SWAT teams regularly cause damage, injury and even death, just to serve warrants for non-violent crimes. How did we get here?
About this Piece
To understand more about the problem of police brutality in the United States, I read Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko. This book traces the history of policing in the U.S. from the American Revolution to 2013. It tracks the rise of militarization of police that occurred largely due to the war on drugs and related "tough on crime" legislation. One of the most significant emphases in the book is the development and proliferation of SWAT teams across the nation. These teams were originally created to defuse hostage situations or mass shootings, but instead have been used frequently to serve routine warrants for non-violent crimes, endangering people's lives instead of saving them. For this piece I chose some of the statistics that best demonstrated the "how we got here" of the problem of SWAT team proliferation in our country. Rise of the Warrior Cop is rich with statistics, and some of them are so jarring it’s hard to really comprehend them without a visual depiction. Balko does not provide any visuals, but I created a few graphs in Google Sheets using some of the most notable statistics from the book. I think these graphs throw into harsh relief the daunting task of challenging systems of injustice when the needle has swung so far in the wrong direction.
References
Balko, Radley. Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Public Affairs, 2014.
Balko, Radley. Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Public Affairs, 2014.