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To: alanrs who wrote (111995)	5/25/2010 1:59:48 PM
From: alanrs	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

When that SWAT team video surfaced I did a little thought experiment, trying to look at it from a few different angles. How did there get to be so many SWAT teams? They're needed to counter the well armed drug gangs and the occasional hostage, armed robbery, what have you gone bad situation. Fair enough, I wouldn't want the police out gunned by the bad guys. So what are they used for. I don't know, but using the midpoint of 125 raids per day/365 days a year gives us 45,625 incidents. Now, if these are targeted at the Bloods and Crips and various other assorted bad guys I would expect to see "breaking news, film at 6:00" kind of announcements fairly regularly, even if they are only local events. After all, hostage, gun battle, tons of coke, automatic weapons are all great buzz words in the info news business, and it seems unlikely that the local police force is shy about these types of successes. We're talking about a dozen incidences, each and every week, in each and every state (roughly, not adjusted for population, many more in Illinois, fewer in Montana). And yet I live in Illinois and rarely hear these types of stories. In fact, the few times A YEAR I do hear them the authorities are right there with chests all puffed out telling me what good Joe's they are. So now I imagine I'm a police muckety muck. I've got a heavily armed squad, all dressed up with no place to go. I could head over to the Bloods and Crips hangout, but they've got guns and lookouts, might go badly. I could tell everyone, never mind, back in your street cloths, take the day off, but they'd get rusty and how would that justify the budget increase I just put in for. Or I could hunt up Fred, he's kind of a patsy, smokes a bowl with his wife after they put the kid to bed. A bust is a bust, a conviction is a conviction, at years end my stats look good, raises all around and the world is safer for there being a lot fewer Freds loose on the streets. And then I step back into being me and say I'm not really that comfortable with this being done in my name, although I have absolutely no say in the matter. And maybe they'll run out of Freds, or mistake me for a Fred. Any way I looked at it, it just didn't add up. ARS