John Whitehead's Commentary
An Eleven-Year-Old Victim Raises Questions About Police Tactics
It happened around 6:20 on the morning of September 13 during a coordinated raid on the residences of an alleged drug smuggling ring. After the police forced their way into the Modesto, California home, a member of the SWAT team killed 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda with a shotgun blast to his back. The boy's father was arrested on charges of methamphetamine trafficking.
Investigators say they may never know what caused the officer's shotgun to discharge during the raid. Last year, the same officer accidentally fired a bullet into the body of a suspect during a raid when the suspect's pit bull attacked. A subsequent investigation and autopsy, however, concluded that the suspect was already dead at the time. Other than that mishap, authorities say the officer, who has been a member of the police department for 21 years and on the SWAT team for the past 18, has a "star record."
In just the past twenty years, however, what experts call "no-knock dynamic searches of private homes" have risen by over 250 percent. Usually conducted as yet another skirmish in the ongoing war on drugs, these SWAT team raids feature police paramilitary units that are often trained by military special services forces--such as the Navy Seals.
This military training isn't the only thing trickling down to local police departments, though. In a three-year span during the mid-Nineties, the Department of Defense gave police over one million pieces of military hardware. The police department in Jasper, Florida - all seven officers - are now equipped with fully automatic M-16s. Instead of policing a community, these local officers are fighting a war, and the civilian casualties continue to mount.
The casualty in Modesto could have been avoided simply by not raiding the Sepulveda's house. For a report on police militarization in the September/October issue of Gadfly magazine (www.gadfly.org), writer Kathleen Phalen talked with the SWAT team commander for the Charlottesville, Virginia police department, who told her that his department only deploys the SWAT unit for hostage situations.
The Modesto police, as well as others, could benefit from following this example. That isn't to say we should accept methamphetamine use. But neither should we accept pre-dawn raids on private homes where innocent family members sleep in blissful ignorance of the fury about to be unleashed.
When a police department has a SWAT team, the temptation to use it may prove too powerful to resist. Officials have to justify the hours of specialized training, the sophisticated weaponry and the investment in tactical gear. So instead of simply knocking on the door of a supposed drug dealer with a family, the police kicked in the door, threw in a smoke bomb and followed closely behind.
As Phalen points out in Gadfly, "[T]hey've got the repetitive training, the clothing, the weapons .... The warrior snaps into action .... [H]e's running in a swirl of noises. Click, like in the simulation, he's got the enemy in his site." And an innocent child lies dead on the floor, just a few feet away from the comfort of his own bed.
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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