No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day.
No-knock raids, a subset of the violent, terror-inducing raids carried out by police SWAT teams on unsuspecting households, differ in one significant respect: they are carried out without police even having to announce themselves.
In addition to the terror brought on by these raids, general incompetence, collateral damage and botched raids are also characteristic of these SWAT team raids.
All too often, botched SWAT team raids have resulted in one tragedy after another for those targeted with little consequences for law enforcement.
In 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT team-style raids in the US. Incredibly, that number has since grown to more than 80,000 SWAT team raids per year, often for routine law enforcement tasks.
Then there are the SWAT team raids arising from red flag gun laws, which gives police the authority to preemptively raid homes of people "Suspected" of being threats who might be in possession of a gun, legal or otherwise.
Rubber-stamped, court-issued warrants for no-knock SWAT team raids have become the modern-day equivalent of colonial-era writs of assistance.
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