[Baltimore Citizen’s Academy] SWAT
SWAT, also known as Special Weapons and Tactics or the Quick Response Team, is the team that the Baltimore Police call for those situations that might escalate, such as barricaded subjects, raids/no-knock warrants, or even ship boardings in the harbor. Although, 90% of the situations they are called to are volatile situations that need additional support, such as violent repeat offenders, human traffickers, drug dealers with priors and firearms, and murders.
Baltimore’s SWAT team was formed in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots. (Check out the Wikipedia page for the Watts riots if you want to read about an event with many parallels to the Baltimore uprising of 2015). In the aftermath of that riot, police departments across the country started setting up these SWAT teams as much more militarized divisions for the department to use. Like most decisions that happened in the 60’s, it seems that there was a racial element to this movement.
The BPD has two SWAT teams that are on call 24x7 who are expected to be able to drop everything and respond to calls (which caused an embarrassing situation in March with a drunk SWAT member and his official car). Over the course of the year, they average 500 calls between the two teams, so a lot of their time is spent going to calls. But the time that they aren’t doing that, they are working on training or admin work.
For example, in March 2017, there was a situation where a father was holding a 1 and 4 year old child in a house at knife point because of a domestic dispute. That is a situation that requires a bit more training than a normal patrol officer would bring to the situation, so they bring in the SWAT team.
To become a basic SWAT officer, they need to do three additional weeks of training at the Police and Correctional Training Commission in Sykesville. But that isn’t the only thing that makes the SWAT team the elite team that it is. they also have better guns, better shields, and bullet proof vests that can stop a rifle shot (the normal patrol officer’s vests only stop a pistol shot).
What do they use?
They brought out their Bearcat vehicle, which is a modified Ford F-550 that is covered in reinforced metal and bulletproof glass. While it may seem like they would use this during no-knock raids, it is actually designed for rescue operations. While it has holes in its doors and sides for them to shoot from, and having a turret hole in the top that someone can poke out of, it was not very clear what exactly the use case was for this. Its for rescues, where you need to be shooting cover fire, and can back up to the person you need to save I guess?
Although, I think the answer came when someone asked if they use military supplies. They do not, but they are all for getting them because it helps them do their job better. I think the Bearcat probably falls in the same category, where the SWAT team is called into the toughest situations that the BPD deals with, and they want the best tools at their disposal to deal with these situations. The Bearcat might be used as a show of force and a way to carry their stuff most of the time, but they would prefer to have these tools as opposed to not having them.
As the individuals doing the job, you should expect them to ask for the best tools available because their singular focus is on being the best unit on the force for handing tough situations. But as the citizens of Baltimore, we need to push back on these kinds of requests. If we give our SWAT unit the same tools as our military, then they will probably start acting a bit more like a military. Its the law of the instrument, where if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
But they did reinforce that their goal is to save lives. When they get to a situation, they like to stay outside of the situation and use non-lethal gas to force the people out. But they also have tools to escalate a situation, like cameras to scope out the inside through windows, battering rams, and guns. Of course, the situations where the SWAT ends a situation without a loss of life does not make the news like the death that I mentioned above. They also have robots that can enter a building, open doors, climb stairs, and pull someone to safety (we will discuss that more when we discuss the bomb squad). They have also been asking for drones that would help them survey a situation from above.
But why should we care about this?
In May 2014 in Georgia, a SWAT team executed a no-knock search warrant on the house of the mother of a suspected drug dealer. However, they threw a flashbang through a window of the guest house which landed in the crib of a sleeping baby, causing a collapsed lung, and $1 million in medical costs. The person that they were looking for was not in the house, and had not been there in a long time.
If the responsible police department had done a bit more investigating, they would have found out that the person they were looking for was not there. Or if the SWAT team had used some recon before breaking in, they would have seen the family sleeping in the room they were entering.
But this goes back to the law of the instrument. When you have a militaristic SWAT team available, you are more likely to go after a low level drug dealer with guns blazing under the assumption that you need to catch the guy with his drugs before he flushes them down the toilet. A department that was less reliant on tools like that could probably rely on detective work to get people to testify against the person, and know where he was. The SWAT team should be used for situations of imminent danger; not for half baked investigations.
