Operation Ghetto Storm

At 4:30 a.m., the first wave of SWAT teams clothed in battle dress uniforms (BDUs) with black hoods and wielding submachine guns - swarmed into nine homes in a rural community in Washington state. Some 150 officers executed search warrants in 1994, alleging that the residents were running a massive international drug cooperative and harvesting marijuana in underground farms.

The multi-jurisdictional SWAT team members came from 13 separate police agencies including the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms, the Washington Air National Guard, the Washington State Patrol, three county sheriffs SWAT teams, and four small city police departments.

A massive, essentially military operation, the raid netted a few arrests for possession and 54 marijuana plants. It also terrorized eight children asleep in their beds when hooded figures burst in, guns ready One officer put a gun to the head of a three-year old, according to witnesses, and ordered him down on the floor. Because the police were masked, had no badge numbers, and represented so many different agencies, the victims decided to settle out of court

That same July, on the other side of the country, another SWAT team ran amok. As Cleave Atwater tended his customers at his club and pool room in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the door suddenly splintered open and a mob of men in ninj a hoods and fatigues waving automatic rifles rushed in and shouted for people to get down onto the floor. Terrified, Atwater slipped out while his bar assistant sprawled face down in a pool of his own terror-provoked urine. On reaching the street, Atwater entered a surreal landscape in which paramilitarystyle police taking part in "Operation RediRock" were selectively stopping and searching black people.

Atwater, proprietor of the Village Connection, had called the police months before to complain about drug trafficking near his Graham Street business. But when the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation's Special Response Team (SRT) and the local police that held the warrant for the block-wide raid2 finally arrived in full battle dress, they brought little comfort or remedy.

The victims of North Carolina's Operation Readi-Rock raids survived their ordeals. In another incident, in Oak City, about 70 miles north of Chapel Hill, Jean Wiggins, a cleaning woman, was less fortunate. The same SRT team that went into Graham Street put seven rounds through her body as she ran from a bank where she had been held hostage for 15 hours after a robbery attempt. In less than two years, a single paramilitary police team destroyed a lot of public trust and claimed the life of a woman who should have had every reason to expect she would be safer with the police than with her captors.

The War at Home

Then came the "War on Drugs" in the 1980s. Suddenly, there was a new rationale for aggressive use of state- sponsored violence since - any teenage moviegoer knows by now - drug dealers are wanton, diabolically violent characters, armed to the teeth, eager to fight to the death, and stereotypically non-white. From 1985 to 1995, the survey found, a second wave of paramilitary units was established - most in the smaller, less populous jurisdictions to fight the drug war.

Starting in the 1970s, the military had been only casually involved in drug interdiction activities. Its participation sparked court cases charging violations of the Posse Comitatus Act, which was passed to end the state of martial law that existed in occupied southern states after the Civil War. During that period of repression, in which internal passports, arbitrary search and arrest, public beatings and lynchings were the norm, the line between military and policing functions was routinely blurred.

13 The Posse Comitatus Act became a guiding tenet of American democratic governance: the military is designed to engage in war, and the civilian police are charged with enforcing the law.

14 Then two changes in the law, first in 1983 and then in 1989, brought the military and police institutions side by side formally and legally - at exactly the same time that the post-Cold War military was looking for a new mission. After those amendments to Posse Comitatus, the military could provide intelligence, materiel, transport services and training, as well as participate in drug interdiction efforts in almost every way short of direct search, seizure and arrest.

15 Subsequently, through programs including Joint Task Force Six at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas, local police began receive ing some of the same kind of military training as the Special Forces units. More than 20 of the respondents in Kraska and Kappeler's survey reported their paramilitary teams were trained by Army Rangers or Navy SEALS, military units that specialize in commando tactics. One commander told Kraska in a follow-up interview: "We've had teams of Navy SEALS and Army Rangers come here and teach us everything. We just have to use our own judgment and exclude the information like: 'at this point we bring in the mortars and blow the place up.'"

16 The similarities between police and military operations have raised serious questions about civil liberties. In May 1997, Marines conducting a border control "anti-drug" training mission shot dead a goat herder tending his flock in Texas at the Mexico border. The four soldiers, dressed in camouflage, claimed that the herder - armed with a World War 11 era single-shot rifle, as is usual when protecting livestock in rattlesnake and coyote territory - had fired on them. But where police would be required by law to announce their presence and fire only when their lives were in danger, the soldiers remained hidden and unannounced as they stalked high school student Ezequiel Hernandez for several hours.

17 As the army assumes civilian police functions, the police are acting - and looking - more like soldiers. McNamara, who served as a police chief in San Jose and Kansas City after 15 years in the New York City police department, partially blamed the militarization of police forces on the proliferation of assault weapons: "I predicted a long time ago, the failure to control military-style weapons into the general population would lead to further militarization of police."

18 The drive toward high-tech weaponry was facilitated soon after the end of the Cold War when military spending reductions brought cheap war-surplus materiel into the market. (St. Petersburg, Florida, just bought its first armored personnel carrier this Spring for $ 1,000 from the US military.) Gun companies, perceiving a profitable trend, began aggressively marketing automatic weapons to local police departments, holding seminars, and sending out color brochures redolent with ninja-style Imagery.

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