How a Suburban SWAT Team Sees Itself

Even some opponents of militarized law enforcement have been
startled by the tactics and machinery on display in Ferguson,
Missouri, this week. They might not have been surprised to see such
a horror show in
Boston or
Los Angeles, but they didn’t expect it in a suburban or
small-town setting. Yet as Samuel Bieler recently
told City Lab, “you can definitely see evidence of
militarization of the police in the suburbs. You can find examples
basically anywhere.”

Illustrating the point, former Reasoner Radley Balko,
now at The Washington Post, has
posted a SWAT video from Doraville, Georgia, population 8,500.
“At least as of this writing,” he notes, “the video was posted on
the front page of the
Doraville Police Department Web site”:

Balko adds:

The images at the beginning and end are from The
Punisher, the fictional character described by Wikipedia as “a
vigilante who employs murder, kidnapping, extortion, coercion,
threats of violence, and torture in his war on crime.” The audio is
the song “Die Motherf—-r Die” by Dope.

Doraville is a town of about 8,500 people, in the northeast suburbs
of Atlanta. It
last saw a murder in 2009 (at least through the end of 2012,
the last year for which I can find statistics).

This
isn’t unusual. It’s the culture of policing in much of America.
The consequences are on display in Ferguson right now.