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“Urban Warrior”

TITLE: “ETS PICTURES PRESENTS ”TITLE: “A FILM BY MATT EHLING”
VO 1: Tony Bouza:		Protect life and property. Detect and arrest offenders of the law. Preserve the peace, enforce the law, and prevent crime.

VO 2: Neil Haugerud:		You make the arrests, bring them to court. Be as peaceful as you can, and non-judgmental. The judgment comes at the court.

VO 3: Larry Pratt:		A police officer ... who is to restore the peace by getting an alleged bad guy ... alive whenever possible ... and bringing him before a magistrate.

VO 4: Gene Wheaton:		A civilian police officer is taught from the police academy, and all through his career, to use the minimum force necessary to accomplish the mission. The military is trained to use overwhelming force – deadly force – to win a battle and to win wars.

VO 5: Peter Kraska:		Their role has historically been, and their training today still involves, using a tremendous amount of firepower to eliminate a threat.

VO 6: Paul Richmond:		There’s a fundamental difference between police and soldiers. And one of the transformations that we’ve seen take place is that a lot of the tactics, methodology of soldiering ... have been applied to the police.
TITLE: “URBAN WARRIOR” TITLE: “SEATTLE” “WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION PROTESTS”
Narrator:		In growing numbers, American police departments are relying on weapons and tactics adopted from the military to carry out many of their functions, from drug raids to crowd control. Many police officials maintain that increased threats from violent criminals require that they adopt more aggressive tactics, and equip themselves with more advanced weaponry. As military tactics have spread throughout American policing, concern has grown among some observers that police are coming to rely too heavily on these types of tactical approaches. Critics contend that paramilitary tactics developed to deal with extreme circumstances are increasingly being employed in situations that do not require the use of overwhelming force. This program looks at the increasing use of military methods by civilian police, and investigates the controversy surrounding the growth of tactical policing.

Aftergood:		Traditionally, there has been a sharp and clear distinction between the military and civilian law enforcement.
TITLE: “STEVEN AFTERGOOD” “FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS”
Aftergood (cont’d):		In part, this dates back to the founding of the country, where there was a marked distrust of a standing military on the part of the Founders. As a society we have made a choice that we don’t want to be controlled by the military. We don’t want to have our streets patrolled by military forces. There’s a law which enshrines the distinction between the military and civilian law enforcement. It’s an 1878 law called the Posse Comitatus Act. It’s the law that says you can’t ask the army to carry out police functions in the United States.

Smith:		As in a lot of things dealing with the law, there’s the law and then there’s the practice.
TITLE: “SAM SMITH” “THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW”
Smith (cont’d):		And there are laws like the Posse Comitatus Act, which presumably kept the military out of law enforcement, and that was sort of a standard. What has changed now has been the presumption that there’s anything wrong with this.

Morales:		What we have to recognize is that, for instance, in 1995, the Justice Department entered into an agreement with the Department of Defense, called Technology Transfer Amendments.
TITLE: “FRANK MORALES” “AUTHOR, RESEARCHER”
Morales (cont’d):		And basically, that legalized the process wherein military technology would be transferred for use by law enforcement.

Aftergood:		In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration decided to enlist the military in what has been called the ‘drug war’.

Kraska:		And that comes in a lot of different forms. You have the National Guard involved in marijuana eradication exercises, for instance.
TITLE: “PETER KRASKA” “PROFESSOR OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE STUDIES” “EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY”
Kraska (cont’d):		You have the military training civilian police forces in certain kinds of military tactics.

Smith:		You began to see military-type vehicles coming into police departments. You began to see joint training exercises. You began to see the National Guard joining the police on drug raids with their spotlights shining on people’s houses.

Bouza:		The police are obsessed with the military culture. They love the notion of hardware and military and salutes and uniforms.
TITLE: “TONY BOUZA” “FORMER MINNEAPOLIS POLICE CHIEF”
Bouza (cont’d):		But in fact, it’s not a military operation at all; it’s an individual entrepreneurial enterprise where you send one cop out to do a job. But with the growth of rioting and disorders in the major cities of America: Newark, Detroit, pillaging, rioting, looting ... the police developed tactical patrol forces. So they started training police in mass formations, in squadrons ... taking control of the avenues, putting down rebellions. Also at the same time there were a couple of hostage situations. We had one in Brooklyn where a bunch of guys took over a gun store and held hostages. And one of the hostages was shot on the street and lying there wounded, and the police conceived the notion of bringing an armored personnel carrier up, rescuing this person and then taking him away. And this sort of introduced everyone to the notion of using military vehicles.

Walden:		Well, I mean, in 1965 everybody knows about the riots ...
TITLE: “HARRIET WALDEN” “MOTHERS FOR POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY”
Walden (cont’d):		... in Watts – and as a result of these riots, was when they set up the SWAT teams.

Morales:		In 1967, uprisings in the urban centers took place in well over 100 cities – in the course of 1967 alone. At the same time, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration was set up. They in turn set up a three-year project known as the California Specialized Training Institute. The California Specialized Training Institute was set up and run by Louis Guiffrida from Army Combat Command to deal with this civil disorder in the cities. He was responsible – and those who were involved in the institute – for the creation of the special weapons and tactics concept – the SWAT concept.

Kraska:		It’s, I think, an important phenomenon to understand what it means when we say ‘militarizing’ the police. It may sound like an inflammatory term but it’s really not. It’s an accurate term. The military model is providing a whole range of ideas, tactics, ideology, culture, to the police; which a component of the police are adopting.

Police Officer:		All right, to review what we know at this point ... Uh, we have thirty, potentially forty ...

Kraska:		What we call commonly a SWAT team – a more accurate term would be a police paramilitary unit. It’s really a more accurate descriptor for these teams, because these teams differ significantly from what we think of as normal policing. Normal policing generally is the cop on the beat. You have an individual police officer patrolling in a car, maybe with one other officer, but in most police departments only a single officer. And they’re reacting to situations, calls for services. With this paramilitary police model you have a team, or a squad of officers that operate much like a Navy SEALS Special Forces team. In fact, the whole SWAT community considers themselves sort of the Special Operations Forces of the police institution, and so they form in squads – anywhere from 8 to 25 members, and they go out on deployments.Hostage situations, barricaded suspects, those things that really do require a specially trained team to go in and do something about them

Bouza:		I used very aggressive techniques, and created tactical teams, SWAT teams. There were really two ideas behind the SWAT teams: one, containment. I wanted a situation contained, surrounded, making sure … let’s say a hostage situation. I want containment. And then I wanted negotiation. I want endless negotiation. And just to negotiate endlessly as long as nothing terrible is happening, understanding that we’d have to use force. And that force would involve the use of sophisticated weaponry, shotguns, heavy firearm weapons, armored personnel carriers, but as our last resort. So it’s containment and negotiation.

Wheaton:		A SWAT team on a police department ... they’re supposed to go in and try to negotiate hostage situations, unusual situations where somebody might be barricaded in a business or a bank or something of that nature ...
TITLE: “GENE WHEATON” “FORMER TULSA POLICE OFFICER” “RETIRED MILITARY CRIMINAL INVESTIGATOR”
Wheaton (cont’d):		But to keep these SWAT teams sharp and aggressive, they are taking over more and more of these functions that traditionally are the functions of either uniformed squad car patrolmen or detective units.

Television Reporter:		As we roll the videotape you can see that the Colorado Police Department SWAT team a few minutes ago entered that motel…

Kraska:		One of the more important findings in the research I did was that the SWAT function has changed dramatically over the last 10-15 years. SWAT was originally designed to handle those rare, reactive situations – dangerous situations already in existence. But over the last decade, decade and a half, those kinds of activities have really taken a back seat to basically fighting the ‘drug war.’ And I would call this, instead of a reactive function; they’ve shifted into a proactive function. My research shows that 80% of their deployments now are for drug raids, and most of these drug raids are no-knock warrants, where they go to a residence; they either don’t knock at all, or they knock very quickly and enter the residence. They do what’s called a ‘forced entry’, and they raid the home, looking for contraband. It’s a highly dangerous way to do police work, but it’s become commonplace. The SWAT team will show up, usually in the pre-dawn hours of the day, usually when people are in the middle of rapid eye movement sleep. They do this so they can surprise the people, catch them in bed: generally four or five o’clock in the morning, sometimes 3 o’clock in the morning. If they think the situation might be particularly dangerous, they might use a flash bang detonation device.

Goff:		You pull the spoon; you pull the pin, POP! Lots of flash, lots of noise. They make people’s ears ring, they startle them, and it gives you an extra second during that confusion to take advantage of – when you make one of these dynamic entries into a room.
TITLE: “STAN GOFF” “RETIRED SPECIAL FORCES MASTER SERGEANT ”TITLE: “TRAINED THE HOUSTON AND LOS ANGELES SWAT TEAMS”
Goff (cont’d):		There’s sort of a standard scenario for a room entry, the type of room entry that we used to teach. The pretty standard thing is to set up a breaching charge, usually made out of something called linear-shaped charge or JEDAX; it’s a commercial explosive.It’s initiated by either a non-electric or electrical initiating device while a team lays up against a wall or around the corner or somewhere near the actual breaching point. They’ll pop the breaching charge, and immediately go in.

Police:		“Get down, get down!”

Goff:		During that entry they will employ some very basic close-quarter battle tactics. And during that entry they’re – all of 'em – picking sectors based on their plan. Each person has a sector, it's a moving sector that moves with them; and in that sector, they identify, discriminate and eliminate targets. The discrimination of targets is based on hands. When you go into a room, you look at hands. Whatever the threat is, it's going to be in their hands. And so that's the way you do that instant target discrimination. You go straight in, look at hands.If there's a weapon in the hands during that dynamic entry, it does not matter what that weapon is doing. It’s not the old deadly force criteria – you know, TOM – that they used: Threat Opportunity and Means – that the police trains for the deadly force training. If the weapon’s in the hands during a dynamic entry, that person dies. It's just automatic. It’s automatic on a dynamic entry. Weapon in the hand, two rounds center of mass and keep on going.

Pratt:		One of the problems of the sudden attack of a SWAT team is that people don’t know that these are police. They don’t look like police.
TITLE: “LARRY PRATT” “GUN OWNERS OF AMERICA”
Pratt (cont’d):		Sometimes they even have face masks on but in any case, there's no badge. There's no identification that says Officer Francis O'Malley. If you get to see their back, which you're not likely to, it may say ‘BATF’ or it may say ‘SAN DIEGO SWAT’ or just ‘SWAT’. But when they're coming at you, you don't see anything except black, if you see anything at all. There was a man in Denver – but it's happened in many different jurisdictions. Wrong address, but the guy gets killed, because he reaches for a gun thinking his home is under attack, and he's dead. Sorry ... That’s the problem when you play war in a civilian environment.

Bouza:		I think the police are right to organize themselves in the most effective legal manner that they can, whatever that may be. But in the process, the police abused the uses of this new weapon very often. I think a classic case is Waco.

Narrator:		In 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to arrest David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidian religious movement

Bouza:		It began with a SWAT team of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents going in to execute a warrant – and four of them getting killed.

Narrator:		After the shooting of the federal agents, a 51-day standoff ensued. The FBI attempted to force the Davidians to surrender by using National Guard tanks to assault the building where members of the sect were housed. During the course of the raid, a fire started, and the church compound was rapidly consumed by flames, killing over 80 Davidians, including 22 children.

Bouza:		Who knows how many people died? Nobody knows. It's 80-something ... when it should have been containment and negotiation.

Wheaton:		Until the Feds surrounded that place, David Koresh was moving around freely, going into town for meetings and so forth. If they'd had good reason to arrest him, the local officials could have simply stopped him on the street, put a set of handcuffs on him, and that would have taken care of the problem. They could have prosecuted him in the courts of Texas. That little group wasn't going to attack Washington D.C., or a threat to the national security of the United States, so why were those people in there? That's the things that just common sense tells you that you have to ask.

Bouza:		What every chief has got to learn is that it's just ‘go’ or ‘no go’. Once you loose the dogs of action, the consequences can be fearful.

Wilcox:		Richard Brown was a 73-year-old retired worker that lived in the city of Miami, lived in an apartment, and he basically lived taking care of his younger daughter.
TITLE: “NATHANIEL WILCOX” “PULSE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR”
Wilcox (cont’d):		He was accused of selling drugs, and the police department obtained some kind of a search warrant to go in and search his apartment. He was home alone with his daughter, and the SWAT team came. Police tapes indicate that Richard Brown was calling the police. His daughter was on the telephone calling police, because he heard the noise outside and was wondering who it was.His daughter was on the line calling the police when they were breaking into his apartment, saying that he was shooting at them. So they fired over 120 shots at Richard Brown, who they accused of having a gun and accused of shooting at them. The shooting was geared toward the bedroom. The bullets went all through the windows, and the air conditioning, and the chest of drawers, and all over the place. Richard Brown was shot about 9 times, and he died as a result of those wounds that he received from those automatic weapons.After our organization met with the U.S. attorney concerning Richard Brown's shooting, as well as other shootings in Miami-Dade County, they had an opportunity to go in and look at the evidence and say, ‘Hey, there's something wrong’, there's something real wrong with the evidence that the police is presenting here to try to justify killing this man. As a result of the investigation, Richard Brown did not have any gun powder residue on his hands. Richard Brown did not fire any shots.

Narrator:		A federal grand jury subsequently indicted five Miami SWAT officers for lying to investigators about the Richard Brown shooting.

Goff:		They started using these things as cops are doing now; they started using these tactics, these SWAT tactics, routinely. You know, anytime they wanted to make an arrest, and there was 1/100th of a percent of a chance that somebody was going to be armed, or there were going to be drugs involved, they started using all these dynamic entry techniques.

Narrator:		In 1999, 6-year-old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez was rescued from a capsized boat off the coast of Miami. He immediately became the focus of a custody battle between his American relatives in Miami and the Cuban government, who wanted the boy returned to his father.The U.S. Justice Department sided with the child's father, and a lengthy court battle ensued. On April 22, 2000, negotiations between the Miami relatives and the Justice Department abruptly ended when federal marshals seized the boy from his uncle's home in an early-morning raid.

Marisleysis Gonzalez:		They had guns pointed at us ... so I stood in this door, and I stood like this, "Please!" and they putting the guns right here … "We're going to shoot, we're going to shoot you! Give me the damn boy! Give me the damn boy . . ."
TITLE: “RAMON SAUL SANCHEZ” “MOVIMIENTO DEMOCRACIA”
SANCHEZ:		I never expected that the federal marshals were going to come into a family home with weapons.
TITLE: “JUAN CONTIJOCH” “MIAMI RESIDENT”
Contijoch:		We felt the raid was an overkill. We never felt we would go from negotiations over the phone to a full military raid. .

Narrator:		The Justice Department claimed that it needed to use proactive SWAT tactics, due to the possibility of a violent response to Elian's removal.

Janet Reno:		There were guns perhaps in the crowd, perhaps in the house; it was unclear . . .

Narrator:		These allegations are disputed by many who were in regular contact with the Gonzalez family.

Freyre:		Is there a situation; are there situations where those tactics are justified? Absolutely. No question about it.
“PEDRO FREYRE” “MIAMI ATTORNEY”
Freyre (cont’d):		But I think one of the dangers here – and we live in a society where the Founding Fathers understood very, very clearly, that you had to protect the people against the abuse of power by the government ... To have law enforcement officers use that sort of force in situations where, basically, they knew or should have known that there was no real threat to the law enforcement officers – that opens the door, that's a slippery slope.

Kraska:		As civil disturbance situations come up, it's the SWAT teams that respond first, because they're the ones that are the use-of-force specialists.They're the ones that can go in as a spearhead unit. In fact, I worked with a police department that ... their chief of police very much saw them in that capacity. He wanted those SWAT officers to be able to respond to those kinds of civil disturbance situations rapidly and aggressively.

Narrator:		The current use of SWAT teams to police protests and civil disturbances has its roots in the 1960s, when Louis Guiffrida began training police in civil disturbance management techniques at the California Specialized Training Institute.

Morales:		Ever since the days of Guiffrida and his course on civil disturbance management, the techniques and logistics on how to deal with this issue have proliferated.

Woman:		They said, “You have 15 minutes to get out of here.” And like five minutes later, without any other warning, started shooting the tear gas and everything else. And I know there were rubber bullets, because I got one.

Goff:		One of the most interesting developments technologically in recent years has been the emphasis has been placed on what they call ‘non-lethal’ munitions. And again, for urban operations, this is very, very important.

Narrator:		‘Non-lethal’, or ‘less-lethal’ weapons have existed in various forms for the past three decades. In recent years, however, the development and proliferation of these weapons has increased, as less-lethal technologies developed by the military have found applications in law enforcement.

Aftergood:		There has been a transfer of leftover hardware – military hardware. But there has also been a transfer of something that's called non-lethal weaponry. Non-lethal weapons are a field of technology that has been pursued by the Defense Department, particularly over the last decade, and particularly in support of its peacekeeping mission. It refers to weapons whose principal purpose is not to kill, but to immobilize personnel and enemy equipment.

Narrator:		Less-lethal weapons used by SWAT and tactical teams for crowd and demonstration control include newer technologies, such as impact projectiles and concussion grenades, as well as older military grade agents, such as CS and CN gas, which were used in combat operations during the Vietnam War.

Morales:		As happened in numerous cities across the country – in Washington D.C., in Philadelphia, in various places in which protests were taking place during the last two and three years, the approach has been pretty similar: namely, the use of so-called non-lethal weapons: CS, CN gas, bean bags, rubber balls, rubber bullets. So what we saw in Seattle were all of these elements coming together.

Narrator:		In 1999, thousands of protesters gathered in the streets of Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization. On the opening day of the WTO talks, protesters began blockading the Washington State Convention Center, as well as the nearby Paramount Theater and key street intersections.

Parrish:		The blockades were designed to try and deny access by WTO delegates and government officials to the opening ceremony of the World Trade Organization talks.
TITLE: “GEOV PARRISH” “SEATTLE WEEKLY”
Narrator:		The Seattle police concentrated their manpower at the Convention Center, where officers were stationed to protect the entrances. Over the course of the morning, the hundreds of protesters taking part in the street blockades were joined by thousands of additional marchers and onlookers, effectively grid-locking downtown Seattle. As the crowds grew in size, the police made an attempt to clear key intersections, by using armored vehicles and less-lethal weapons.

Stamper:		We have brought with us today non-lethal weapons. I don’t want to complicate this news conference...

Richmond:		Repeatedly, during the WTO, even from the police chief, we heard these weapons referred to as ‘non-lethal weapons’.
TITLE: “PAUL RICHMOND” “NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD”
Richmond (cont’d):		The term that's used by the manufacturers is actually ‘less-lethal’, meaning they're less likely to kill.There are very narrow parameters around which these weapons can be used safely: they couldn't be shot from certain distances, they couldn't be shot into specific parts of the body. And yet, they seem to have been violated in every way.

Dalaba:		Well, I saw physical injuries on the street from rubber bullets, and people going into shock.
TITLE: “LESLI DALABA” “SEATTLE RESIDENT”
Dalaba (cont’d):		One man had a rubber bullet in his chin. Another man had two rubber bullets in his thigh.

Helm:		I also witnessed a young man get hit right in the face with a canister of tear gas.
TITLE: “ANDREA HELM” “PROTEST PARTICIPANT”
Helm (cont’d):		They weren't just lobbing them over on the sidewalk. Those things were coming at just breakneck speed, and this hit him just right in the face. He looked like he had been boiled alive.

Parrish:		In the meantime, we had Madeline Albright unable to get out of her hotel; a number of the delegates, again, unable to get out of their hotels; and once they got out of their hotels, unable to get into the Convention Center. And it became pretty clear by early afternoon that at very best, the WTO's opening ceremonies were not going to be able to be held. Something else that had happened while all this was going on was that the property damage had started.

Narrator:		By mid-morning, a contingent of anarchist protesters started to move throughout downtown Seattle, smashing the windows of corporate chain stores.

Parrish:		They went through in a couple of passes, to specifically-targeted corporate businesses in downtown Seattle, and broke windows, sprayed graffiti and so forth, basically without interference from the police. The police had been standing back in the areas around the Convention Center, and most of this damage occurred in areas several blocks away from the Convention Center.

Narrator:		While the city administration saw the downtown vandalism as justification for the tactics employed by the police, many observers noted that police actions were directed primarily against the nonviolent demonstrators blocking intersections, rather than at the vandals, who were largely ignored by law enforcement.

Walker:		One of the most important things to keep in mind when you're talking about police activity in any kind of ...
TITLE: “CHRISTIANNE WALKER” “WASHINGTON STATE A.C.L.U. CHAPTER”
Walker (cont’d):		... civil disturbance or demonstration, or any kind of police activity really, is that the police response needs to be proportionate to the threat, proportionate to the situation.

Bouza:		What you do, is you have a large number of people with very, very legitimate civil disobedience, and you have a small minority who are going to be burning and breaking. You have to make a distinction, and target those individuals for arrest. And what has happened is, there is the mistake of treating all the demonstrators equally.

Schell:		We will be exploring during the rest of the day, what we ought to be doing in terms of the evening curfew tonight and its exact dimensions . . . .

Narrator:		In response to the activity occurring in the streets, Seattle mayor Paul Schell called in police reinforcements from other jurisdictions, and Governor Gary Locke activated the National Guard.

Derdowski:		Now I was not privy to the conversations that were happening between the mayor of Seattle, the governor, the National Guard, and any federal authorities. I wasn't privy to that.
TITLE: “BRIAN DERDOWSKI” “FORMER KING COUNTY COUNCIL MEMBER”
Derdowski (cont’d):		I understood that it was happening. There were lots of conversations, and the rumors were that the city was getting a lot of pressure to tighten up the situation prior to the president's arrival.

Walker:		The city was under pretty heavy pressure to kind of gain control of the situation, or they were going to not allow President Clinton to come in. So what happens is, the mayor and various police officials meet in early afternoon, and the mayor decides to issue a state of emergency proclamation.

Parrish:		So what wound up happening was that Mayor Schell, in declaring a state of civil emergency – which is essentially one step short of martial law – set out for Wednesday and for the rest of the week what he called a ‘no-protest zone’.

Narrator:		The no-protest perimeter was patrolled by state and local police as well as by National Guard soldiers. Protesters were either stopped at check points and prevented from entering the downtown core, or were swept up in mass arrests. Those who were not arrested were driven out of downtown by platoons of riot police.

Parrish:		The police strategy was to take the several hundred demonstrators that were left in the streets, and push them out of that area – push them into the area up the hill, past the Paramount Theater, and toward a residential and small business area called the Capitol Hill.

Rosenstein:		I wasn't pushed up Capitol Hill, I was up Capitol Hill…
TITLE: “FRANK ROSENSTEIN” “SEATTLE RESIDENT”
Rosenstein (cont’d):		…and observed the police sweeping up the hill in a phalanx, just coming up the hill.
TITLE: “CHRISTOPHER HUSON” “CAPITOL HILL RESIDENT”
Huson:		There was so much gas released that I couldn't stand on my front lawn. I couldn't, like, go outside my lawn, go outside my front door, and stand on the lawn and breathe.

Derdowski:		My wife and I heard on the radio that the police were randomly shooting people with rubber bullets coming out of the QFC on Capitol Hill. And during this period of time, the reporter was also getting hit, and she was literally crying on the air as she was trying to get out of the scene. And so my wife and I went right there.

Walker:		What you find is that the police were up Capitol Hill largely for no reason, without any clear orders about what they were doing or what they were trying to accomplish. And essentially what they were doing, were inflaming the residents to come out and see what was happening, and protest the police activity, which I think anybody would rightly do.

Hanagan:		Immediately I knew something was happening. I heard the sound of helicopters, I could see them flying in the sky a couple of blocks away from where I live.
TITLE: “DAVID HANAGAN” “CAPITOL HILL RESIDENT”
Hanagan:		So immediately, I chose to pick up my video camera and go out and see what was going on.They didn't look like the crowds during the actual protest, during the downtown activities, so I could easily tell they were just people who lived in the neighborhood. A King County council member by the name of Brian Derdowski was there.

Resident:		I want to know why all these police are here ...

Derdowski:		I agree. The reason they are here . .

Hanagan:		The whole time, he was constantly going back and forth between the crowd and the police, to sort of negotiate some sort of agreement, or some kind of truce between the two sides.

Derdowski:		I felt that the first bit of action that should occur, was that we should get the demonstrators on the sidewalks, get them out of the street, so that the police would not have a pretext to do this. And so we did that and it took a couple or three hours, and slowly the pressure was diffusing, and it was getting less and less of a concern.By now this crowd of 1000 had diffused itself to maybe 100 or less, and they were singing Christmas carols, and I was quite pleased because after 4 and 5 hours of a real tense stand-off situation, it had wound down to Christmas carols. And you know, I turned my back on the police line. And you know, no sooner had I turned my back on the police line, then I was hit in the back with a tear gas canister.

Hanagan:		Can you tell me where I'm bleeding from? I can’t tell.

Parrish:		What we discovered after the fact, was that the militarization of the United States plan as to how to handle these protests was in place long before thousands of people hit the streets of Seattle.

Narrator:		Press reports filed by CNN confirm the presence of active duty military personnel at the WTO event. Reports filed by the Seattle Weekly also noted the participation of the Army's Delta Force team in operational planning.

Parrish:		What we discovered was that the Delta Force, at minimum – was that they were in a motel very close to the action in downtown Seattle with video cameras and personnel out among the protesters, literally sending back camera feeds to a motel surveillance center and decision-making center. They were planning to use the Delta Force apparently quite routinely to monitor the demonstrations and participate in the decision-making as to how the meetings and the delegates would be protected during the course of the ministerial talks.

Goff:		It's important to understand that there's not just a process of the military bleeding into the police; it's not just the militarization of the police that's going on; it's also the policification of the military.

Narrator:		Despite the Posse Comitatus Act, active duty military personnel have increasingly made inroads into domestic law enforcement operations, including the FBI raid at Waco, Texas. During the course of the 1990s, the military was also active in border patrol and drug interdiction efforts.

Pratt:		And so we have got the result of a war against drugs that has increasingly been used to water down, by law, the barrier that had been drawn up by the Posse Comitatus law; so that the military is no longer more than arm's length from civilian law enforcement. The military is increasingly able to intrude into the war on drugs, and as a result, not surprisingly, since military action is not compatible with the Bill of Rights, the Bill of Rights has suffered.

Goff:		So you know, Posse Comitatus, which has been around since I think 1873, has gone the way of the Glass-Stiegel Act. They didn't have to appeal it. They just sort of went around it until it was meaningless.
TITLE: “SEPTEMBER 11, 2001”
Aftergood:		The events of September 11th came as a shock to everybody, and their implications will be sorted out for years to come. What it means is that our organizational structures of national security have suddenly become very fluid. One of the things that is up for grabs is what should be the role of the military in civilian defense, including civilian law enforcement. Should we increase the military presence on our borders? Should we have military personnel at the airports?

Kraska:		There are still plenty of people in the military that believe strongly that these kinds of homeland security measures are more appropriate for civilian police forces. They would argue we should bolster federal law enforcement. We should take local law enforcement and better coordinate it. We have adequate police forces, in other words, to handle the interior security of this country. Because the military has been drug into various internal security roles for a long time now, this 9/11 incident makes it a pretty short step for them to be much more intimately involved in internal security. So you can almost – the stage has been set for them to get involved in internal security measures with the drug war. And I would argue that the drug war wasn't a legitimate threat. But with this 9/11 event, truly a legitimate threat – it's just a small step now to get the military very involved in internal security matters.

Narrator:		In response to the September 11th terrorist attacks on Washington and New York City, the Defense Department created a homeland command for domestic military operations. While the Pentagon insists that any operations conducted by this command will be under the control of civilian law enforcement, critics warn that by involving the military more intimately in internal affairs, the United States may be abandoning its traditional values of civil-military separation.

Smith:		When William Cohen was Secretary of Defense, he said an extraordinary thing. He said that Americans were going to have to get used to choosing between security and their civil liberties. That, I thought, was sort of a scary choice for a country that had been started by someone saying, "Give me liberty or give me death." And I don't think it is decent or acceptable behavior for a public official to tell you that your choice is between your civil liberties and your security. And this, I think, is the proper reaction to somebody like that. But unfortunately, it just sort of goes out over the air waves and becomes part of our consciousness, and the next thing we know, we start to believe it.


END TITLES:

PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY MATT EHLING

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER KAREN MANION

Seattle Crew
Camera Grip Production Assistant Still photos		Roger Schmidtz Matt Lambert Matt Wright Frank Rosenstein

Washington DC Crew
Camera Grip		Roger Schmidtz, Michael Sutz Kathy Overton

New York City Crew
Camera Grip		Paul Rowley Conrad Mulcahy

Miami Crew
Camera Sound Production Assistant		Tony Zumbado Joe Biscotti Adam Schwarz

Minneapolis Crew
Camera Grip		John Springer Michael Sutz Dominick Miller

Austin Crew
Camera		David Martinez

Los Angeles Crew
Camera		Travis Sittard

Raleigh/Richmond Crew
Camera Interview Lighting Director		Chris Gegax Matt Ehling

SWAT raid crew
Camera Assistant Director Gaffer Grips Sound		Matt Ehling Karen Manion Michael Hanley Greg Niska, Robin Harris Dave Voight

Prod. Coord. Production Assistants Pyrotechnics Stills Armorer		Auni Adams Brandon Mathews, Catherine Gray Eric Howell Paul Shambroom Mark Hanson

SWAT Raid cast
Chris Gegax Jim Martyka Shane McCaffery William Flowers

Rerecorded at Cinesound 2

Processing		DuArt Film Labs

Telecine		Pixel Farm, High Wire

Special Thanks To: Paul Richmond Richard Yount Stock footage courtesy of ABC News Videosource Cable News Network Bob Deflores Detrick Lawrence Chris Gegax David Hanagan Headwaters Video Collective The National Archive Paul Richmond PULSE Whispered Media Thanks to Ed Raker TJ Larson TV Sea Brian Standing Jessica Baum David Phillips Nico Manion-Phillips Bruce Mamer Katie Koskenmaki Jean Zimniewicz Troy Lafaye Jeremy Stromberg Mike Anderson Judson Church Seattle IMC New York City IMC Twin Cities IMC A. Mark Liv PULSE The CATO Institute Dianne Weber Michael Andregg Alex Jones Shooters Video Oak Street Cinema Docuclub The Full Frame Film Festival IFP Minneapolis/Saint Paul Rivertown Film Festival The Oakwood Inn The Minnesota Film Board Cinequipt Audioquip Toby’s Tunes Henry Fieldseth Cheri Townsend Ken, Jean and Mark Covert Action Quarterly Aurora Pictures Julie Harmsen Thalia Driori John Thompson Jorge Sosa Neil Haugerud Ernie Fitzgerald Lighthouse The City of Saint Paul Chuck Olson Emily Goldberg John Whitehead Dan Luke Venus Grandell Adam Toht Ben Bowman Robin Harris The Miller Crocket House Hard Working Pictures ©2002 ETS Pictures, Ltd. END PROGRAM