Local cops, federal money: How much is too much?

Eight times a year, on average, the Billings Police Department deploys its Special Weapons and Tactics team, 12 officers wearing heavy armor and toting semiautomatic and automatic weapons.

In almost all cases, they are executing high-risk search warrants at the homes of suspected drug dealers, and they roll up in the BEAR, the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Department’s 35,000-pound Ballistic Engineered Armored Response vehicle.

“They look like Seal Team 6 when they come out,” Police Chief Rich St. John said.

Yellowstone County Sheriff Mike Linder said his Tactical Response Team goes out six to eight times a year, with the same number of officers, using equipment similar to what’s used in the city and almost always in the BEAR.

Both men said the gear, the weapons and the big armored vehicle are used only in the most dangerous situations, and then only to protect officers and civilians.

“We make it safe for everybody, bad guys included,” St. John said.

In recent weeks, however, “militarization of policing” has become an increasingly familiar term, and a more ominous one. The term came into wide currency after the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. — and the armed-to-the-teeth response of Ferguson police to protests over the shooting.

Last week, President Obama ordered a review of federal programs that have showered billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment on local law enforcement agencies since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Concern over the issue has been highlighted because of events in Missouri, but it has been simmering for years. Late in June, the American Civil Liberties Union issued a report, “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” in which it argued that SWAT teams, mostly in the name of fighting drugs, were changing American neighborhoods into war zones.

Amy Cannata, communications director for the ACLU of Montana, wrote at the time that “Montana has not been immune to this militarization of police.” She referenced a report from the Center for Investigative Reporting that showed state and local law enforcement and public safety agencies in Montana had received just under $200 million in federal homeland Security grants between 2002 and 2011.

“The question is,” Cannata said in an interview this week, “why are police gearing up like this? U.S. citizens are not the enemy. We’re not foreign enemies who need to have military-grade equipment pointed at them.”

St. John and Linder had similar responses to the ACLU’s characterizations.

“I think the term ‘militarization of the police’ is really a misnomer,” St. John said. “What we’re doing is augmenting our equipment and getting things our budget can’t support.”

More important than the equipment is how it’s used, and in Billings, St. John said, it is being used as an extension of regular police work, not as part of some kind of military presence.

As criminals become increasingly better armed, he said, “the perceived militarization is trying to match force for force.” Special training and special equipment simply allow police officers on dangerous assignments to “dominate the environment and control it. That’s all we’re trying to do.”

Linder said the special teams used by his department go out rarely and are used only in very dangerous situations.

“I think we do a good job in law enforcement of maintaining a civil atmosphere,” he said.

In the piece Cannata wrote in June, she also referred to an incident in 2012 in which the Billings SWAT team raided a West End house and seriously burned a 12-year-old girl with a flash grenade.

“This is not an isolated incident,” Cannata wrote. “The ACLU report details numerous cases where children were injured or killed in SWAT raids” around the country.

“To me,” she said in an interview, “a child being injured by police is not acceptable collateral damage.”

In general terms, Cannata said, federal money was originally doled out under the guise of responding to threats of terrorism. But the resources are being spent almost exclusively on non-terrorism cases, usually as part of the war on drugs, she said.

“When police go in with this heavy gear, throwing flash-bang grenades and busting down doors, that actually escalates the threat of violence,” Cannata said.

On the contrary, St. John said, the SWAT team is deployed only rarely, and only after a “risk analysis assessment” has been completed.

Detective Sgt. Shawn Mayo, the department’s SWAT team commander, said points are assigned for specific threats, and the team is used only if the operation is deemed “high risk.”

Mayo provided a blank copy of the two-page assessment, which has a “decision matrix” based on points. A search warrant for property crimes is worth two points; for warrants involving crimes against people or evidence of narcotics violations, five points are awarded.

An arrest warrant for felony weapons offenses or violent felonies is worth 10 points. Situations that rack up a score of 1-19 points are handled by regular officers. If there are 20 to 30 points, the SWAT team is consulted and may be used for backup. For 31 points or more, the SWAT team plans and executes the operation.

Some factors receive an automatic score of 31 — if a “no-knock” warrant has been issued by a judge, if the location is fortified or booby-trapped, or if the suspects are “members of a violent criminal organization.”

“We stick to that matrix very closely because we want to make sure we don’t overuse our team,” Mayo said.

The BEAR vehicle almost always goes out with the SWAT team because the high-risk designation virtually demands it, Mayo said.

“To leave our armor at home and not take it really wouldn’t make much sense,” he said.

“It’s just another tool in your toolbox,” St. John said. “It doesn’t mean you’re using it in a military manner.”

In the case cited by Cannata, St. John acknowledged that police surveillance failed to note that children were in the house about to be raided as part of a drug investigation. Though no formal report was issued on the incident, in which the sleeping girl suffered second- and third-degree burns, it was reviewed thoroughly, St. John said.

Ultimately, the officer who deployed the flash grenade was found to have been inadequately trained. He attached the grenade — which is used to disorient people with a bright flash, a loud bang and a concussive blast — to a metal pole and stuck it through a window of the house.

The officer didn’t realize there was a delay on the detonator, and when it failed to go off, he released the grenade and it landed and went off next to the girl, who was sleeping on the floor near the window.

Although initial reports said a claims process had begun soon after the incident, St. John said no restitution was ever paid and nothing came of the claim. He also said the man who was the target of the raid was arrested and later convicted on drug charges.

As for federal spending in Montana, the Center for Investigative Reporting study Cannata referred to said Montana received $199,976,009 in public-safety related federal grants between 2002 and 2011.

The largest chunk of that by far was almost $81 million spent on state Homeland Security, but there was no further breakdown, and the CIR people who compiled the report could not be reached for comment.

Pat Weber, finance director for the city of Billings, ran his own report, showing that federal grants to the police and fire departments from fiscal year 2001 to 2013 (which ended on June 30) totaled $10,642,618. There were only six grants designated Homeland Security, and these totaled $1,165,502.

Weber’s report didn’t break down what the grants were spent on, but the largest category of federal grants to the Police Department was labeled “technology” and totaled just over $2 million in those years.

The second-largest category dealt with grants totaling $1.8 million, which went toward the “high intensity drug traffic area” program. In third place, with grants totaling a little less than $1.8 million, was spending on “Internet crimes against children.” Billings has a task force that works on those crimes and conducts investigations statewide.

In the same time period, the Fire Department received federal grants of $827,710, the biggest chunk of which paid for “personal protective equipment.”

It was unclear how, if the largest city in the state received just $1.1 million in grants from the Department of Homeland Security between 2001 and 2013, statewide Homeland Security grants could have added up to more than $80 million.

Weber said federal grants for airport security would have shown up on his report if money had gone directly to the city-owned airport. He said it was possible that the report referenced by the ACLU counted all Homeland Security money spent at Montana airports — money that paid for the legions of Transportation Security Administration workers, baggage-scanning equipment and other equipment and safety measures.

One of the biggest and best-known Homeland Security purchases was the $385,000 BEAR vehicle acquired by the county in 2009 and used jointly by the Police Department. A Billings Gazette story about the unveiling of the BEAR was headlined “Fighting crime military-style.”

Helena received a similar grant and bought its own BEAR vehicle, which the ACLU’s Cannata called “essentially tanks designed to carry 15 or more armed officers.” In 2010, the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Department used a $197,000 Homeland Security grant to buy handheld thermal-imaging units.

St. John said most of the Homeland Security money received by his department has been spent on the bomb squad, which is a regional team with enough equipment to be able to respond to two incidents at the same time. One bomb robot purchased years ago cost $300,000, St. John said, and a smaller, wireless robot bought in 2011 with Homeland Security money cost $41,000.

Much of the national scrutiny of police militarization focuses on the Department of Defense’s 1033 program, under which surplus military equipment is funneled to local law enforcement agencies. It has been reported that agencies in Arizona have received, among other equipment, 1,700 weapons, 120 utility trucks, 64 armored vehicles and 17 helicopters.

St. John and Linder said their departments stopped accepting surplus military equipment more than a decade ago. St. John said all the paperwork accompanying the transactions became “a little labor-intensive and problematic.”

But the biggest problem was that the donated equipment was usually “heavily, heavily used” and needed lots of repair and maintenance, he said. The last piece of surplus military gear that St. John or Linder could remember accepting was a Vietnam-era “Peacekeeper,” a small armored personnel carrier that was given to Yellowstone County in 1999 by Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls.

Linder remembers it well because he was a sheriff’s lieutenant at the time and he spent a year rebuilding the vehicle “from the ground up.”

He still has a scrapbook of photographs documenting the entire process. He did all the work on his ranch near Broadview, on his own time and with donated parts from a variety of businesses in the county.

Cannata acknowledged that Montana hasn’t seen anything like the military-style response to protests in Missouri, but she says that doesn’t mean citizens should shrug and accept the situation.

“There’s parts of the country that definitely have it worse than we have it here, but it’s something we need to be mindful of,” she said.

She said concerns about individual liberty span the political spectrum, and that while Americans expect police protection, “I don’t think anybody in this country wants to see the police as an occupying force.”

“People say ‘land of the free,’” Cannata said. “They don’t say ‘land of the safe.’”

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