In regards to blaming the police for being overzealous I think part of the problem is we don't have nearly enough info to evaluate it on. What kind of calls do these scumbags make to get a SWAT team response? Is it a quick call to a 911 responder that then gets passed up the ladder? What sort of response time does the SWAT team have, is there anytime to do a cautionary background check before they hit the pavement? How often are these false alarms sounded? Have they been through 9 dangerous crackhouses this month then the 10th time happens to be the innocent Jones family?Baresark said:I think it's extremely short sighted to blame this on the police. They get a call that they MUST take as serious. The calls almost universally include confession of murder of women and/or children or holding hostages or both. Any police agency on the planet would treat it just as serious, even if there were no equivalent to SWAT teams in other countries. I'm not saying the police in the US are not over militarized, but it doesn't make sense to blame them. This happens because some piece of crap thinks it's funny to almost get people killed. That is the only reason this happens. Not because police are militarized, that is a whole other issue that you can't possibly blame this on.
We tend to assume that they should be able to look up an address and say 'oh the Jones live there, family of 4 with dog in safe suburban area no criminal record, likely false alarm so send officer first'. But realistically we don't know how it all plays out. And considering that these scumbags use this knowledge to effectively make these calls, it probably shouldn't be laid out somewhere for everyone to see. At face value the best I could think of is that if it's not a crime ridden area then while swat is suiting up they could maybe send a regular patrol car on a simple drive by? No sirens, no knocking at the door, just drive by the house and report if anything seems amiss.
And on a completely different topic, another thing you here of often happening in these cases is the family dog getting shot. Humans get the warning but it seems like if a SWAT team see's a dog they shoot first. A number of years ago at a film fest I watched a French film which involved a scene where a Paris SWAT team busted assaulted the leads apartment. He was gone, but his big fluffy dog was home. In this case however the tactics used were that this SWAT team had intel and was expecting a big dog. After breaching the door they had a specific guy wearing one of those dog training arms go right for the dog and when it bit down they shot it with a tranquilizer. Seemed like standard procedure while the guys with the real guns did the usual sweep.
So is it not possible for the US SWAT teams to handle dogs a bit more humanely?