The Making of the Warrior Cop

BY 7:30 ON THURSDAY MORNING, the capacious ground-floor convention center of the Oakland Marriott was filled with SWAT teams. Mostly men, mostly white, dressed in camouflage or black fatigues, they stood in groups of eight or ten, some eating pastries, others sticking to coffee and a dip of tobacco. A few wandered the expo hall, stopping by booths to test the feel of armored vests, boot knives, and sniper rifles, grab swag like grenade-shaped stress balls, or drop tickets into a box for a raffle of iPhone covers and pistols.

"Want to see the new toy?" a vendor asked a police officer in camo. He handed him a pamphlet for his company, Shield Defense Systems. "This will blind anyone for 10 minutes. Imagine, walk into a bar fight, blind everyone, then figure out what's going on. Some guys on drugs, you can put three slugs in their chest and it won't stop them. But blind him, and I guarantee you he'll calm down." The device attached to a gun and sent out a frequency that the vendor said temporarily scrambled its target's ocular fluid. The vendor turned to me—conspicuous for my lack of fatigues—and insisted the device caused no permanent damage (hence the name Z-Ro, as in "zero damage"), though he said it would probably make you nauseous. He expected it to be on the market this coming January.

Two SWAT Raids. Two Officers Dead. One Defendant Is Black, One White. Guess What Happened.

One Friday last May, the sun had not yet risen when a SWAT team ignited a flash-bang grenade outside Marvin Guy's apartment in Killeen, Texas. Officers were trying to climb in through a window when Guy, who had a criminal record and was suspected of possessing cocaine, opened fire. Four officers were hit; one of them was killed.

Five months earlier, 100 miles away, a SWAT officer was shot during a predawn no-knock raid on another house. In that case, too, police threw a flash-bang grenade and tried to enter the residence. Henry "Hank" Magee, according to his attorney, grabbed his gun to protect himself and his pregnant girlfriend. "As soon as the door was kicked in, he shot at the people coming through the door," says his attorney, Dick DeGuerin. With his legally owned semi-automatic .308 rifle, Magee killed one of the officers.

SWAT Team Shot David Hooks At Home After Tip From Meth Addict

Deputies shot and killed a man inside his Georgia home last month following an apparently bogus tip they received from a confessed meth addict and thief.

East Dublin resident David Hooks, 59, was killed because, according to Laurens County Sheriff Bill Harrell, he aggressively brandished a gun at the SWAT team that broke in his back door. But Mitchell Shook, a lawyer for Hooks' widow, contends that the sheriff has misled the public about the shooting and raid, which turned up no drugs.

Texas Police Hit Organic Farm With Massive SWAT Raid

A small organic farm in Arlington, Texas, was the target of a massive police action last week that included aerial surveillance, a SWAT raid and a 10-hour search.

Members of the local police raiding party had a search warrant for marijuana plants, which they failed to find at the Garden of Eden farm. But farm owners and residents who live on the property told a Dallas-Ft. Worth NBC station that that the real reason for the law enforcement exercise appears to have been code enforcement. The police seized "17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, 14 tomatillo plants ... native grasses and sunflowers," after holding residents inside at gunpoint for at least a half-hour, property owner Shellie Smith said in a statement. The raid lasted about 10 hours, she said.