Petition for Responsible SWAT Reform

Originally created to deal with emergency or other very-high intensity 
situations (e.g. snipers, hostages, barricaded suspects), SWAT teams were 
deployed on fewer than 3,000 occasions in all of 1980. Today, SWAT teams 
conduct raids more than 50,000 times per year, mostly while doing 
low-level drug enforcement.

This is wrong. Every time police enter a home with sudden, overwhelming 
force in the way that SWAT teams are trained to do, a trauma is caused to 
the people inside from which they may never recover. Many of the buildings 
targeted house completely innocent people -- roommates, spouses, children, 
victims of wrong address reports -- and the vast majority are low-level 
offenders at worst.

Even more troubling, using a SWAT team when a situation is not already 
close to violence risks creating an altercation that could otherwise have 
been avoided. Reports have detailed numerous cases in which unarmed people 
were shot by police officers who had become trigger happy due to the rush 
of doing a dynamic entry. In some cases police officers have themselves 
been killed doing SWAT raids, by people inside who were taken by surprise 
and who in fear of losing their lives opened fire. Reports of SWAT 
officers killing pets are common.

The overuse of SWAT teams is an injustice that shatters the peace of 
communities rather than protecting them; and the rationale behind most 
SWAT raids -- fighting the drug war -- is a weak one, given the failure of 
supply-side enforcement to reduce the availability of drugs. We the 
undersigned therefore call for:

•	the limiting of SWAT team deployments to emergency or otherwise 
very-high intensity situations;

•	for changes in the way criminal justice funding is allotted, in order to 
focus on public safety needs rather than arrest numbers;

•	for modification of other policies that have encouraged the overuse of 
SWAT teams;

•	for detailed reporting on the activities of SWAT teams and their 
results; and

•	for policymakers at the federal and state levels to consider the 
detailed recommendations on this issue appearing at 
http://www.swatreform.org.

SWAT teams should be available but rarely used. Please take action to fix 
this problem, in the states and across the nation, for the sake of safety, 
good policing and basic fairness.

(Citations backing up the statements made in this petition can be found at 
http://www.swatreform.org.)