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Hopefully, the ACLU will look at the "misuse" of SWAT for missions outside of their designed function.
Effective SWAT Teams are highly trained and very expensive to maintain. In a time of shrinking budgets Police Managers have to find a way to justify a unit which might only be called upon once or twice a quarter.
For this reason they expanded the SWAT Mission to include other duties. Initially it was to serve high risk warrants and arrest. This is a good use but in most jurisdictions still minimal use. Once again the managers had to justify the cost for minimal benefit.
Now many departments have tasked the Swat to serve all warrants and make all planned arrest. This policy justifies the budget but it does a couple of other things. If the Officers go into an ordinary arrest mode, their tactical training degrades. If they affect all arrest in the tactical mode then the public suffers, the departmental relationship with the community suffers, and accidents happen were innocents are killed or injured.
There have been a number of incidents reported were the after action review showed that if the officers had not gone in hard no injuries would have been sustained. The subjects while a repeat offender has all ways surrendered peaceable when a uniformed officer knocked and notified the subject of the arrest. The Police went in hard, the BG thought it was a rip off and responded appropriately until he determined that the Raiders were in fact police.
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