Via Balko comes this rather disturbing bit of SWAT advice:
Team commanders must raise the profile of their teams. Stay active. Yes, I mean do warrant service and drug raids even if you have to poach the work. First, your team needs the training time under true callout conditions. If all your team does is train, but seldom deploy, you will end up training just to train. You need to train to fight. You already know that.
The article actually has some good advice, but the idea that SWAT should make an effort to be deployed against persons who are not clearly violent and causing harm to regular officers is a big part of the reason we have innocent people getting killed by SWAT teams.
I mean, I get the rationale for getting your team actual experience and not just training, but not even the military encourages throwing forces into the fray just to get them some “real world training experience”. Maybe have SWAT train against other cops who play the OpFor (with SimUnitions) to get that real world feel?
Or maybe, if you are not getting enough deployment experience, you should really be evaluating your need for a SWAT team?
Is not the first word of the SWAT acronym “special”? As in “not usual”?
Seems to me we have a vocabulary failure…
“You need to train to fight.”
You need to join the Marines not the police.
Next up: SWAT Teams performing combat patrols and OPs just to get some boots on the ground time.
Sounds to me like somebody has some jackbooted thug tendencies coupled with an itchy trigger finger.
That’s just the kind of goblin I want policing my streets. Yup. Nothing like a good old gestapo.
unintended consequences ?
what could possibly go wrong?