On Mar. 6, ACLU affiliates in 23 states filed over 255 public records requests with law enforcement agencies to establish the extent to which federal funding fuels the militarization of state and local police departments — particularly SWAT teams.
"Equipping state and local law enforcement with military weapons and vehicles, military tactical training, and actual military assistance to conduct traditional law enforcement erodes civil liberties and encourages increasingly aggressive policing, particularly in poor neighborhoods and communities of color," said Kara Dansky, senior counsel for the ACLU's Center for Justice. "We've seen examples of this in several localities, but we don't know the dimensions of the problem."
One disturbing example happened on Mar. 21, when the Albany, NY, police chief wanted a setting “as realistic as possible” for his SWAT training exercise. He picked a soon-to-be-demolished housing complex just yards away from occupied homes in a predominately African-American neighborhood. The training exercise was virtually unannounced in advance to most of the local folks, and frightened residents endured assault rifle blank ammunition fire, tear gas, and exploding flash grenades.
According to local news reports, some residents were confined to their apartments while others were threatened with arrest for trying to enter their own homes.
After nudging from the local NAACP, the Albany Police say they're reviewing their “communication process.”
For the black community already reeling from two recent reports on gun violence and race and increased racial hate crimes, the militarized SWAT strategies now used routinely by many police departments only seems to add fuel to the existing racial tensions in communities like Albany.
According to the ACLU, while only a fraction of SWAT raids result in actual criminal charges of any sort, they often “provoke fear, hurt individuals, and families, and result in damages to personal property.”