Constitutional Law

GAO report on government duplication and waste

Article here. It brought to mind what a local prosecutor suggested, decades ago. He suggested that was enormous duplication of SWAT teams. FBI has multiple, local based, SWAT teams. BATF has its equivalent, Special Reaction Teams. IRS, I'm told, has them. Agriculture, of all things, has at least one, with helicopter. (I know because a friend was a Justice of the Peace and signed off on some search warrants for food stamp fraud, and was astounded to find these perfectly ordinary warrants were being executed by SWAT teams with the helo hovering overhead. He asked a fellow what was the helo doing, it couldn't land with all the electrical lines around, were the men aboard going to rappel down? The answer was no, after the raid was over it'd go back to the airport. We just brought it along because some Congressional types had pointed out we'd never used it and why did we need it?

My prosecutor friend observed, yes, LE needs a SWAT team trained in its special skills. But why does each agency and local department need a separate one? Maybe IRS agents need to know tax law, and ATF firearms law, and Agriculture how you run the food stamp program, but why not just one SWAT team for all agencies (or one per region), and a single local one for all localities in the area?

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on March 16, 2011 (boomark / email).