SWAT team members, some armed with assault rifles, prepare for an exercise. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
The militarization of America's police has been hotly debated in recent years. Critics argue that effectively turning cops into soldiers risks alienating them from the communities they supposedly serve.
New research provides evidence supporting such warnings. It finds the use of SWAT teams—perhaps the most common and visible form of militarized policing—neither reduces crime nor enhances public safety.
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It reports this aggressive approach to law enforcement is disproportionately used in minority communities. And finally, it finds portraying officers in military gear decreases public support for the police.
"Curtailing militarized police may be in the interest of both police and citizens," concludes Jonathan Mummolo, an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. His study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Mummolo measured the impact of militarization using a variety of methods. Among his data sources were "a nationwide panel measuring the presence of active SWAT teams," and a list of every SWAT team deployment in the state of Maryland over a five-year period (8,200 in all).
"SWAT teams," he notes, "often received advanced combat training," and their formation "represents a heightened commitment to the use of militarized equipment and tactics."
He found "the vast majority of SWAT deployments occur in connection with non-emergency scenarios, predominately to serve search warrants." What's more, these teams "are more often deployed in areas with high concentrations of African-Americans, even after adjusting for local crime rates."
Perhaps most importantly, he reports "there is no evidence that acquiring a SWAT team lowers crime, or promotes officer safety." All in all, he adds, "the benefits of increased deployments appear to be either small or nonexistent."
But there are costs involved, as the second part of the study shows. Mummolo conducted two studies of Americans' attitudes toward the police: one online, featuring 1,566 people, and another conducted by Survey Sampling International, featuring 4,465 people.
Participants read a fictitious news article in which a police chief argues his department deserves a larger budget. The report was paired with a one of four photos featuring a group of policemen "standing guard during a local protest."
The images depicted various degrees of militarization, ranging from one in which five officers stand in traditional uniforms to another featuring cops in riot gear posing with an armored vehicle. Participants were then asked about their support for police spending and their confidence in the force.
The results: Seeing the armored-vehicle photo "caused support for police funding in the United States to fall by roughly four points in the (online) survey, and two points in the SSI survey," Mummolo reports. "Support for funding the department in the news article also fell."
Strikingly, among people taking the latter survey, viewing that image also led to "a 3.2 point drop in respondents' desire for more police patrols in their own neighborhoods."
It seems few people are enthused about having a pseudo-army patrolling their streets. And they assume a police force that can afford that kind of equipment doesn't need additional taxpayer dollars.
Overall, "the routine use of militarized police tactics by local agencies threatens to increase the historic tensions between marginalized groups and the state, with no detectable public safety benefit," Mummolo concludes. "While SWAT teams arguably remain a necessary tool for violent emergency situations, restricting their use to those rare events may improve perceptions of police with little or no safety loss."
Attorney General Jeff Sessions might want to rethink his support for a plan in which surplus military gear is passed on to police forces. This research suggests the benefits are negligible at best, while the costs are quite real.
ClunkySpoon on August 21st, 2018 at 06:17 UTC »
So I read through the paper and I'm curious as to who would make the claims the paper debunks? It seems to me that militarization of the police in the case of SWAT is meant as a suppressive force, not as a deterrent. And when responding to an incident, typically they are responding to a dangerous incident, meaning there would be higher risk for the officers.
What I'm not clear on from this paper is how many incidents actually warrant militant swat response and of those incidents, how many of them occur within high crime poverty stricken areas? And of those areas what is the racial makeup? I'm not sure what actually warrants a suppressive response, in these cases as the premises the paper postulates seems to indicate may not fully cover.
SirFrostbyTe on August 21st, 2018 at 05:09 UTC »
Looking at the full study, there seems to be a variety of issues with the way the author collects their data and then tries to extrapolate that to actual SWAT use across the country. Firstly, the "rare census" of SWAT deployments that the author uses to support his initial claim that SWAT is used in majority black communities comes specifically from the state of Maryland, which isn't necessarily representative of the entire U.S. Furthermore, the "trust in police" claim is based on a voluntary survey the author sent out, with the context of a police chief asking for a budget increase, and the "militarized police" (representative of SWAT) picture was that of an armored personnel carrier surrounded by five officers in heavy military gear. This contrasted with the "control" photo of what we picture as a "normal" cop, wearing just a blue uniform, with no additional and expensive looking vehicles in the background. Personally, if you frame the question as a budget issue, and ask me if I would support giving more money to a department that has either A: enough funds to already purchase an APC, and equip its police with extra supplies and equipment short of a nuclear bomb, or B: a department that isn't showcasing any signs of wealth, and is just wearing normal clothes where I don't have the imagery to go on, I would probable be more favorable to giving that Department B more money, since it seems like Department A already has enough. On a more statistical note, the very nature of the survey, particularly the targeting of African American oversampling lends itself to response bias and possible validity issues there. Additionally, as u/czartaylor pointed out below, most departments utilize SWAT for extreme scenarios that weren't necessarily observed in the authors data points (the study features simple comparisons of whether or not a county in Maryland had a SWAT team or not, and then links that to their crime response), and the study doesn't initially take into account how the SWAT officers apply to crime rates when they aren't responding as SWAT.
Full study link: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/14/1805161115
czartaylor on August 21st, 2018 at 04:36 UTC »
I feel like this research completely misses the point of a SWAT team.
The point of a swat team is not to reduce average crime, or average officer safety. SWAT teams exist specifically for nightmare scenarios like active shootouts, school shootings, hostage crisis, barricaded suspects, etc. 'using SWAT teams doesn't do what it wasn't supposed to do' is not exactly breaking news by any stretch, and they even make a concession to the exact reason why SWAT teams are around: those exact crisis situations.
The problem is that SWAT teams are incredibly expensive to maintain and acquire gear and train officers, for the 1% of situations where you actually need that stuff. You absolutely do not want to get caught without a nearby SWAT team when shit goes sideways, but on a yearly budget basis, it's incredibly hard to justify giving a SWAT team the kind of budget they need because they don't do much (part of the reason why a lot of even mid-sized cities don't have their own dedicated SWAT team, they share one with the surrounding cities). So SWAT's sent out on routine shit like serving warrants not be cause someone actually thinks they're needed to keep officers safe or to reduce crime, they're being sent out both for live training and so when the budgeting committees look at their budget, they can say 'look at what our money is doing even when we don't need them. Also, if you're paying for all that stuff anyways, you might as well take no chances when possible, there's no reason to send in regular cops when you have a full SWAT team and gear sitting on their asses waiting for something to do (i exaggerate, you aren't paying cops to sit around and wait, most SWAT officers are regular officers doing regular officer things normally, but you get the point).