The nearly exclusive use of dynamic entries has given way to the utilization of other options like the breach and hold. Negotiations have gone from an investigator in a trench coat yelling through a bull horn to the use of high-tech communications with a highly skilled team of negotiators. SWAT equipment has progressed from mirrors to robots. The bygone days of painting a donated delivery truck black are over.
One life-saving tactic advanced by SWAT has been the use of less lethal options that are now also available to patrol officers. Every team has under-reported stories of suspects who are alive today because of the use of a non-lethal impact munition. Despite an evolution in tactics, one thing never changes: SWAT saves lives. They are called upon to solve the worst problems imaginable and in some cases unimaginable. When conditions are at their worst, SWAT is at its best.
Dan Marcou is an internationally-recognized police trainer who was a highly-decorated police officer with 33 years of full-time law enforcement experience. Upon retiring, Lt. Marcou began writing. Dan is a member of the Police1 Editorial Advisory Board.
More Police1 Articles. More Police History News. More Product news. More Police History Videos. Make Police1 your homepage. How to buy automated external defibrillators eBook. The following article was written for PoliceOne. It was August 1, , a tragic event occurred in Austin, Texas. A man named Charles Joseph Whitman, a honor student, used a high-powered rifle to randomly kill over a dozen people and wounded over thirty more from the University of Texas Clock Tower Building in Austin.
At approximately 11 A. The tower stood feet tall in which Whitman could see for some distance. Whitman took an elevator to the twenty-seventh floor, killing a maintenance worker and later took up his position. Whitman had an arsenal of 3 rifles, a sawed-off shotgun, 2 handguns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a 5-gallon container of water, some sandwiches, and a can of gasoline.
The rampage did not start at the tower, as most people would believe. He would return to his residence where he stabbed his wife to death while she lay in bed. Back at the tower, Whitman first shot a young black male riding a bicycle and later shot a young girl in the head. Whitman had no mercy on the people below him. He even shot a pregnant woman in the abdomen killing her eight-month old unborn child, and then began shooting people as they hid in doorways or looked out of windows trying to see what was happening.
Members of each team, who volunteered from the ranks of patrol and other police assignments, had specialized experience and prior military service. Each unit was activated for monthly training or when the need for special weapons personnel actually arose.
The first challenge to these pioneers in the field of special weapons and tactics came in On December 9th, search warrants for illegal weapons were served at the Black Panther Headquarters at 41st and Central Streets. Boston started one in , New York followed in and Philadelphia created one in In cities, increasing urbanization rendered the night-watch system completely useless as communities got too big.
The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter.
In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.
In general, throughout the 19th century and beyond, the definition of public order — that which the police officer was charged with maintaining — depended whom was asked. For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce. Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests.
The irony of this logic, Potter points out, is that the businessmen who maintained this belief were often the ones who profited off of the commercial sale of alcohol in public places.
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