The American Spectator<\/p>\n
August,1999<\/p>\n
HEADLINE: They Couldn’t SWAT a Fly<\/strong> BYLINE: by James Bovard. Federal and Colorado officials have transformed the April 20 killings at In fact, the excruciatingly slow response by Special Weapons and Tactics In Littleton, the sheriff’s department has shifted official explanations more For the first four days after the shooting, the sheriff’s department claimed Much of the press is treating the lawmen as heroes, or at least failing to Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone later explained: “We had initial people County SWAT Commander Terry Manwaring, whose team entered the school but SWAT teams made no effort to confront the killers in action, but devoted Television cameras captured a SWAT team creeping toward the school behind a SWAT team members did not reach the room where the killers lay until at least Many local SWAT teams descended on the high school parking lot and vicinity The police response was paralyzed by concerns for “officer safety.” Sheriff’s Law enforcement spokesmen worked overtime to turn the debacle into a triumph. Were any students directly harmed by police action? At 12:20 p.m. on the day The Colorado debacle is ironic in that SWAT teams are routinely criticized SWAT teams are most often used for no-knock raids in drug cases. But now SWAT teams are routinely called to deal with people threatening to take their A Fitchburg, Massachusetts SWAT team attacked an apartment building in Once local governments militarize the police, they find more and more Massive federal aid is fueling this militarization of local police. Since guns, over a hundred armored personnel carriers, scores of grenade launchers, SWAT teams are becoming an impediment to public safety. There were probably Citizens pay taxes so government will guard their rights and safety, not The American Spectator August,1999 HEADLINE: They Couldn’t SWAT a Fly But police commando teams are still a menace to society. BYLINE: by James Bovard. James Bovard is the author of Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin’s Press). Federal and Colorado officials have transformed the April […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nBut police commando teams are still a menace to society.<\/p>\n
\nJames Bovard is the author of Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the
\nDemise of the Citizen (St. Martin’s Press).<\/p>\n
\nColumbine High School into a law enforcement triumph. Attorney General Janet
\nReno praised the local police response as “extraordinary,” “a textbook” example
\nof “how to do it the right way.” President Clinton declared on the Saturday
\nafter the shooting that “we look with admiration at…the police officers who
\n rushed to the scene to save lives.”<\/p>\n
\n(SWAT) teams and other lawmen to the killings in progress turned a multiple
\nhomicide into a historic massacre. And federal aid to local law enforcement, by
\nspawning the proliferation of heavily armed but often flat-footed SWAT teams,
\nmay actually undermine public safety.<\/p>\n
\noften than the Clinton legal defense team. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold began
\ntheir rampage around 11:20 a.m. on April 20. Jefferson County sheriff’s
\nspokesmen initially claimed the killers had committed suicide at around 12:30
\np.m. After the police came under harsh criticism for the slowness of their
\nresponse, spokesmen announced that the killers may have committed suicide much
\nearlier–though no precise information has yet been released. Local officials at
\nfirst also greatly exaggerated the number of fatalities–thus causing the story
\nto have a greater initial impact.<\/p>\n
\nthat, as the Rocky Mountain News reported, once the boys’ attack began, Deputy
\nNeil Gardner “ran into a (school) hallway and faced off with one of the two
\ngun-toting teenagers. Gardner and the gunman shot it out before the Jefferson
\nCounty deputy retreated to call for help.” Law enforcement was criticized by
\nDenver radio hosts and others for the failure of the deputy to stand his ground.
\nFive days after the shooting stopped, Gardner went on “Dateline NBC” and
\nrevealed that he had been outside in his patrol car–had driven up when he heard
\nshooting–and that he stopped 50 yards away and fired several shots at Harris,
\nbut missed. When I asked him about this discrepancy, Steve Davis, spokesman for
\nthe Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, attributed it to the initial
\nconfusion just after the shooting.<\/p>\n
\nchallenge their more bizarre claims. For instance, Gardner said on “Dateline”:
\n“I think with exchanging fire, it did allow some–some people that are–that
\nwere fleeing the scene to get out of the building. I always will have to live
\nwith the fact that, maybe if I could have dropped him, maybe it would have saved
\none or two more lives.” Yet, at the time of this gunfire exchange, the teens had
\nkilled only two people. If Gardner had hit Harris, Klebold (described as a
\nfollower of Harris) might have been unnerved and surrendered, and thus saved up
\nto eleven lives. Two other officers arrived, fired at one of the teens, and
\nmissed.<\/p>\n
\nthere right away, but we couldn’t get in. We were way outgunned.” Jefferson
\n The American Spectator, August,1999 <\/p>\n
\nproceeded at a glacial pace, said: “I just knew (the killers) were armed and
\nwere better equipped than we were.” SWAT team members had flak jackets,
\nsubmachine guns, and fully automatic M-16s–rather more formidable protection
\nand weaponry than the teenagers’ shotguns, semiautomatic rifle, and shoddy TEC-9
\nhandgun (which Clinton ludicrously described as an “assault pistol”).<\/p>\n
\ntheir efforts to repeatedly frisking students and marching them out of the
\nbuilding with their hands on their heads. Jefferson County Undersheriff John
\nDunaway bragged to the Denver Post that the evacuation of students “was about as
\nclose to perfect under the circumstances as it could be.” Even though none of
\nthe SWAT teams came under hostile fire, Denver SWAT officer Jamie Smith claimed:
\n“I don’t know how you could have thrown in another factor that would have made
\nthings more difficult for us.”<\/p>\n
\nfiretruck, each officer taking one small step after another, with the group
\nhunched together as if expecting an attack at any moment. This maneuver occurred
\nlong after the perpetrators were dead.
\n The American Spectator, August,1999 <\/p>\n
\nthree hours after the shooting stopped. Wounded teacher Dave Sanders died,
\nperhaps because the team took four hours to reach the room he was in, even
\nthough students had placed a large sign announcing “1 Bleeding to Death” in the
\nwindow.<\/p>\n
\nafter the shooting started. Police spokesmen said most of the SWAT teams were
\nnot sent in “for fear that they might set off a new gunfight,” as the New York
\nTimes reported. Sheriff Stone justified the non-response: “We didn’t want to
\nhave one SWAT team shooting another SWAT team.”<\/p>\n
\nspokesman Davis said, “We had no idea who was a victim and who was a suspect.
\nAnd a dead police officer would not be able to help anyone.” Donn Kraemer of the
\nLakewood SWAT team explained: “If we went in and tried to take them and got
\nshot, we would be part of the problem. We’re supposed to bring order to chaos,
\nnot add to the chaos.” A former law enforcement officer who now helps train
\nColorado police observed: “Everything the SWAT teams did that day was geared
\naround fear. A great flaw in the training for SWAT teams is that they’re so
\nworried about officer safety that they’ve lost their ability to fight.”
\n The American Spectator, August,1999 <\/p>\n
\nSheriff Stone proclaimed that “early intervention” by the cops who shot at the
\nkillers and missed “saved one heck of a lot of kids’ lives, by pinning these
\nguys down (Harris and Klebold spent most of their time in the library, where
\nthey killed ten people), by putting them on the defensive, instead of the
\noffensive (except for the 13 murder victims), and subsequently probably led to
\ntheir suicide.” But one of the youths had left a suicide note before the carnage
\nbegan.<\/p>\n
\nof the shooting, police on the scene radioed that they needed to be resupplied
\nwith ammunition. This is peculiar because, according to official accounts,
\nHarris and Klebold fired only a handful of volleys at lawmen. SWAT teams laid
\ndown “cover fire” as they advanced towards the building. Spokesman Davis could
\nnot estimate how many shots were fired by the SWAT teams. Denver attorney Jack
\nBeam stated that the sheriff’s department may be a target of lawsuits because of
\npossible “friendly fire” casualties.(Jefferson County Coroner Nancy Bodelson
\npersuaded a Colorado judge to seal the autopsy reports on the victims–thus
\nmaking it much more difficult to determine who shot whom. ) Said Beam: “Public
\nofficials want to make it like you are anti-victim if you want to get to the
\nfacts.”
\n The American Spectator, August,1999 <\/p>\n
\nfor excessive violence against unarmed civilians. Peter Kraska of Eastern
\nKentucky University estimated that the use of police SWAT teams has ” increased
\nby 538 percent” since 1980. Ninety percent of police departments responding to a
\n1995 survey by Kraska reported having an active paramilitary unit. Kraska told
\nthe Washington Post: “We have never seen this kind of policing, where SWAT teams
\nroutinely break through a door, subdue all the occupants and search the premises
\nfor drugs, cash, and weapons.” (Before being sanitized the SWAT acronym
\noriginally stood for “Special Weapons Attack Team.”)<\/p>\n
\nhardware may be driving policy; so many cities have police dressed up for war,
\nit is often easier to rely on massive intimidation rather than old- fashioned
\npolice work. No-knock raids have become so common that thieves in some places
\nroutinely kick down doors and claim to be police. No-knock raids at wrong
\naddresses have become a national scandal. Naturally, some police departments
\nhave responded to the problem by seeking to define it out of existence. New York
\nCity Police Commissioner Howard Safir insists that his officers have not
\nwrongfully raided someone’s house unless they go to a different address than
\nthat typed on the search warrant–regardless of whether they have any
\njustification for busting down doors.
\n The American Spectator, August,1999 <\/p>\n
\nown lives, often with catastrophic results. As the San Antonio Express- News
\nreported on May 23, “A 48-year-old armed man was killed in a hail of gunfire
\nearly Saturday by a special operations police squad during what police said was
\nan attempt to stop him from committing suicide.”<\/p>\n
\nDecember 1996, seeking to arrest a drug dealer. However, one of its stun
\ngrenades (similar to those the FBI used at Waco) set fire to the building and
\nleft 24 people homeless.<\/p>\n
\npretexts to send in the troops, if for nothing else than to keep people in
\nplace. How else to explain the practice of St. Petersburg, Florida, in deploying
\nSWAT teams to keep order along a parade route? Or of the Greenwich, Connecticut
\nSWAT deployment for crowd control any time lottery jackpots exceed $1 million,
\nas the New York Times reported? Palm Beach County in Florida has twelve separate
\nsuch teams; weapons were found in fewer than 20 percent of the locations they
\nraided in 1996.<\/p>\n
\n1995, the Pentagon has deluged local law enforcement with thousands of machine
\n The American Spectator, August,1999 <\/p>\n
\nand over a million other pieces of military hardware. The police arms buildup
\nhas also been fueled by federal drug-war aid. Instead of relying on street
\nsmarts, police departments are resorting to high-tech weaponry, courtesy of
\nUncle Sam. This is the same mentality that led to zero American combat
\ncasualties during the Kosovo bombing but left the land to be protected a
\nshambles.<\/p>\n
\nplenty of policemen with the courage to enter Columbine High School and go after
\nthe shooters while the killings continued. But the SWAT teams’ military- style
\ncommand structure and their take-no-casualties mindset led to police dallying
\nwhile civilians died.<\/p>\n
\nbully them into submission when they go to a parade or buy a lottery ticket, nor
\nkick down their door every time a neighbor accuses them of drug possession. It
\nis time to remember what peace officers were hired for, and end the military
\nbuild-up on Main Street.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"