In the Summer of 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement came to fruition in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a young and unarmed black male. Since then, the movement has demonstrated against other deaths of many black men believed to have been victims of police brutality. Despite the scrutiny behind police practices such as the chokehold and racial profiling, which are both deemed illegal, the police have not changed these practices and instead made them legal under different names such as the “headlock” and the “drug courier profile”. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2014 killings of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, the Blue Lives Matter movement was created. Instead
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Originally, only small groups of law enforcement officers such as the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team had specialized military training to deal with riots, hostage situations, and terrorists. But over time, that group of military trained personnel expanded in numbers and transformed the “boys in blue”. The SWAT team has, “become a fixture in many police departments in the United States” (Coyne 166). According to Coyne, the need for SWAT teams have spread throughout the country with barely 20 percent of police departments having one in 1980, to 90 percent of police departments employing SWAT teams in the year 2000. This spread is followed by the growth in the usage of SWAT teams which has shifted from 3,000 deployments in the 1980’s to nearly 45,000 times in 2000. The, “current estimates place the number of SWAT deployments as high as 80,000 annually. (Coyne 166). The actual purpose of the SWAT team since its creation in the 1960’s was to control riots, in other words, control the “demagogues” like Martin Luther King and the band of “young hoodlums” whom threatened social order with their racial uprising. After the success of the SWAT team in taking down members of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles in 1969, police departments across the country made it their mission to replicate the LAPD’s model. Today, “these units have moved away from their original purpose of handling crisis situations and now routinely carry out no-knock raids on private residences, often with unit members wearing full battledress and carrying assault weapons” (Campbell 332). Although their purpose has changed, their target has remained consistent throughout the years as shown in the racial composition maps of SWAT raids in Austin, Texas and Cincinnati, Ohio. During times when the SWAT teams are not utilized, the officers perform basic policing.
Originally, only small groups of law enforcement officers such as the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team had specialized military training to deal with riots, hostage situations, and terrorists. But over time, that group of military trained personnel expanded in numbers and transformed the “boys in blue”. The SWAT team has, “become a fixture in many police departments in the United States” (Coyne 166). According to Coyne, the need for SWAT teams have spread throughout the country with barely 20 percent of police departments having one in 1980, to 90 percent of police departments employing SWAT teams in the year 2000. This spread is followed by the growth in the usage of SWAT teams which has shifted from 3,000 deployments in the 1980’s to nearly 45,000 times in 2000. The, “current estimates place the number of SWAT deployments as high as 80,000 annually. (Coyne 166). The actual purpose of the SWAT team since its creation in the 1960’s was to control riots, in other words, control the “demagogues” like Martin Luther King and the band of “young hoodlums” whom threatened social order with their racial uprising. After the success of the SWAT team in taking down members of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles in 1969, police departments across the country made it their mission to replicate the LAPD’s model. Today, “these units have moved away from their original purpose of handling crisis situations and now routinely carry out no-knock raids on private residences, often with unit members wearing full battledress and carrying assault weapons” (Campbell 332). Although their purpose has changed, their target has remained consistent throughout the years as shown in the racial composition maps of SWAT raids in Austin, Texas and Cincinnati, Ohio. During times when the SWAT teams are not utilized, the officers perform basic policing.