Riots and political conflicts of the 1960s is one of the world's most prominent SWAT units and was the second SWAT team established in the United States, after that of the
Philadelphia Police Department in 1964. According to the
Historical Dictionary of Law Enforcement, the term "SWAT" was used as an acronym for the "Special Weapons and Tactics" established as a 100-man specialized unit in 1964 by the
Philadelphia Police Department in response to an alarming increase in
bank robberies. The purpose of this unit was to react quickly and decisively to bank robberies while they were in progress, using a large number of specially trained officers who had a great amount of firepower at their disposal. The tactic worked and was used to resolve other types of incidents involving heavily armed criminals. The
Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)
Special Weapons and Tactics was established in 1967. LAPD inspector
Daryl Gates envisioned the "SWAT" acronym to be "Special Weapons Attack Team" but this was not accepted by deputy chief
Edward M. Davis who instead approved Special Weapons and Tactics. The LAPD promoted what became known as SWAT teams for a variety of reasons. After the racially-charged
Watts riots in
Los Angeles in August 1965, the LAPD began considering tactics it could use when faced with urban unrest, rioting, or widespread violence. Daryl Gates, who led the LAPD response to the riots, would later write that police at the time did not face a single mob, but rather "people attacking from all directions".
New York University professor
Christian Parenti has written that SWAT teams were originally conceived of as an "urban
counterinsurgency bulwark". Another reason for the creation of SWAT teams was the fear of lone or barricaded gunmen who might outperform police in a shootout, as happened in Austin with
Charles Whitman. SWAT-type operations were conducted north of Los Angeles in the farming community of
Delano, California on the border between
Kern and
Tulare Counties in the
San Joaquin Valley. At the time, the
United Farm Workers union led by
César Chavez was staging
numerous protests in Delano in a strike that would last over five years from 1965 to 1970. Early police powers and tactics used by SWAT teams were aided by legislation passed in 1967–68 with the help of
Republican House representative Donald Santarelli. The legislation was promoted within the context of fears over the
civil rights movement,
race riots, the
Black Panther Party, and the emerging
war on drugs.
War on drugs: 1980s and 1990s SWAT officers during a training exercise at
Travis Air Force Base in 1995 In 1981, the
U.S. Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, giving police access to military intelligence, infrastructure, and weaponry in the fight against drugs.
Reagan subsequently declared drugs to be a threat to U.S. national security. In 1972, paramilitary police units launched a few hundred drug raids annually within the United States. In the early 1980s, SWAT drug raid numbers increased to 3000 annually, and by 1996, 30,000 raids annually.
Columbine shooting The
Columbine High School massacre in Colorado on April 20, 1999 was another seminal event in SWAT tactics and police response. As perpetrators
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were shooting students and staff inside the school, officers did not intervene in the shooting, but instead set a perimeter as they were trained to do. By the time they did enter the school, 12 people were killed and Harris and Klebold had committed suicide. They were also heavily criticized for not saving teacher Dave Sanders, who had died from
blood loss, three hours after the SWAT first entered the school. As noted in an article in the
Christian Science Monitor, "Instead of being taught to wait for the SWAT team to arrive, street officers are receiving the training and weaponry to take immediate action during incidents that clearly involve suspects' use of deadly force." The article further reported that street officers were increasingly being armed with rifles, and issued heavy body armor and ballistic helmets, items traditionally associated with SWAT units. The idea was to train and equip street officers to make a rapid response to so-called
active shooter situations. In these situations, it was no longer acceptable to simply set up a perimeter and wait for SWAT. As an example, in the policy and procedure manual of the
Minneapolis Police Department, it is stated, "MPD personnel shall remain cognizant of the fact that in many active shooter incidents, innocent lives are lost within the first few minutes of the incident. In some situations, this dictates the need to rapidly assess the situation and act quickly in order to save lives."
Post-9/11 and the war on terror According to criminal justice professor Cyndi Banks, the
war on terror, like the war on drugs, became the context of a significant expansion of SWAT policing. Whereas some have attributed this expansion to "mission creep" and the
militarization of police, other scholars argue that increased SWAT policing is a response to real or perceived
moral panics associated with fear of crime and terrorism. Banks writes that SWAT team employment of military veterans has influenced their tactics and perspective. most often to serve drug-related warrants in private homes. According to a study by the
ACLU, just under 80% of SWAT deployments were used to serve arrest warrants. Officers have cited safety as the main reason for use of SWAT teams, stating that SWAT units would frequently be called if there were a possibility a suspect might be armed. For instance, in 2006, only two police officers were killed in the arrest of 2 million drug suspects, a low casualty rate possibly stemming from the military equipment and tactics used in the raids.
Radley Balko, an analyst for the
libertarian Cato Institute, argued in his book
Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America that increased SWAT raids have made
no-knock raids, and danger to innocents and suspects, far greater. Another study,
Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments by Diane Cecilia Weber, also of the Cato Institute, raised concern about the increasing use of SWAT teams for ordinary policing tasks. == Organization ==