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War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing

126 points by dublinben 12y ago

adamnemecek 12y ago
Holy fuck https://www.aclu.org/secure/limit-abusive-use-swat?ms=web_140624_crimjustice_militarization https://www.aclu.org/secure/limit-abusive-use-swat?ms=web_14... (middle to bottom)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- bronson 12y ago
  That's on the front page right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938748
  - adamnemecek 12y ago
    Yeah, when I saw this post, it was on the second place so I saw it first.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jqm 12y ago
A few years ago a shop owner I know was burglarized. He asked me to help him get the surveillance tapes into a format he could present in court, so I did so. Reviewing the tapes while transferring was interesting. It was a simple burglary. A guy came in through the roof. He appeared to be high on crack or crystal meth and weighed probably 100 pounds. He tripped the alarm, panicked, ran about the store, couldn't get out and eventually exited back through the roof. This was about 3 in the morning. 15 or 20 minutes later 2 officers arrived with my friend in his pajamas looking sleepy. He let them in and they crept about the store pistols drawn. No one was there. One of the officers pointed to the drop ceiling (good call... there was a gaping hole there) and they eventually exited the store. 3 or 4 hours later the swat team arrived. They stood behind shields and put in some sort of gas bomb. The tapes filled with smoke and you couldn't see anything for a period. Then, a number of officers entered with gas masks and examined inside the drop ceiling with a camera. No one was there of course. There were probably not less than 15 of them and they stayed around until noon or so wandering about and poking stuff. At one point one of the officers noticed the surveillance camera and turned it so they couldn't be filmed further. No one was brutalized but it appeared to be extreme over reaction. The store reeked of tear gas for weeks. I have to wonder exactly what the cost was to taxpayers. This certainly isn't an extreme case but it was an eye opener. Lots of these guys just want to play GI Joe and don't care what they damage nor how much money they waste. It is time for some reform.
gfodor 12y ago
Intuitively I agree with this, and think militarization of law enforcement is terrifying, but this report at a glance has some issues. I want to understand the trade off here, but they fail to pose SWAT as a real trade off for officer safety in many cases. For example, they cite that of the raids where police predicted weapons, 35% of the raids turned out to have weapons, 32% did not, and for the remaining 33% it is unknown if they did or did not. The way they interpret this data is: "We found in the course of our investigation that the SWAT team found weapons (the overwhelming majority of which were firearms such as handguns, but rarely assault rifles) in just over one-third of the incidents in which they predicted finding them, which suggests the police are not particularly good at accurately forecasting the presence of weapons." This is transparent bullshit, because in their very table they state that a third of the raids it was unknown. If we assume that the 'unknown' state is random (an assumption), ie ~half of those unknown accounts had weapons and the rest didn't based upon the known positive and negative rates being close to even, this means that no, the police didn't guess only one third of the time correctly, they guessed correctly approx 53% of the time, more than half of the time. The next step is to ask if a 50/50 chance of being right that you might be under threat of a weapon means you should err on the side of SWAT, but they don't ask that, they just say that we should "we would expect them to find weapons in nearly all of the incidents studied." Says who? Risk is a game of probabilities, and obviously there needs to be some threshold for which cops deploy SWAT with regards to the likelihood of weapons being present. Regardless of if the randomness of the unknown assumption is true, they are transparently mis-characterizing the data here. Additionally, their section on race seems transparently broken. They are measuring absolute measures, not relative measures. To understand race bias in SWAT, you need to understand the rate at which SWAT is deployed for warrants for a given demographic. Instead, they spent most of their analysis (if this rate is in there, I missed it) on absolute metrics; but we all know already that on an absolute basis, law enforcement spends a disproportionate amount of time in minority communities. You can argue if this is due to systemic bias or not, but this is obviously a dependent variable if we're trying to answer the question "Do cops deploy SWAT more if they are dealing with minorities?", and it doesn't seem to be treated as such. edit: Classy downvotes, HN thought police!
- angersock 12y ago
  So, a third of the time there were guns (though not specified if they were being used against the officers, up in a safe, or tucked away somewhere), a third of the time there were not, and a third of the time the cops were too sloppy to accurately assess the presence of firearms? And these are the bozos we want to let have automatic weapons, body armor, and carte blanche to show up in the middle of the night? Fuck that.

126 points by dublinben 12y ago

Holy fuck https://www.aclu.org/secure/limit-abusive-use-swat?ms=web_140624_crimjustice_militarization https://www.aclu.org/secure/limit-abusive-use-swat?ms=web_14... (middle to bottom)

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bronson 12y ago
That's on the front page right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938748
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  Yeah, when I saw this post, it was on the second place so I saw it first.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jqm 12y ago

A few years ago a shop owner I know was burglarized. He asked me to help him get the surveillance tapes into a format he could present in court, so I did so. Reviewing the tapes while transferring was interesting. It was a simple burglary. A guy came in through the roof. He appeared to be high on crack or crystal meth and weighed probably 100 pounds. He tripped the alarm, panicked, ran about the store, couldn't get out and eventually exited back through the roof. This was about 3 in the morning. 15 or 20 minutes later 2 officers arrived with my friend in his pajamas looking sleepy. He let them in and they crept about the store pistols drawn. No one was there. One of the officers pointed to the drop ceiling (good call... there was a gaping hole there) and they eventually exited the store. 3 or 4 hours later the swat team arrived. They stood behind shields and put in some sort of gas bomb. The tapes filled with smoke and you couldn't see anything for a period. Then, a number of officers entered with gas masks and examined inside the drop ceiling with a camera. No one was there of course. There were probably not less than 15 of them and they stayed around until noon or so wandering about and poking stuff. At one point one of the officers noticed the surveillance camera and turned it so they couldn't be filmed further. No one was brutalized but it appeared to be extreme over reaction. The store reeked of tear gas for weeks. I have to wonder exactly what the cost was to taxpayers. This certainly isn't an extreme case but it was an eye opener. Lots of these guys just want to play GI Joe and don't care what they damage nor how much money they waste. It is time for some reform.

gfodor 12y ago

Intuitively I agree with this, and think militarization of law enforcement is terrifying, but this report at a glance has some issues. I want to understand the trade off here, but they fail to pose SWAT as a real trade off for officer safety in many cases. For example, they cite that of the raids where police predicted weapons, 35% of the raids turned out to have weapons, 32% did not, and for the remaining 33% it is unknown if they did or did not. The way they interpret this data is: "We found in the course of our investigation that the SWAT team found weapons (the overwhelming majority of which were firearms such as handguns, but rarely assault rifles) in just over one-third of the incidents in which they predicted finding them, which suggests the police are not particularly good at accurately forecasting the presence of weapons." This is transparent bullshit, because in their very table they state that a third of the raids it was unknown. If we assume that the 'unknown' state is random (an assumption), ie ~half of those unknown accounts had weapons and the rest didn't based upon the known positive and negative rates being close to even, this means that no, the police didn't guess only one third of the time correctly, they guessed correctly approx 53% of the time, more than half of the time. The next step is to ask if a 50/50 chance of being right that you might be under threat of a weapon means you should err on the side of SWAT, but they don't ask that, they just say that we should "we would expect them to find weapons in nearly all of the incidents studied." Says who? Risk is a game of probabilities, and obviously there needs to be some threshold for which cops deploy SWAT with regards to the likelihood of weapons being present. Regardless of if the randomness of the unknown assumption is true, they are transparently mis-characterizing the data here. Additionally, their section on race seems transparently broken. They are measuring absolute measures, not relative measures. To understand race bias in SWAT, you need to understand the rate at which SWAT is deployed for warrants for a given demographic. Instead, they spent most of their analysis (if this rate is in there, I missed it) on absolute metrics; but we all know already that on an absolute basis, law enforcement spends a disproportionate amount of time in minority communities. You can argue if this is due to systemic bias or not, but this is obviously a dependent variable if we're trying to answer the question "Do cops deploy SWAT more if they are dealing with minorities?", and it doesn't seem to be treated as such. edit: Classy downvotes, HN thought police!

angersock 12y ago
So, a third of the time there were guns (though not specified if they were being used against the officers, up in a safe, or tucked away somewhere), a third of the time there were not, and a third of the time the cops were too sloppy to accurately assess the presence of firearms? And these are the bozos we want to let have automatic weapons, body armor, and carte blanche to show up in the middle of the night? Fuck that.