Why do swat teams wear masks

The gay club is alleged to have been the site of open sex acts and drug sales, but the raid -- in which customers were detained on the floor at gunpoint -- was officially for a mere booze inspection. The police never bothered to get a warrant. Initial reports indicated the raid was because Wright's estranged wife had defaulted on her student loans. The Department of Education issued a press release stating that the investigation was related to embezzlement and fraud -- though why embezzlement and fraud necessitate a SWAT team isn't clear, not to mention that the woman hadn't lived at the house that was raided for more than a year.

Ignoring these details, however, still leaves the question of why the Department of Education needs a SWAT team in the first place. The reason?

The company is under investigation for importing wood that wasn't properly treated. In , a group of Tibetan monks inadvertently overstayed their visas while touring the U. Naturally, immigration officials sent a SWAT team to apprehend them. It hasn't always been this way. Yes, there has always been police brutality, and the civil rights era in particular produced a number of striking images of excessive force brought down upon peaceful protesters.

But it has become routine to use force that is disproportionate to the laws the police are enforcing. Because it has happened gradually over the course of about 30 years, the public has become accustomed to it. There was a time when the level of force governments chose to use in response to a threat was commensurate with the severity of the threat.

From the inception of the SWAT team in the late s and throughout the s, paramilitary police units were generally only deployed when someone posed an immediate and violent threat to others -- incidents like hostage situations, bank robberies, riots or escaped fugitives. Today, SWAT teams are routinely deployed against people who pose little to no threat at all. It's hard to come up with a legitimate reason that the federal government needs to send heavily-armed, heavily-armored SWAT teams to raid medical marijuana clinics, for example.

Whatever your position on the debate over whether federal or state law should govern pot dispensaries, the idea that their customers and employees pose a violent threat to federal agents is absurd. There's also little justification for sending SWAT teams to raid the offices of doctors accused of over-prescribing prescription painkillers, co-ops accused of selling unpasteurized milk , or for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to send paramilitary squads into businesses suspected of employing undocumented immigrants.

The militarization of police departments can also instill in police a militaristic mindset among cops not involved with the SWAT team. This is troubling because, again, soldiers and cops have very different jobs. The UC-Davis students may be fortunate they were only pepper-sprayed.

In recent years, the stun gun has become the weapon of choice for noncompliance with a police order. A little over a week after the UC-Davis incident, for example, a year-old North Carolina man died after a police officer shot him with a stun gun for failing to stop on his bicycle when ordered. Roger Anthony's family says he may have failed to stop because he was hard of hearing.

He had done nothing illegal. And Anthony is far from the first person to die after receiving a charge from a stun gun. Police have used stun guns on pregnant women, the elderly and children as young as six. They're carried by security personnel in some schools. Stun guns may well be appropriate as an alternative to more lethal measures like real guns, but it's now acceptable in much of the country for police to send a jolt of electricity through someone for noncompliance with a police officer, argument over a traffic ticket or even petulance among children.

The image of the domestic cop dressed in camouflage or a battle dress uniform, toting an assault weapon, or decked out in armor more appropriate for a battlefield is also now common , particularly at protests and high-profile summits or conferences.

At the GOP Convention, police staged preemptive raids on the homes of possible protesters and rabble-rousers. There were mass arrests of protesters and journalists, few of which resulted in any actual charges. At the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, camouflage-clad cops deployed sound cannons and arrested protesters, students and even onlookers. This was not because they broke any actual laws, but on their potential to cause disruption.

Ironically, the more important the event and the more consequential the decisions are likely to be, the less likely police and government officials are to allow dissent -- and the more force they're likely to employ to keep protesters silent.

But the military mentality extends to more mundane police activities as well. In , I wrote an article for the Daily Beast about the odd phenomenon of cops shooting dogs. In drug raids, killing the dogs in the targeted house is almost perfunctory. We also see stories about cops killing dogs while chasing suspects across the property of a third party, or killing a dog who growls at them after they were called to a house on an unrelated matter.

These stories have punch, and public reaction to them can be even stronger than to stories about cops killing people. Should you require any additional information on this matter, please, feel free to contact [the Office of Health Enforcement at ]. Sincerely, Richard E. Standard Interpretations Medical evaluation requirements under the respiratory protection standard.

Standard Number:. The respiratory protection program must include the medical evaluation of employees. Voluntary use of a filtering facepiece respirator does not require medical evaluation. The employer needs only to ensure that the dust masks are not dirty or contaminated, that their use does not interfere with the employee's ability to work safety, and provide a copy of Appendix D to each voluntary wearer.

Statement: Use of an air supplied positive pressure face mask does not require medical surveillance unless intended for rescue or emergency purposes. I answered this question before in another phrased different inquiry. Heute bestellen, versandkostenfrei. Glasses Heute bestellen, versandkostenfrei. Yahoo Web Search Yahoo Settings. Sign In. Search query. All Shopping Images Videos. News Local. Anytime Past day Past week Past month. About 2,, search results.

Ad related to: What kind of glasses do Special Forces wear? Depending on the model, they might have automatic light-adjusting lenses, or interchangeable tinted and clear lenses. The perfect pair for this type of mission is the Oakley Half Jacket 2. In the city elected its first African-American mayor, John Daniels, who appointed maverick reformer Nicholas Pastore as his police chief.

SWAT was a big part of that. Pastore began a radical restructuring of the police department, dividing the city into 10 small police districts, forcing officers to walk beats, and creating community management teams that work with police, social services, and other parts of government to address the root causes of violence. That creates accountability and cuts down on brutality.

Pastore has since moved on—he is now a research fellow at the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in New Haven—but his reforms remain. Although the HNT trains once a month, the unit is not deployed as a group. Instead, officers convene only for emergencies such as big shootouts, hostage takings, and riots, or when high-profile visiting politicians require added protection. Since the HNT was founded in , it has only assembled 79 times. The latest is CopWatch, which runs an office, trains citizens in filing complaints and lawsuits, publishes a quarterly report, and agitates before the City Council and Police Review Commission.

However, Berkeley and New Haven are rare exceptions. More typical is the situation in Greensboro, N. Shortly thereafter, the bookmobile was bought by the police department and converted into a mobile command-and-control center for its tactical Special Response Team.

This article is part of an ongoing series on the impact of guns in our communities. It originally appeared in The Nation. By Paula Harris.