who needs the military when you've got SWAT

Lies, more lies and damned statistics

"94 percent of the state's SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended."
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The only good news I could take of this story was in this line

"Police forced their way into 545 houses, seized property in 633 of the raids, made arrests 485 times and discharged their weapons five times. In the six months studied, seven civilians were hurt but none killed, and two animals were injured and two killed."

But if they only fired 5 times on raids, it does lead to some questions as to how often they were going up against armed and potentially hostile suspects, the putative reason that SWAT goes in rather than a regular police arrest with backup.

Which is criticized here
"Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes."

- So they need SWAT to go after someone with unpaid parking tickets, disorderly conduct, or a pot possession charge? Bad enough the police have, and abuse the use of, tasers or shoot people's corgis. We don't need a military police regime to enforce standard laws. What you'd need is a more efficient criminal justice system (and possibly fewer dumb laws, but that's probably asking too much).