-Caveat Lector- ------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 01:20:05 -0500 Subject: Barney Fife Joins SWAT
[Note from Matthew Gaylor: For my non-American readers Barney Fife is a reference to the bumbling deputy sheriff character played by Don Knotts on The Andy Griffith Show. Although in the 1960s Mayberry fictional utopia Barney's hijinks never got anybody killed. Unfortunately Police Departments all across the US, large and small, look nothing like Mayberry. ] From: "K.Neal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Matthew Gaylor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: projo.com-news Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2001 15:22:30 -0500 12.30.2001 00:07 Training death a familiar tragedy East Providence is not the only place where one officer has killed another in a SWAT-team training exercise. Top RI News stories: Last update: 12.31.2001 00:10 <http://www.projo.com/news>Back to: RI News <http://www.projo.com/report/stories/06782241.htm> Printer-Friendly Version <http://www.projo.com/wwwthreads/postlist.pl?Cat=&Board=News>Read/Post to our Bulletin Board on this topic BY JENNIFER LEVITZ Journal Staff Writer It's happened before and it's always the same tragic story. In the past decade, nine police officers have been killed by accidental shootings during training exercises. The latest was Thursday, when an East Providence police officer mistakenly fired a loaded gun at Capt. Alister C. McGregor as the SWAT team practiced a hostage scenario on a school bus. The deaths are almost excruciatingly baffling, but their trajectory is often clear. Somehow, real ammunition makes it into "mock" scenarios. Or at a training where live ammunition is used, and everybody knows it, someone runs left when they should have run right. These deaths do not fully illustrate the inherent danger in having police officers, including some at small departments, practicing tricky tactical maneuvers. The public "only hears about the accidents that result in tragedy," says David Klinger, a criminology professor, at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, who is conducting a study on SWAT Teams for the National Institute of Justice. "It's much more common than the fatalities would suggest," says Klinger, who is also a former police officer for the Los Angeles Police Department. Klinger says SWAT teams are a crucial part of public service. You want specialists, he says, who can "come in and take care of business." The odds of anyone at a scene getting hurt drop dramatically when SWAT teams show up, he says. But he questions whether "small-agency SWAT teams," generally comprised of officers who shoulder their regular duties along with their SWAT duties, should be trying to train for such things as hostage rescues. IN OREGON, the Clackamas Sheriff Department dismantled its SWAT team after the death of a deputy during a training exercise. It was a crisp day, in the fall of last year, and Deputy William Bowman, a 36-year-old father of two, was pretending to be the suspect in a home invasion scenario. He was slinking, dressed in fatigues, through an empty cement house. Outside, the snipers on the SWAT team had just finished lunch. They crowded into a van, retrieved their long guns, and loaded their magazines with blanks. One sniper, having trouble loading a magazine into his gun, grabbed another magazine from a drawer in the van. The drawer was set up to hold magazines that are preloaded with live ammunition, in case of a SWAT callout. "They should have done a security check, but they didn't," says Deputy Angela Blanchard, spokeswoman for the department, and a former member of the SWAT team. "Bill wasn't wearing a helmet and he was struck in the head. His best friend was on the team and saw it happen." About 15 months later, the Clackamas County department is still struggling with broken friendships, and a tumult of blame, says Blanchard. "It created a huge morale problem that I think we're still in the midst of." The sheriff's department has formed an entirely new SWAT team, with new leaders, and new safety procedures. It has still not been authorized to take calls, she says. But at each training session, there must be one safety officer who is assigned to do safety checks on all weapons before each training scenario. "It's clear that if certain things had been done, this would have never happened; it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out," says Blanchard. "I have no doubt that this is something the department will never forget." A SIMILAR mistake occurred in June, in Arlington, Texas. Crpl. Joseph Cushman, who had been the Arlington Police Department's Rookie of the Year, was helping to lead a SWAT team training session inside a junior high. To demonstrate the safety of dummy bullets, another officer pointed his gun at Cushman's head and fired. But the officer had accidentally pulled his own loaded 9 mm semiautomatic handgun from his holster instead of picking up a gun loaded with dummy ammunition. Arlington police acknowledged that it was common, despite a department policy that there be no live ammunition at training exercises, for instructors to bring their loaded weapons to training. "The guy just spaced and forgot he had a live weapon on his hip," says Klinger, the University of Missouri researcher. The police department has since changed its procedures; it also disciplined several supervisors, including the officer who fired the gun. Samuel Walker, a University of Nebraska criminal law professor who helped investigate mismanagement of the Albuquerque Police Department's SWAT team -- which has since been disbanded -- says he has seen some SWAT teams, caught up in their esprit de corps, make their own rules. SWAT teams are "important and necessary," he says, but "depending on the department, and the standards . . . it's very easy for departments to let the SWAT team become a semiautonomous unit with its own set of attitudes." THERE IS currently no national standard for SWAT training procedures, says Klinger. But the common-sense rule is that there should be no live ammunition near the training area. Many police departments are strict on this, he says. "In some departments , he says, if any officer leaves the room, he is searched when he comes back into he room." The mistakes that happen in SWAT team training, Klinger has found, are not so different from "friendly fire," in the military, or cases in which a surgeon performs the wrong surgery. To an outsider, such mistakes seem inexplicable. But human beings who are peforming a task, "spin a gestalt," define a situation and then act accordingly, Klinger says. They get a mindset: "Okay, there's no live rounds here. I'm allowed to aim my rifle at this guy's head and squeeze the trigger and it will go click." The other cases show how deceptive that mindset can be. In 1993, at the Rock Island Police Department, in Rock Island, Ill., Auxiliary Officer Todd C. Johnson was killed during a demonstration of a disarming technique. The officers who disarmed him were unaware he had reloaded his weapon when he thought training was finished. Unbelievably, four days later, at the same department, Auxiliary Captain Richard Shurtz accidentally shot himself as he demonstrated what had happened to Johnson. In Palo Alto, Calif., Police Reserve Officer Theodore H. Brassinga died in 1994, while playing "the suspect" in a tactical SWAT training session aboard an Amtrak train. The Palo Alto officers were supposed to have empty guns. On March 4, 1999, a Nebraska state trooper was shot by a colleague during defensive tactics instruction. The officer who shot the trooper had reloaded his weapon during a break in training, not realizing that weapons were going to be used later in the day. Later, however, the group did an exercise on defending themselves against an assailant with a knife. The trooper had come at the officer, pretending to have a knife. The officer fired the loaded gun. Each of the officers who died in training are described on the Officers Down Memorial Page. Yesterday, there was already a "reflection" dedicated to McGregor, of East Providence. POLICE departments, starting with the Los Angeles Police Department, throughout the country began forming SWAT teams 30 years ago. It was around the time of the Watts riots. And after an honor student at the University of Texas, in Austin, in 1966, climbed a 27-story campus tower and opened fire. The early idea was that SWAT teams were necessary for emergencies such as hostage situations and barricaded subjects. But now even tiny police departments have something resembling a SWAT team, a group of specially chosen officers who are trained to handle volatile calls. They head to scenes clad in black, wearing bulletproof vests, and gripping semiautomatic weapons. In Rhode Island, at least 15 communities have such squads. Most have shunned the Hollywood-style SWAT label, for tamer names. Middletown has its Special Operations Unit. Portsmouth, its Tactical Response Team. Burrillville created its Special Response Team more than two years ago. Police Chief Bernard Gannon created the crew because situations requiring special responses were on the rise, and the chief wanted Burrillville to be able to handle its own problems rather than call in other agencies. The department has used it surprisingly often, and effectively, says Lt. Lareto Guglietta. The team trains once a month. Before each training session, the officers go down the line, and check each other's guns; they place a blue nylon cord down the barrel, so they know there are no bullets in it. In September, Burrillville's special-response team trained on a scenario involving the takeover of a school bus. The officers used pistols, which shoot paint-tipped cartridges. And rather than having an officer play the hostage-taker on the bus, the team shot at cardboard cutouts. That was not the case in East Providence. On Thursday, the East Providence SWAT team was instructed to shoot at "the suspect." That suspect was Captain McGregor. But, Burrillville's Guglietta says, "it's tough for us to Monday-morning quarterback." IN MANY departments, SWATs are seen as lifesavers. After an intense three-day standoff with a disturbed man in Cranston, in June of last year, Cranston's Special Reaction Team was able to invade the house and subdue the man before he could reach for the loaded shotgun that was next to him. East Providence's SWAT officers, chosen from the department's 96 officers, train twice a month; but some other local teams train far less. West Warwick, for instance, has a SWAT team that trains eight hours a month, sometimes on similar hostage scenarios, says Chief Peter Brousseau. Brousseau, however, says he questions whether he needs his SWAT team. "I've been chief for three years and we've used it twice; it is a concern financially . . . the overtime, and equipment." At some point, Rhode Island departments, "might think about regionalization," of SWAT teams, he says. He has thought about dismantling the SWAT team, but that because of school violence, and events such as Sept. 11 -- the department has actually invested more money into it. Klinger, of the University of Missouri, says that smaller departments need to understand "that because they can't train as much, their capabilities won't be as good. I don't care if you've got 10 guys who just left Delta Force 6 weeks ago . . . if they're now working for a small town team and training once a month for eight hours . . . skills for tactical operators are highly perishable." "Maybe they can say: 'We can't run a hostage rescue, but we can imagine a typical barricaded gunman. . . . We can handle a situation that involves, let's say, warrant service work." Others, however, speak of SWAT's many successes. Ralph Ezovski, a retired East Providence police lieutenant, says it doesn't matter if a SWAT team is called out once a month or once a year. "I don't care if it's Little Compton," he says. "Tragedies can happen anywhere -- you want a trained team." EAST PROVIDENCE started its SWAT team nearly 30 years ago, although it was temporarily disbanded in the early '90s by a former chief who did not see the need to have a formal team. Chief Gary Dias reinstated it when he became chief in 1996. The team members are highly trained to handle an armed suspect -- using tactics that the average patrol officer doesn't know or wouldn't use every day, he says. Some of the more common incidents the East Providence SWAT team has responded to -- wearing their top-of-the-line body armor and Kevlar helmets -- include drug raids, risky arrest warrants, and more recently, a suicidal woman who had barricaded herself in her house. Last summer, Dias and McGregor, a 16-year veteran, had worked on a school-safety plan that detailed how the police would respond to school violence. They've trained inside empty school buildings, using paint-ball guns. Thursday's exercise at the school bus yard was meant to continue the training, Dias said. East Providence's SWAT Team uses live ammunition at the firing range, but not during drills, Dias said. But somehow, on Thursday, live ammunition came into the training scenario at Laidlaw bus storage lot at Commercial Way. While an investigation is still under way, the initial details suggest the tragedy followed a pattern similar to other deaths in training exercises. In keeping with department policy, officers checked their weapons to make sure they weren't loaded before beginning the day's exercise. But later in the day, a new weapon -- a loaded weapon, was introduced into the mix. At some point, McGregor asked the SWAT team's sniper, a young officer who has not yet been named, to get a rifle that had been left at the police station. The sniper was going to shoot from 70 yards away, and McGregor thought the rifle's scope would work better than binoculars. The sniper returned and aimed at McGregor, intending to "dry fire," or fire an unloaded weapon. There was no clip in the rifle. The officer didn't know there was still a live round in the chamber, the chief said. The sniper shot McGregor in the head as he sat in the bus driver's seat. The state police and the attorney general's office are helping East Providence police investigate exactly what happened. The evidence will then be brought before a grand jury. Dias could not say Friday whether anyone had checked the rifle before it was fired. <http://www.projo.com/news>Back to: RI News <http://www.projo.com/report/stories/06782241.htm> Printer-Friendly Version <http://www.projo.com/wwwthreads/postlist.pl?Cat=&Board=News>Read/Post to our Bulletin Board on this topic Copyright, Belo Interactive, Inc. ********************************************************************** **** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week) Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ ********************************************************************** **** ------- End of forwarded message ------- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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