Hawaii's no-knock cops

You and your law-abiding neighbors in Hawaii might be just one street address away from a life-threatening, midnight raid by a local paramilitary police unit. As these so-called SWAT squads increasingly become America’s favored search warrant delivery service, bungled raids -- including many to the wrong address -- have skyrocketed. In these assaults on private property, scores of innocent citizens, police officers and nonviolent offenders have died.

In a recent CATO Institute report titled Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, Radley Balko describes how, “Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.”

These raids -- as many as 40,000 per year -- terrorize nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders and wrongly targeted civilians who are awakened in the dead of night as teams of heavily armed paramilitary units, dressed not as police officers but as soldiers, invade their homes.

A Botched Hawaii Raid.

In 2005, Balko reports, police in Omao, Kauai broke into the home of Sharon and William McCulley on a drug raid. They were tracking down a box that allegedly contained marijuana and believed the box to be in the McCulley’s possession. The McCulleys, at home with their grandchildren, were thrown to the ground and Sharon was handcuffed and held down at gunpoint as her grandchildren lie next to her. William, who walks with the aid of a walker and has an implanted device that delivers electric shocks to his spine to relieve pain, began flopping around on the floor after the device malfunctioned from the trauma of being thrown down. The police had raided the wrong address. They then erroneously raided a second home before finally locating the box and arresting several men.

SWAT Origins.

How did the once trusted neighborhood cop become a serious threat to life and privacy on the home front? Originally, Los Angeles officials formed the nation’s first SWAT units in response to civil riots and hostage taking and bomb toting radical groups in the 1960s. But by 1995, one study found, 89% of the nation’s police departments, including 65% of smaller towns in the 25-50,000 population range, had a paramilitary unit. As the violence-prone sixties faded away, SWAT squads found a new lease on life in the emerging tough-on-drugs culture of the 1970s. By 1995, serving search warrants, mostly in no-knock “drug raids,” accounted for 75% of the actions of the nation’s SWAT squads.

Threats to Liberty.

These SWAT squads have become more and more of a threat to our civil liberties. First, they depend on notoriously unreliable informants when picking raid targets. Self-serving and ill-informed sources often send raids to wrong addresses. Second, SWAT teams trained by U.S. Army Ranger and Navy Seal units blur the line between war and law enforcement. Citizens are then treated as if they are, in fact, combatants.

Third, the use of military assault weapons and tactics -- nighttime raids, crashing through front doors and setting off stun grenades inside homes -- actually turn otherwise non-violent situations into violent confrontations when startled occupants try to arm and defend themselves.

Finally, by 1990 (the last year for which the information has been made public) 38 percent of all police departments, 51 percent of all sheriff departments and 94 percent of all state police departments in the U.S. received money from the sale of boats, cars and other assets seized during drug raids. This money is then used to outfit more SWAT teams for more asset-seizing raids -- a practice that serves as a license for SWAT teams to confiscate private property for their own use.

To rein-in out-of-control SWAT units, Hawaii’s state and local governments should limit the use of these squads to their original purposes; end corrupting asset forfeiture policies; and pass laws that safeguard families’ rights to the privacy and sanctity of their homes.

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