
War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing  - dublinben
https://www.aclu.org/war-comes-home-excessive-militarization-american-policing
======
jqm
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.

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adamnemecek
Holy fuck

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

~~~
bronson
That's on the front page right now:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938748)

~~~
adamnemecek
Yeah, when I saw this post, it was on the second place so I saw it first.

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gfodor
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
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.

~~~
gfodor
They don't specify why a third of the time it was unknown. But feel free to
make more baseless conjectures I guess.

~~~
jleader
They don't specify, but keep in mind that the police departments are the ones
reporting these statistics, and they have an interest in showing how dangerous
the situation was and in justifying their use of force.

~~~
gfodor
Sounds like an unfalsifiable position to me.

