SWAT raids studies, no contraband of any kind was found. The report notes that due to incomplete police reports on these raids this figure could be as high as 65 percent.
SWAT tactics are disproportionately used on people of color.
65 percent of SWAT deployments resulted in some sort of forced entry into a private home, by way of a battering ram, boot, or some sort of explosive device. In over half those raids, the police failed to find any sort of weapon, the presence of which was cited as the reason for the violent tactics.
Ironically (or perhaps not), searches to serve warrants on people suspected of drug crimes were more likely to result in forced entry than raids conducted for other purposes.
Though often justified for rare incidents like school shootings or terrorist situations, the armored personnel vehicles police departments are getting from the Pentagon and through grants from the Department of Homeland Security are commonly used on drug raids.

In other words, where violent, volatile SWAT tactics were once used only in limited situations where someone was in the process of or about to commit a violent crime — where the police were using violence only to defuse an already violent situation — SWAT teams today are overwhelmingly used to investigate people who are still only suspected of committing nonviolent consensual crimes. And because these raids often involve forced entry into homes, often at night, they’re actually creating violence and confrontation where there was none before.

The geographic diversity of these tragedies suggest that the problem is not centralized to one area of the country, but rather a widespread issue of concern. In 2007, a joint effort by ColorLines and the Chicago Reporter examined police shootings in the 10 largest cities in the U.S., and in every city, African Americans comprised a disproportionately large percentage of those killed.

The cities with the greatest racial disparity in these shootings were New York, San Diego, and Las Vegas — in each of these cities, the percentage of black people killed was at least twice that of their percentage of the city’s population. This means that if these statistics remained constant in 2010, when the percentage of black people in New York City was 25 percent, a whopping 50 percent of those killed in police shootings would have been of African American descent.