The American Spectator

August,1999

HEADLINE: They Couldn’t SWAT a Fly

But police commando teams are still a menace to society.

BYLINE: by James Bovard.

James Bovard is the author of Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the

Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin’s Press).

Federal and Colorado officials have transformed the April 20 killings at

Columbine High School into a law enforcement triumph. Attorney General Janet

Reno praised the local police response as “extraordinary,” “a textbook” example

of “how to do it the right way.” President Clinton declared on the Saturday

after the shooting that “we look with admiration at…the police officers who

rushed to the scene to save lives.”

In fact, the excruciatingly slow response by Special Weapons and Tactics

(SWAT) teams and other lawmen to the killings in progress turned a multiple

homicide into a historic massacre. And federal aid to local law enforcement, by

spawning the proliferation of heavily armed but often flat-footed SWAT teams,

may actually undermine public safety.

In Littleton, the sheriff’s department has shifted official explanations more

often than the Clinton legal defense team. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold began

their rampage around 11:20 a.m. on April 20. Jefferson County sheriff’s

spokesmen initially claimed the killers had committed suicide at around 12:30

p.m. After the police came under harsh criticism for the slowness of their

response, spokesmen announced that the killers may have committed suicide much

earlier–though no precise information has yet been released. Local officials at

first also greatly exaggerated the number of fatalities–thus causing the story

to have a greater initial impact.

For the first four days after the shooting, the sheriff’s department claimed

that, as the Rocky Mountain News reported, once the boys’ attack began, Deputy

Neil Gardner “ran into a (school) hallway and faced off with one of the two

gun-toting teenagers. Gardner and the gunman shot it out before the Jefferson

County deputy retreated to call for help.” Law enforcement was criticized by

Denver radio hosts and others for the failure of the deputy to stand his ground.

Five days after the shooting stopped, Gardner went on “Dateline NBC” and

revealed that he had been outside in his patrol car–had driven up when he heard

shooting–and that he stopped 50 yards away and fired several shots at Harris,

but missed. When I asked him about this discrepancy, Steve Davis, spokesman for

the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, attributed it to the initial

confusion just after the shooting.

Much of the press is treating the lawmen as heroes, or at least failing to

challenge their more bizarre claims. For instance, Gardner said on “Dateline”:

“I think with exchanging fire, it did allow some–some people that are–that

were fleeing the scene to get out of the building. I always will have to live

with the fact that, maybe if I could have dropped him, maybe it would have saved

one or two more lives.” Yet, at the time of this gunfire exchange, the teens had

killed only two people. If Gardner had hit Harris, Klebold (described as a

follower of Harris) might have been unnerved and surrendered, and thus saved up

to eleven lives. Two other officers arrived, fired at one of the teens, and

missed.

Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone later explained: “We had initial people

there right away, but we couldn’t get in. We were way outgunned.” Jefferson

The American Spectator, August,1999

County SWAT Commander Terry Manwaring, whose team entered the school but

proceeded at a glacial pace, said: “I just knew (the killers) were armed and

were better equipped than we were.” SWAT team members had flak jackets,

submachine guns, and fully automatic M-16s–rather more formidable protection

and weaponry than the teenagers’ shotguns, semiautomatic rifle, and shoddy TEC-9

handgun (which Clinton ludicrously described as an “assault pistol”).

SWAT teams made no effort to confront the killers in action, but devoted

their efforts to repeatedly frisking students and marching them out of the

building with their hands on their heads. Jefferson County Undersheriff John

Dunaway bragged to the Denver Post that the evacuation of students “was about as

close to perfect under the circumstances as it could be.” Even though none of

the SWAT teams came under hostile fire, Denver SWAT officer Jamie Smith claimed:

“I don’t know how you could have thrown in another factor that would have made

things more difficult for us.”

Television cameras captured a SWAT team creeping toward the school behind a

firetruck, each officer taking one small step after another, with the group

hunched together as if expecting an attack at any moment. This maneuver occurred

long after the perpetrators were dead.

The American Spectator, August,1999

SWAT team members did not reach the room where the killers lay until at least

three hours after the shooting stopped. Wounded teacher Dave Sanders died,

perhaps because the team took four hours to reach the room he was in, even

though students had placed a large sign announcing “1 Bleeding to Death” in the

window.

Many local SWAT teams descended on the high school parking lot and vicinity

after the shooting started. Police spokesmen said most of the SWAT teams were

not sent in “for fear that they might set off a new gunfight,” as the New York

Times reported. Sheriff Stone justified the non-response: “We didn’t want to

have one SWAT team shooting another SWAT team.”

The police response was paralyzed by concerns for “officer safety.” Sheriff’s

spokesman Davis said, “We had no idea who was a victim and who was a suspect.

And a dead police officer would not be able to help anyone.” Donn Kraemer of the

Lakewood SWAT team explained: “If we went in and tried to take them and got

shot, we would be part of the problem. We’re supposed to bring order to chaos,

not add to the chaos.” A former law enforcement officer who now helps train

Colorado police observed: “Everything the SWAT teams did that day was geared

around fear. A great flaw in the training for SWAT teams is that they’re so

worried about officer safety that they’ve lost their ability to fight.”

The American Spectator, August,1999

Law enforcement spokesmen worked overtime to turn the debacle into a triumph.

Sheriff Stone proclaimed that “early intervention” by the cops who shot at the

killers and missed “saved one heck of a lot of kids’ lives, by pinning these

guys down (Harris and Klebold spent most of their time in the library, where

they killed ten people), by putting them on the defensive, instead of the

offensive (except for the 13 murder victims), and subsequently probably led to

their suicide.” But one of the youths had left a suicide note before the carnage

began.

Were any students directly harmed by police action? At 12:20 p.m. on the day

of the shooting, police on the scene radioed that they needed to be resupplied

with ammunition. This is peculiar because, according to official accounts,

Harris and Klebold fired only a handful of volleys at lawmen. SWAT teams laid

down “cover fire” as they advanced towards the building. Spokesman Davis could

not estimate how many shots were fired by the SWAT teams. Denver attorney Jack

Beam stated that the sheriff’s department may be a target of lawsuits because of

possible “friendly fire” casualties.(Jefferson County Coroner Nancy Bodelson

persuaded a Colorado judge to seal the autopsy reports on the victims–thus

making it much more difficult to determine who shot whom. ) Said Beam: “Public

officials want to make it like you are anti-victim if you want to get to the

facts.”

The American Spectator, August,1999

The Colorado debacle is ironic in that SWAT teams are routinely criticized

for excessive violence against unarmed civilians. Peter Kraska of Eastern

Kentucky University estimated that the use of police SWAT teams has ” increased

by 538 percent” since 1980. Ninety percent of police departments responding to a

1995 survey by Kraska reported having an active paramilitary unit. Kraska told

the Washington Post: “We have never seen this kind of policing, where SWAT teams

routinely break through a door, subdue all the occupants and search the premises

for drugs, cash, and weapons.” (Before being sanitized the SWAT acronym

originally stood for “Special Weapons Attack Team.”)

SWAT teams are most often used for no-knock raids in drug cases. But now

hardware may be driving policy; so many cities have police dressed up for war,

it is often easier to rely on massive intimidation rather than old- fashioned

police work. No-knock raids have become so common that thieves in some places

routinely kick down doors and claim to be police. No-knock raids at wrong

addresses have become a national scandal. Naturally, some police departments

have responded to the problem by seeking to define it out of existence. New York

City Police Commissioner Howard Safir insists that his officers have not

wrongfully raided someone’s house unless they go to a different address than

that typed on the search warrant–regardless of whether they have any

justification for busting down doors.

The American Spectator, August,1999

SWAT teams are routinely called to deal with people threatening to take their

own lives, often with catastrophic results. As the San Antonio Express- News

reported on May 23, “A 48-year-old armed man was killed in a hail of gunfire

early Saturday by a special operations police squad during what police said was

an attempt to stop him from committing suicide.”

A Fitchburg, Massachusetts SWAT team attacked an apartment building in

December 1996, seeking to arrest a drug dealer. However, one of its stun

grenades (similar to those the FBI used at Waco) set fire to the building and

left 24 people homeless.

Once local governments militarize the police, they find more and more

pretexts to send in the troops, if for nothing else than to keep people in

place. How else to explain the practice of St. Petersburg, Florida, in deploying

SWAT teams to keep order along a parade route? Or of the Greenwich, Connecticut

SWAT deployment for crowd control any time lottery jackpots exceed $1 million,

as the New York Times reported? Palm Beach County in Florida has twelve separate

such teams; weapons were found in fewer than 20 percent of the locations they

raided in 1996.

Massive federal aid is fueling this militarization of local police. Since

1995, the Pentagon has deluged local law enforcement with thousands of machine

The American Spectator, August,1999

guns, over a hundred armored personnel carriers, scores of grenade launchers,

and over a million other pieces of military hardware. The police arms buildup

has also been fueled by federal drug-war aid. Instead of relying on street

smarts, police departments are resorting to high-tech weaponry, courtesy of

Uncle Sam. This is the same mentality that led to zero American combat

casualties during the Kosovo bombing but left the land to be protected a

shambles.

SWAT teams are becoming an impediment to public safety. There were probably

plenty of policemen with the courage to enter Columbine High School and go after

the shooters while the killings continued. But the SWAT teams’ military- style

command structure and their take-no-casualties mindset led to police dallying

while civilians died.

Citizens pay taxes so government will guard their rights and safety, not

bully them into submission when they go to a parade or buy a lottery ticket, nor

kick down their door every time a neighbor accuses them of drug possession. It

is time to remember what peace officers were hired for, and end the military

build-up on Main Street.