February 23, 2016 testimony to the House Judiciary Committee

in SUPPORT of HB521, "An Act concerning Public Safety - SWAT

Teams - Reporting and Limitations"
Thomas Nephew, Member, Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition
[contact information withheld]
Speaking for the activist group "Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition"
and for myself, I strongly support this legislation.
It's hard to believe that there was a time, not so very long ago, when a Los
Angeles police inspector (soon to be police chief) named Daryl Gates had not
yet conceived of "Special Weapons and Tactics" (SWAT) teams. Or that there
was a time when systematic no-knock raids violating the presumption of
innocence, the Fourth Amendment, the "Castle Doctrine," and the spirit of
the Third Amendment were not even a gleam in the eye of Nixon
administration operatives -- or the Democrats who went along with him.
It's telling that SWAT teams were a response to the Watts riot of 1965--a riot
that was sparked in part by the kind of "beat first, ask questions later"
policing that has brought so many Maryland citizens to these hearings today.
Daryl Gates's alleged solution proved to be even worse policing: deploying
increasingly militarized police forces first in Los Angeles, and all too soon
across the country. Not at all coincidentally, SWAT teams were modeled on
counterinsurgency forces thousands of miles away in Vietnam. 1 SWAT teams
are, fundamentally, American authority at war with overwhelming force
against its own citizens. Some of us may accept, justify, or even welcome
that, but none of us should deny it.
Of course, this bill doesn't seek to end no-knock raids or SWAT team
deployments, or reverse overnight the regrettable series of court decisions,
misguided policies, and political knavery that gave rise to SWAT teams and
militarized policing.
Instead, Delegate Smith's excellent bill mainly proposes to resume counting
how often and under what legal authorities these events take place, and
what their basic consequences are.
I'd say that was a good start -- except that from 2010 to 2014, Maryland
once already did that, leading the country in actually looking at and counting
how often its police forces were deployed like Marine platoons to serve
search warrants and the like. The data were telling:

In FY 2014 (July 1 2013-June 2014), there were 1689 SWAT

deployments in Maryland -- nearly 5 per day, with well over one a day
in P.G. County alone (418 in all).2

About two of every three SWAT raids used forced entry.2,3

In FY 2012, nearly 90 percent of the SWAT raids in Maryland were

executed merely to serve search or arrest warrants; by FY 2014, that

figure had actually climbed to 93 percent.2,3, leaving only 7 percent

for the kinds of emergencies (barricaded structures, bank robberies,
hostage situations) that SWAT teams are imagined to respond to
exclusively.

Half the SWAT deployments in 2012 were for Part II crimes, the
nonviolent class of crimes. The vast majority of those raids were to
serve search warrants on people suspected of drug offenses.3

Yet rather than prompting legislative soul-searching about overly frequent,

disproportionate armed force used by year after year by law enforcement for
trivial reasons, the law requiring this data collection was allowed to lapse last
year, for reasons I, for one, cannot begin to fathom.
The state of Maryland demands its agencies and commissions collect and
annually report detailed data--and no doubt rightly so--on subject matter
ranging from the condition of the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation
Fund, to cemetery complaints, to horse racing and breeding, to
nanobiotechnology research grants, to public drainage associations.4 Surely
it is not too much to ask that it resume requiring annual reports about the
highest levels of force employed by its law enforcement agencies.
Indeed, this committee should go further and prohibit SWAT team
deployments and forced-entry tactics for warrants obtained on the word of a
single informant, or for persons suspected only of nonviolent crimes. It
should pass legislation holding police forces liable for damages and penalties
after raiding the wrong place (it happens, as Berwyn Heights, Maryland
mayor Cheye Calvo can attest).5
The committee might amend this bill, requiring on-the-record, post-raid
evaluations by police forces or their inspectors general to determine whether
the expense and risk (to citizens and police alike) of SWAT deployments was
in fact necessary.
But above all, this committee must not fail to do its duty to the citizens of
Maryland: to see to it that the use of extreme force by law enforcement
agencies is at least reported to the public, so that we and you, our
representatives, can make an informed decision whether a state with SWAT
teams serving minor search warrants is really the kind of society we want. I
thank Delegate Smith for introducing this bill, and urge you to report it
favorably.

1 I rely for this brief history on "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's
Police Forces," Radley Balko, 2013. PublicAffairs. New York.
2 Fiscal Year 2014 SWAT Team Deployment Data Analysis ;MSAR # 7790 Maryland
Statistical Analysis Center, Governors Office of Crime Control & Prevention September
2, 2014. Retrieved from
http://goccp.maryland.gov/msac/documents/SWATReportFY2014.pdf, 2/23/16.
3 "Shedding light on the use of SWAT teams," Radley Balko, Washington Post, 2/17/14.
4 MD Agricultural Land preservation fund: Md. AGRICULTURE Code Ann. 2-506;
Cemetery complaints: Md. BUSINESS REGULATION Code Ann. 5-311; horse racing
and breeding: Md. BUSINESS REGULATION Code Ann. 11-213; nanobiotechnology
research grants: Md. Economic Development Code Ann. 10-451; public drainage
associations: Md. LOCAL GOVERNMENT Code Ann. 26-902. Retrieved from
https://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/mdcode/, 2/23/16.
5 Policy proposals: Balko, 2013. Cheye Calvo: Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor's
residence drug raid, retrieved from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor's_residence_drug_raid,
2/23/16.