I'm from the Government and I'm Here to Kill You

by David T. Hardy

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  These are not rare, isolated cases. There is a simple indication that such fouled-up SWAT raids occur with frequency. Performing a Google search for “botched swat raid” will turn up 1,390 hits (and 58,000 if the words are not put in quotation marks).

  How did we get to a situation where we tolerate outright attacks on American citizens on American soil—and indulge them until they are almost commonplace? One study of seventy-nine SWAT deployments in Massachusetts found that only ten involved barricaded and nonsuicidal subjects. The remaining seven-eighths involved drug searches, routine patrol, or—oddly—responses to suicide threats.20

  Another study of eight hundred SWAT deployments nationwide found that that only 7 percent involved barricade, hostage, or active shooter situations; 62 percent were drug searches, two-thirds of which involved use of battering rams or other forced entry.21 Search warrants that not long ago would have been served by uniformed officers and a knock on the door are now being served by black-clad teams with battering rams and assault rifles. Investigative journalist Radley Balko, in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, calculates that the average annual number of SWAT team deployments rose from thirteen per team in 1986 to fifty-five in 1995, a rise of 423 percent in nine years.22

  Of still greater concern is that nearly half of departments have used SWAT in crime prevention—that is, not to apprehend lawbreakers, but to try to intimidate the locals into following the law.23 A representative of an unnamed “highly acclaimed” police department explained to researchers:

  We’re into saturation patrols in hot spots. We do a lot of our work with the SWAT unit because they have bigger guns. We send out two, two-to-four men cars, we look for minor violations and do jump-outs, either on people on the street or automobiles. After we jump-out, the second car provides peripheral cover with an ostentatious display of weaponry. We’re sending a clear message: if the shootings don’t stop, we’ll shoot someone.24

  Quite an original approach to preventing shootings!

  FEDERAL AGENCIES GO SWAT

  The FBI was the first federal agency to form a SWAT unit, and by the 1990s, each of its fifty-six Field Offices had its own team. Other agencies rapidly followed suit. The Marshals Service had its Special Operations Group; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had a Special Response Team; and so on. By the late 1990s, if an agency still did not have its own paramilitary unit, it simply didn’t rate.

  Between 1996 and 2008, the number of federal nonmilitary employees authorized to carry guns increased from 74,000 to 120,000.25 By 2016, the number had expanded to 200,000. Federal law enforcement officers now outnumber the United States Marine Corps.26 This expansion is all the more remarkable when we reflect that serious violent crime—murder, rape, robbery, assault—is primarily a state and local concern; only rarely do these offenses violate federal law.

  Even agencies that were not charged with apprehending violent criminals began arming as if they were pursuing terrorists or drug cartels. Soon journalists were wondering:

  Why does the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) need submachine guns? The agency’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) is seeking .40 Caliber semiautomatic submachine guns.

  Earlier this year, the US Postal Service listed a similar notice on its website, soliciting proposals for assorted small arms ammunition. And the Social Security Administration put in a request for 174,000 rounds of hollow-point bullets, shortly after the USDA requested 320,000 rounds about a year ago. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the National Weather Service, also requested 46,000 rounds.

  The ammunitions purchases are to supply dozens of federal agencies which, in the years since 9/11, have acquired Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams to enforce the inflating definition of their missions. The Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Office of Personnel Management, the Labor Department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service are just some of the federal agencies that have their own SWAT units.27

  Why does every federal agency need a SWAT team? For the same reason that every government building needs to be hypersecure: agency prestige. To lack tight building security would be to admit that no terrorist would waste explosives on the Council on Environmental Quality, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. By the same token, to have no SWAT team is to admit that the offenders your agency pursues aren’t particularly nasty characters.

  The federal Byrne grant program exacerbates the problem of militarized policing. The program awards grant monies based on matters such as numbers of drug-related arrests and numbers of drug seizures. As Radley Balko notes, “The grants reward police departments for making lots of … arrests (i.e., low-level drug offenders), and lots of seizures (regardless of size) and for serving lots of warrants…. Whether any of that actually reduces crime or makes the community safer is irrelevant …”28

  FEDERAL AID ENCOURAGES THE MILITARIZATION OF LOCAL POLICE

  Much of this militarization of law enforcement is the product of a 1994 federal program that was consciously designed to encourage such militarization. Under that program, the Justice Department and the Pentagon were jointly given $37.5 million to promote law enforcement use of military weapons. One purpose of the program was to open new markets for defense contractors, whose industry was declining after the collapse of the Soviet Union.29 Where President Dwight D. Eisenhower once warned of the “military-industrial complex” and of its “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,”30 we might today have the same concern over an apparent military-industrial-law enforcement complex.

  In 2014, a black teenager, Michael Brown, was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The result was rioting, and police responded with armored vehicles and other military equipment. The public for the first time began to hear of the federal “1033 Program.” The program is established by section 1033 of the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act31 and authorizes the Defense Department to transfer military items to federal and local law enforcement, provided that the items are “excess” to the needs of the Defense Department and “suitable for use by the agencies in law enforcement activities, including counter-drug and counter-terrorism activities.” Weaponry—firearms, tanks, etc.—cannot be transferred legally so it is regarded as loaned property.32 No fewer than eleven thousand state and local agencies are registered to use the program, and about eight thousand of them are active users.33

  The 1033 Program, one might say, exists to put the “war” in the “War on Drugs.” The Defense Department appears to have taken a rather relaxed stance on the question of what is “excess” and “suitable for use … in law enforcement activities.”

  This is no small program and one has to wonder if it makes the world a safer place. In 2013 alone, the Pentagon transferred half a billion dollars’ worth of equipment to law enforcement agencies.34 A broader study of transfers between 2006 and mid-2014 found that the Defense Department had passed out:

  • 50 airplanes, including 27 cargo transport aircraft

  • 79,288 assault rifles

  • 11,959 bayonets

  • 479 bomb detonator robots

  • 3,972 combat knives

  • 205 grenade launchers

  • 422 helicopters

  • $124 million worth of night-vision equipment, including night-vision sniper scopes.35

  Los Angeles area law enforcement alone received 3,452 firearms. Quite a few MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles) were passed out as well, sticker price $733,000 each. It is unclear why any domestic law enforcement agency would need M16s that fire twelve to fifteen rounds per second or bayonets, let alone mine-resistant ambush-protected armored vehicles.

  Federal programs such as the Byrne grants distort local police decision making. Investig
ative journalist Radley Balko cites the case of a small police department where the sex crimes unit had to struggle for financing, but the SWAT team and drug units were “always flush with money.”36

  The recipients of the arms were as remarkable as the program:

  The 67 police officers of Johnston, Rhode Island, (population 29,000) got ten tactical trucks and 35 assault rifles. Or the security guards of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences signed up for eight rifles and four shotguns, and the campus police at Florida International received 50 M-16 rifles and a mine-resistant vehicle (MRAP).

  Are things so bad along the banks of the Missouri River that the town of Yankton (population 14,500) really needs a robot, a grenade launcher, 14 reflex sights, and a pair of riot guns from the U.S. military?

  But the town of Mitchell (population 15,500) is listed with $733,000 worth of equipment. The sheriff of Codington County (population 27,500) with $415,400. And when we reach the South Dakota Highway Patrol, headed by Colonel Craig Price, things get wildly out of hand: $2.7 million worth of full-tracked carriers, armored trucks, grenade launchers, and other equipment. Robots, riot guns, night sights, a military helicopter: the Highway Patrol has you covered if war breaks out in the Bad Lands and the Black Hills.37

  Navajo County, Arizona, experienced zero murders and one armed robbery in 2014, but was given one MRAP vehicle, three other armored vehicles, and twenty-four assault rifles. Wasatch County, Utah, which experienced no murders and no robberies, received an MRAP and fifteen M16s. Where there actually was some crime to be found, the equipment totals were quite impressive. Five counties in the Los Angeles urban area (Los Angeles, Riverside, Santa Barbara, San Bernadino, and Ventura) sought and received 4,854 night-vision devices; 3,851 M16s; 27 helicopters; 7 armored vehicles; and 5 grenade launchers.38

  The 1033 Program is actually but a part of the whole picture. The Department of Homeland Security has been issuing grants to local law enforcement to finance their militarization, a program that today “dwarfs the 1033 program.”39 In 2011, it was estimated that over the past decade DHS had issued no less than $34 billion in grants for this purpose, which underwrote the purchase of everything from assault rifles to armored vehicles.40

  SCHOOLS GET MILITARY EQUIPMENT

  The Chronicle of Higher Education found that many university police departments were joining the law enforcement arms race; 124 colleges and universities obtained material through the 1033 Program. Half had acquired M16s, fully automatic assault rifles. Arizona State University had the most, seventy, while the University of Maryland and Florida International University had fifty each.41

  Even K-12 school security wanted to be able to rock-and-roll with M16s:

  Texas and California top the list of states in which school districts are known to have received weapons, with 10 districts in Texas having received a total of 82 M-16 and M-14 rifles, 25 automatic pistols and 45,000 rounds of ammunition, and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) receiving 61 M-16 rifles, three grenade launchers and an MRAP.42

  Gone are the days when elementary school teachers kept classroom order with deadly rulers—today they can draw M16s and grenade launchers from the school armory!

  LAW ENFORCEMENT MILITARIZATION: THE LARGER PICTURE

  Ever since the concept of professional policing arose in the nineteenth century, the American approach has been to draw a clear line between military and police functions, training, and thinking. This was a practical separation: the military is fundamentally aimed at the enemy with an objective to break things and kill people; the police are aimed at erring citizens with an objective to bring them into compliance with the law. Over the past few decades the two functions have moved toward a merger. The military function is seen as bringing the enemy (the word itself has vanished from our discourse, now they are “insurgents” or “fighters”) to “justice.” The police function, in contrast, is increasingly seen as obtaining compliance by intimidation and overt use of force. The confusion of the two functions is neither practical nor politically healthy and leads to a government that is more dangerous and intimidating to its own citizens than to its enemies.

  The military function is one that is especially dangerous, and thus we have for centuries kept it under the tightest of controls. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the military has kept itself under those controls. The military world is bound by concepts of honor, duty, obedience, and submission to civilian control. There is a considerable danger that civilian agencies may take on the military’s weapons and tactics without acquiring these restraining factors.43 We need look no farther than the tragedies at Waco and at Ruby Ridge to see the reality of this danger. To have the weapons of war carried by those who lack the military’s restraining ethos is to create a dangerous imbalance between power and responsibility, and to make the United States a more dangerous place.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS KILLS VETERANS

  To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.

  —Motto of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

  This report cannot capture the personal disappointment, frustration, and loss of faith of individual veterans and their family members with a health care system that often could not respond to their mental and physical health needs in a timely manner. Immediate and substantive changes are needed.

  —Richard Griffin, Acting VA Inspector General, 20161

  IN 2009, GENERAL ERIC SHINSEKI BECAME our seventh Secretary for Veterans Affairs. By all accounts an outstanding officer, Shinseki had risen from Second Lieutenant to a four-star, serving two tours of duty in Vietnam and losing most of one foot to a land mine. A man who knew how to get things done, Shinseki retired as the Army’s Chief of Staff, the most senior position in that branch of the military.

  But some things were beyond the capability even of a man like Shinseki: reforming the VA was one of them. After five years as Secretary, Shinseki resigned, explaining:

  I said when this situation began weeks to months ago that I thought the problem was limited and isolated, because I believed that. I no longer believe it. It is systemic. I can’t explain the lack of integrity among some of the leaders of our health care facilities. It is something I rarely encountered during 38 years in uniform. I will not defend it because it is indefensible.2

  At that point, remarkably, the VA hadn’t yet hit rock bottom. The next year was considerably worse. In 2015, the agency set a record for medical malpractice settlements: $230 million.3 Spending nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to settle one year’s malpractice liability might be taken as a sign that things are not going well. But VA leadership may not care, since the payments never came out of the VA’s budget. As discussed previously, any judgment against the government that exceeds $2,500 is paid from the Judgment Fund, a budget allocation administered by the Department of Justice. So budgets, spending, and bonuses went on as if there were no lawsuits—even the VA’s attorneys’ fees were paid outside the VA’s budget. The taxpayer did not get off so easily, nor did the veterans and their families.

  The core problem of the VA hospital system is a staggering lack of accountability. One case settled that year demonstrated just how far out of control things are. In the Lafayette, Louisiana, VA hospital, personnel originally told a family that a seventy-year-old veteran had injured himself in a fall, but the coroner ruled the case a homicide. The investigation found hospital employees who witnessed the burly 240-pound nursing assistant beating the veteran to death.

  State prosecutors had the nursing assistant arrested and charged with manslaughter. The VA responded by suspending him, with pay, while charges were pending. (Suspension with pay is the functional equivalent of a paid vacation.) The criminal proceedings were prolonged; the “vacation” continued for two years. After the VA started receiving Congressional inquiries about employees suspended with pay, it reacted—by returning the nursing assistant to his work in the hosp
ital!4

  Cases of hospital staff committing homicide on patients are rare. Simple negligence racks up a higher body count, especially when those who complain of unsafe conditions are the ones who get punished. Early in 2012, Sharon Helman was appointed head of the Phoenix VA hospital and went to tour her new domain. She received frank advice from one of the ER doctors, Dr. Katherine Mitchell, who later explained:

  There was a perfect storm in the ER and I was afraid a patient would die because I could not get to them, I did not have the resources. She came by and asked me how things were going. I answered her honestly and told her that unless we had additional staffing, unless we had additional ancillary services and other resources, that the ER was too dangerous to continue and we should be shut down immediately.5

  Among other things, while triage (determining the priority assigned to ER patients based on the urgency of their need for care)6 is essential to an ER, not a single nurse in the Emergency Department had completed a comprehensive triage training regimen. Dr. Mitchell could identify more than a hundred cases of mistaken triage resulting in dangerous delays in care.7

  One might expect a new director would react by thanking Dr. Mitchell and dealing with the problems she raised. Instead, Dr. Mitchell found herself pulled into a meeting with top administrators who told her that the only problem in the emergency room was her lack of communication skills.8 Mitchell subsequently filed a complaint about conditions, whereupon the VA put her on administrative leave, further reducing the minimal staffing in that ER.

  “Three days after the U.S. Veterans Affairs Inspector General issued a review that found systemic failures at the Pittsburgh VA led to a recent Legionnaires’ outbreak that killed at least five veterans, the man who oversees the Pittsburgh system was in Washington, D.C., receiving the government’s highest career award for civil servants that included a $62,895 bonus.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 2, 2013.