Professor David Klinger, an expert on police shootings and a former police offer, sent me a copy of a lengthy report he conducted on the employment of SWAT teams submitted to the National Institution of Justice, entitled, “A MULTI-METHOD STUDY OF SPECIAL WEAPONS AND TACTICS TEAMS: FINAL REPORT.”
The report looked at statistical data from numerous teams nationwide that looked at the number of callouts, shootings, and the like over a 12 year period. At the peak year over 250 teams reported data. Some itnteresting facts emerge. SWAT teams do a variety of things, including hostage stand-offs, high risk warrant service, etc. Warrant service was the item that they performed the most, and the use of SWAT teams for this purpose increased throughout the 1990s, consistent with the criticisms of SWAT team lodged by civil liberties advocates.
But for all of these events there are comparatively few shootings. For instance, during the entire 12 year period, the teams reported 462 shootings (only 381 of which were at people). Of these, approximately 30% occurred during warrant-related service. During the relevant time frame 34,271 warrants were served. Not all of these shots were at people, i.e., some were suppressive fire and the like. So of all the shooting that took place in SWAT callouts, around 139 shootings took place in the course of 34,271 served warrants, or around .4% of the time. Even assuming all of these were unjustified–which is not a reasonable assumption–this number is fairly small.
Mistakes, negligent discharges, and other “bad shoots” were reported, for which teams and individuals are rightly criticized and held accountable. But if a shot is fired .04% of the time for all incidents during warrant service, this does not suggest that SWAT teams in general are trigger-happy or that they are frequently resorting to deadly force in an unreasonable, out-of-control fashion.
The report is unfortunately not available on line. I have, however, made a copy available to Radey Balko if he wishes to discuss its contents as they relate to his criticisms of SWAT teams. The next relevant comparison, of course, is to look at warrant service and other policework to see how much more often, if at all, regular cops employ deadly force in executing arrest and search warrants. This comparison would not be apples to apples, of course. SWAT would be expected to have a greater use of deadly force because of their high degree of employment in high risk situations. But it would provide some contex to see if the relatively low numbers of deadly force incidents involving SWAT are as low as they seem.
28 Jan 2006 at 2:38 pm
Whoa there, Roach – first, you erroniously put down “0.04%” in your second citation of the number, when the actual number is 0.41%. Obviously a typo since you cite correctly the first time, but still.
Meanwhile, it would seem that you’re being somewhat selective in what you decide to focus upon. Ok, 0.4% of warrant service jobs involve shooting. What about other dispatches?
And meanwhile, I believe the critical aspect of Radley’s argument is one you’ve chosen to entirely ignore – what happens to the SWAT teams when something does go horribly wrong? Are they actually held to account?
28 Jan 2006 at 3:31 pm
You’re right about the typo.
The other dispatches, I thought, would be uncontroversial, such as the use of deadly force in hostage stand-offs or barricaded suspects, for example. This is not to say such force is always justified, but that such uses of SWAT teams are fairly uncontroversial in general.
The study says, “The Firearms Discharge Reports on the 273 shootings of interest (i.e., those that involved shots fired toward people or accidental discharges) offer additional information about the role that deadly force plays in SWAT operations. Almost half (46.5%) of the shootings occurred during incidents involving barricaded subjects, 19.8% happened during narcotics search warrants, 18.7% during hostage incidents, 9.9% during non-narcotics warrants, a single shooting occurred during a civil disturbance, and the remaining 4.8% happened on miscellaneous SWAT operations (e.g., stake-outs and sting operations).”
As for what happens, I imagine that varies tremendously by incident, by agency, and by the quality of the SWAT team member’s lawyer. For any given case, there is the option of a Section 1983 lawsuit and these suits are fairly common and often result in significant settlements–not just for SWAT, but for all incidents of excessive force.
I think there is a countervailing concern. If we want people to become police officers, they should have some room for error. If any mistake resulted in immediate criminal and civil liability, it would be a job that no one would pursue because such mistakes (or the risk of a jury finding of such mistkaes) are significant.
Police work is difficult. It often requires split-second decisions under life-threatening conditions. This does not mean, of course, that there should be no punishment for egregious mistakes, particularly when the result in the death of an innocent. But if police are exessively inhibited from using force to defend themselves and others, there are significant costs of such a regime. The optimal balance of administrative, civil, and criminal penalties is a complicated issue, and I would not endorse throwing the book at SWAT teams or any other policemen in the case of every reasonable, but mistaken, use of force. I don’t have a magic answer to this quetsion, I confess, but there are important considerations in favor of not employing such punishment too frequently, nor with making such punishments too severe.
There have been great strides in law enforcement and the reduction of incidents of deadly force in the last 30 years. Increased civil liability has certainly been part of that. Whether it’s just right, too harsh, or not harsh enough in general, I can’t say without knowing more, and I certainly can’t say more about whether whatever punishment is forthcoming in any particular incident, especially the Culosi incident, because it’s still pending.
30 Jan 2006 at 10:06 am
Again, the ultimate end point of your position is to have SWAT teams or military units take over all public police duties on the premise that doing so will reduce violence overall and that should be our only concern.
This, obviously, is not what Americans want, for reasons I have already stated.
Now, you say that police work is difficult (which it certainly is), and that the police “should have some room for error.” I agree. But there is a difference between an error that results in civilian inconvenience and an error that results in a civilian dead. The problem with the proliferation of SWAT teams is that although it may reduce overall violence, the “errors” committed are more likely to be deadly ones.
I don’t have any statistics on the success rates for Sec. 1983 civil suits against police officers or SWAT members, but I know it’s not like they have to carry any kind of insurance to pay such potential claims. I’m pretty sure the cops themselves rarely, if ever, are forced to pay these claims out of their own pockets. The worst that happens is that they get fired (rare in itself) and have to get the same job somewhere else. There’s no blacklist, no jail, etc. Not entirely satisfying for someone who has had a loved one needlessly shot to death.
31 Jan 2006 at 3:05 pm
I don’t agree with your conclusion that there is some ultimate endpoint to my position requiring paramilitarized police.
For starters, such a proposal would be excessively costly in purely monetary terms.
Second, I agree that there is value in day-to-day encounters of having our police approachable, nonthreatening, and positioned as very moderate authority figures in society. We don’t want a society of overlords or of a cowed and fearful citizenry.
That said, it’s important that arrests happen efficiently and with minimal loss of life. Arrests and home-searches are dangerous business. It’s hard to know in advance what one will face; and in some cases, one knows in advance that there is substantial risk. In those cases, which I would define more broadly than you and Radley, the balance of harms favors the use of the solution that leads to the least loss of life, including the lives of law enforcement officers. I think that the extensive use of SWAT teams in High-Risk warrants is that solution.
I also don’t agree that SWAT teams lead to more deadly errors. Regular cops have guns too, they simply don’t know how to use them as well and are more likely than SWAT teams to reach for that option because they’re more likely to be outmanned and put in reasonable fear of their life. So I don’t accept this premise at all. It would be true if we had Britsh-style unarmed police. One could say that that is the logical outcome of your own position.
On the last point of what happpens to police after a “bad shoot,” I confess not to know very much about the subject other than what I’ve already said.
19 Mar 2006 at 11:24 pm
As a retired paramedic I believe it is critical to make sure that SWAT officers are the very best and the not the animal worst of a department. I have seen to much bragging about swat killing to beleive anything else. The good old boy protection system is alive and well. I was involved in an incident where I objected to the gross abuse of a suspect and I myself was interigated ( a paramedic ) by Iternal Affiars and blamed for interferring with police. All I did was complaint about police brutality and look at what happened to me. I know that SWAT teams are grossly over used and incorrectly trained. There is a military pyshe going on here and they should not be given those kinds of weapons. It feeds the process. These guys should be trained to absolutely no ever kill anyone and not ever use dealy force. They default to deadly at the drop of a hat.,…no one gets in trouble. That is called excused fascism. Storm troopers…
I learned to disrespect and hate these bastards and it led to my eventual retirement from EMS.
I was paramedic of the year in 1984 and highlky regarded as the best there is for patient care. The SWAT team guys did not care about anything but how loud they could scream and how moucho they looked. They had a defect between their ears. The best cops never joined the SWAT team and detested violence.
Mark EMT-P A82155
19 Mar 2006 at 11:24 pm
As a retired paramedic I believe it is critical to make sure that SWAT officers are the very best and the not the animal worst of a department. I have seen to much bragging about swat killing to beleive anything else. The good old boy protection system is alive and well. I was involved in an incident where I objected to the gross abuse of a suspect and I myself was interigated ( a paramedic ) by Iternal Affiars and blamed for interferring with police. All I did was complaint about police brutality and look at what happened to me. I know that SWAT teams are grossly over used and incorrectly trained. There is a military pyshe going on here and they should not be given those kinds of weapons. It feeds the process. These guys should be trained to absolutely no ever kill anyone and not ever use dealy force. They default to deadly at the drop of a hat.,…no one gets in trouble. That is called excused fascism. Storm troopers…
I learned to disrespect and hate these bastards and it led to my eventual retirement from EMS.
I was paramedic of the year in 1984 and highlky regarded as the best there is for patient care. The SWAT team guys did not care about anything but how loud they could scream and how moucho they looked. They had a defect between their ears. The best cops never joined the SWAT team and detested violence.
Mark EMT-P A82155