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The Spectacle of Policing

'Swatting' innocent people is the latest incarnation of the
decades-long gestation of an infrastructure of fear.

On February 25, an active-duty airman named Aaron Bushnell set himself
on fire

in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., while yelling,
"Free Palestine." I'll leave it to others to analyze the politics. I
want to focus on something else that emerged from that most harrowing
event: what first responders did on the scene before anyone even knew
what was going on.

The

**first** first responder, according to a witness
, either a
security guard or a cop, asked the man before him who was on fire, "May
I help you, sir?" Then he ordered him to the ground.

The second first responder-a Secret Service agent, it turns out-then
approached "with a gun drawn on the man after he collapses, still
consumed by flames." A picture
of that
moment emerged. It looks like he thought he was keeping a murderer from
fleeing the scene of the crime.

It was the third responder who tried to actually put out the fire. As he
did, he cried something that ought to live on in popular lore for the
way it concentrates attention on just how sick our weapons-addicted
society has become-like when a University of Florida student cried,
"Don't tase me, bro
," when six officers
assaulted him for asking an embarrassing question of a politician in
2007.

He told the guy aiming the pistol, "I don't need guns, I need fire
extinguishers!"

By the time enough of those arrived, it was too late. Bushnell died in
the hospital.

People whose job it is to preserve public safety always have many tools
at their disposal in any given situation. Choosing the most appropriate
one is their job. The best tool might be a stern warning, or soothing
words to talk someone down from doing something rash. It might be
well-armed reinforcements with a battering ram, a psychiatric social
worker, or in this case, a fire extinguisher. February 25 was a
frightening token of how habitually our officers of public safety get
that choice wrong, when anything

**but** guns are required.

A little over a decade ago, investigative journalist Radley Balko wrote
the best book about how this happened and why. He called it

**Rise of the Warrior Cop**. He published an updated version in 2021
with a chapter on developments since it first appeared. That chapter is
called "The Police, Unleashed."

"The big issue," he told me the other day via email, "is fear. We're
constantly telling cops that every call could be their last. We vastly
exaggerate the threats they face. Police academies inundate cadets with
videos of ambushes after traffic stops, even though such attacks are
vanishingly rare. You have these 'bulletproof warrior' classes and
the sheepdog mentality that tells cops they should be killing more
people more often."

I've recently been studying one of the most extraordinary consequences
of all of that: a horrifying weapon that some of society's worst
nihilists have invented. It is also one of the most

**complex**weapons humans have ever invented, even though firing it off
is the easiest thing to do in the world. The explosive compound at its
heart is our institutionalized fear of one another, the same fear that
makes cops reach for guns instead of fire extinguishers. And all it
takes to set it off is to squeeze a hair trigger: Just call 911.

[link removed]

AS PART OF MY BROADER PROJECT of documenting the role of right-wing
violence in the U.S., I commanded Google to send me daily emails
compiling the use of the word "swatting" in the news. Swatting, you
probably know, means claiming a phony emergency is taking place at the
address of someone the swatter wants to harass. I decided to start
following the phenomenon after someone phoned in a claim on Christmas
Day

that Special Counsel Jack Smith had shot his wife.

I learned something unexpected: This is not really a growing tactic of
MAGA intimidation. When used politically, in fact, it's one of those
rare phenomena for which the overused cliché "extremists on both sides"
is actually appropriate. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) has recently been
swatted; so has GOP House Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN). Rep. Marjorie Taylor
Greene (R-GA) has been swatted eight times, if you trust her
testimony-which on this subject if on nothing else, actually sounds
quite believable.

This all is something to take very seriously. When police descended upon
Nikki Haley's home in December, cops drew guns on her elderly parents
.
People have died from swatting.

And one thing I learned from my Google alert is that some politicians,
at least,

**are**taking it seriously, introducing a slew of bills in both Congress
and state legislatures to render punishment swift, sure, and uniform for
a crime that has often fallen through the legal cracks. Republican
politicians are these bills' authors. Democrats are MIA on the issue.

Perhaps that owes to Democrats' habitual timidity when it comes to
doing much of anything about anything. Also, conversely, to a classic
hallmark of Republican politicians: They're always happy to find
something new to scare people about, and to propose more punishment as
the solution.

But it also implicates

**another** hallmark of Republican politics. You know how they're
always seeking to appropriate money for some dread disease once someone
close to them contracts it, even if they're content to let the rest of
the health care system rot? A similar narcissism is at work in their
newfound attention to the swatting problem. It has been going on for
some time now. It's only the increase in attacks on politicians that
is novel. The most frequent offenders, however, are kids targeting their
high schools, and even their elementary schools, in places as diverse as
rural central Georgia ;
bucolic Nassau County

suburbs; bedroom communities

surrounding Washington, D.C.; and in one extraordinary but not
unheard-of

incident, 30 simultaneous calls

across Iowa in one day.

This represents something no Republican ever seems to want to deal with,
ever: a deep-seated, society-wide

**social**problem-a problem with the same root as officers pulling
guns instead of fire extinguishers when confronted with burning human
beings. The swatting stories you're increasingly reading in the news,
driven by self-absorbed Republican politicians warding off an admittedly
vexatious irritation, misses the real story: the decades-long gestation
of an infrastructure of fear, led by Republicans but abetted by
Democrats, that has made unleashing warlike mayhem upon innocents so
easy that even a child can do it.

THE SWAT TEAM WAS LARGELY the creation of a single man, a fantastically
racist, legendarily weapons-besotted cop from Los Angeles named Daryl
Gates. Shaken by the 1965 racial uprising in Watts, he received the
blessing from his boss, Chief William Parker-popularizer of the motto
that cops are "the thin blue line between chaos and civilization"-to
create units armed as if for war. They were originally called,
internally, the "shake, rattle, and roll boys" ("Roust anything strange
that moves on the streets," was their charge); then D Platoon; then
finally "SWAT," which originally stood for "Special Weapons Attack
Team." Cops can't be seen as "attacking," Gates was told. So the
acronym became "Special Weapons and Tactics."

Special weapons and tactics were all the rage in those days among police
forces in riot-torn cities across the U.S. In a classic 1968 book
, Garry Wills
catalogued them. They included a gun powerful enough to separate a head
from a body, and a vehicle designed for crashing through thick Vietnam
jungles, which Chrysler sold to local constabularies with a sizzle reel
depicting it "walking over a '53 Chevy." Wills wrote, "The government
is still trying to decide whether the Stoner gun should be adopted in
Vietnam. The Detroit police have decided." They ordered a hundred.

In 1974, a furious gun battle with Patty Hearst's Symbionese
Liberation Army, broadcast live, made Gates's SWAT team a TV star.
Ordinary Americans-those not in the line of fire-apparently loved
the performance. The next year, ABC debuted the police drama

**S.W.A.T.**in prime time. This writer has an early memory of begging
his parents to be allowed to stay up late enough to watch it. Spin-offs
included lunch boxes, a board game, and, Balko reports, "die-cast
miniatures of the S.W.A.T.-mobile."

SWAT teams proliferated like kudzu-not least because the federal
government subsidized them. The first federal law helping local police
access military equipment was signed, naturally, by Ronald Reagan. But
Balko reports that cities also used Bill Clinton's signature policing
initiative, the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, to
bulk up not community-oriented policing but the SWAT teams.

The 1990 National Defense Authorization Act included a provision

that would come to be known as the "1033 program," to let cities buy
surplus military equipment on the cheap, a practice that exploded after
9/11. Tiny towns with a few dozen cops started snapping up gear like
nine-ton BearCats, basically an armored tank on wheels. That was sold by
its manufacturer with a sizzle reel as well: Over AC/DC's
"Thunderstruck," cops "dressed in camouflage toted assault weapons,
piled in and out of the Bearcat ... then attached a battering ram to the
front of the vehicle, which they then used to punch a hole in the front
door of a house, into which they injected canisters of tear gas."

And though Wikipedia only dates "swatting," the verb, to 2008, swatting
the practice drove the plot of the very first episode of

**S.W.A.T.**-when a miscreant called in a report of a fictional
domestic dispute, so cops could be in position for a cop-hating sniper
to mow them down. That was why America needed SWAT teams, apparently.

Except they didn't, really. The most shocking part of Balko's book
is all the instances in which SWAT raids failed, or backfired, while the
boring conventional method-knocking on a suspect's door-often
succeeds just fine. Balko ends each chapter with statistics. By 1975,
America had 500 SWAT teams. By 2008, there were almost that many

**raids**by the SWAT team in lowly Toledo, Ohio, alone.

You come away with the unmistakable sense that what has driven this
growth most is the sheer pleasure of the thing. Also, that, when hammers
are everywhere, everything looks like a nail: The "law of the
instrument" is the philosophical term of art. And so, when confronted
with a man on fire, the first thing the warrior cop reaches for is a
gun.

Or, to take another example, a taser. "Your lead actually reminds me of
this case," Balko responded when I told him my plans for this essay,
linking

to the tale of another man about to attempt suicide by self-immolation,
in Arlington, Texas. He was holding a gas can. The smell of petroleum
was in the air. What did a cop do next?

Bro, he tased him, igniting the man, who burned to death, and
incinerating the house.

[link removed]

SO WHAT IS to be done?

When it comes to individual officers like armed clowns who could have
saved a life with a fire extinguisher but did not, one obvious answer is
to pull back the absurd policy that armed agents of the state are
entitled to "qualified immunity" to protect them from the consequences
of their mistakes. That's what the Fifth Circuit ruled in the
Arlington case, in a decision upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

When it comes to swatting, one obvious point to start with is that it is
at bottom a crime of

**spectacle**-and that anything that de-spectacularizes policing would
attenuate the socially addictive thrill of kids getting to watch
flak-jacketed men with M16s clamber out of riot tanks to descend on
their school cafeteria on pizza day.

That, of course, is a tough ask. It's a

**structural**shift. But most of the answers to the underlying problem
are. Balko suggested to me that police forces could begin "valorizing

**not** shooting people. Drum it into cops that it takes a lot more
courage to hold your fire and wait to see if maybe the gun that
ten-year-old kid is holding is a toy."

Which implicates another structural problem: police unions. "A few years
ago, the LAPD announced a new award for cops who defuse a potentially
dangerous situation without lethal force," Balko told me. "The union
went apeshit, and said that just the act of giving such an award would
put cops' lives in danger."

Balko is about to publish an exposé of the way many police are trained
to counter a literally invented medical condition, "excited delirium,"
which supposedly produces superhuman strength and tolerance for pain.
"The Minneapolis training material on ED," he told me, "included a
training slide with a photo of the Hulk."

Maybe systems to cross-check addresses with a database of possible
targets could help. More research is necessary. Boring, wonky,
technocratic research. You know, the kind of thing Republicans, for whom
the only answer to any social problem is more punishment, are
constitutionally incapable of honoring.

It is, however, the kind of thing Democrats, at their best, do quite
well-that is, when they're not slavishly chasing after the
Republicans' panicky political cues. Maybe some of them are at work on
it. If so, it hasn't made it into my Google alert yet.

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

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