"At 2:15 a.m. on a moonless night, 10 officers in an armored humvee, 3 of them on the running boards, rolled up a driveway to a single-story house in a tiny town in the Appalachians. This SWAT team, outfitted for war, wore body armor & Kevlar helmets carried Colt submachine guns, light-mounted AR-15 rifles & Glock .40-caliber sidearms, & had a door-breaching shotgun, a battering ram, sledgehammers, Halligan bars for smashing windows, a ballistic shield & a potent flash-bang grenade. Not 4 hours earlier, 3 informants had bought $50 worth of methamphetamine in the front yard. That was enough to persuade the county’s chief magistrate to approve a no-knock search warrant authorizing the SWAT operators to storm the house without warning.Often, police use dynamic entry almost by default. SWAT deployments increased roughly fifteenfold between 1980 and 2000 as the war on drugs escalated."
At www.nytimes.com
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