SWAT everywhere? A response to Jenkins, Semple, Bennell, and Huey

Abstract

This paper is a response to an article on public police special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams written by Jenkins and colleagues (2020). Jenkins and colleagues are responding to a study showing that tactical units and members are being used more in Canadian policing. For Jenkins and colleagues, not only are SWAT teams being used properly, but drawing from interviews with tactical members they suggest SWAT teams should be used more in the future. This response focuses on conceptual, methodological, and empirical deficiencies in the work of Jenkins and colleagues. This response shows that Jenkins and colleagues ignore social theory, ignore relevant contrary data, are ignorant of the harms of policing, and are ignorant of the violence that Black and Indigenous peoples face from Canadian police. Relatedly, this response offers a criticism of what is called evidence-based policing scholarship. Using the work of Jenkins and colleagues as an example, the argument here is that evidence-based policing scholars are in a conflict of interest because of how closely they work with police and due to the funding they receive from police agencies and justice ministries. This conflict of interest decreases the credibility and trustworthiness of the claims of evidence-based policing scholars. Overall, this response draws attention not only to the harms of public policing and criminalization, but also to how evidence-based policing scholarship is supporting the expansion of violent, harmful, and regressive forms of social control.

Markers of entanglement: Survival strategies within the neoliberal university and the promise of carceral futures

“…For criminology, there is a credibility offered by the discipline (Brown and Schept, 2017). Confronting this credibility unravels examples that range from pronounced and immeasurable racist violence such as the “superpredator” label and projection created by Princeton University criminologist John DiIulio (Brown, 2020), to the abonnement of the principles of social science from some evidence-based policing scholars (Walby, 2021), to the “morally contaminated” (Walters, 2008: 41) administrative criminology, funded and driven by the state's interests. Throughout the existence of the discipline, criminologists were “authorized to imagine tremendous violence and to invent ways to make that imagination reality, and their labors were informed by the awareness that the state they served would assert its prerogative to levy violence…using the products of their research” (Seigel, 2018: 127).…”

Public Criminology and Media Debates Over Policing

“…(Powell, 2020) In 2015, Professor Huey founded the Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing (CAN-SEBP), the core mandate of which is to empower Canadian police agencies. The CAN-SEBP is aggressively pro-police, beginning from an ontological position that assumes the necessity of police for social order and of conducting research that privileges police perspectives and voices (Walby, 2021). CAN-SEBP members' interests with respect to funding and access for research are entwined with those of police, and CAN-SEBP regularly provides commentary that could be characterized as antithetical to social justice concerns, further underscoring the organization's position with respect to defunding the police.…”

1033 Program Data for Studying Policing and Militarization: An Open-source Database in Response to the Recommendations of Koslicki

“…Steidley, 2018), officer and departmental behavior (Burkhardt and Baker 2018;Delehanty et al, 2017), officer and civilian safety (Carriere and Encinosa, 2017;Harris et al, 2017;Lawson, 2019), and the use of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Teams (Radil et al, 2017). Discussion surrounding the 1033 Program has increased substantially in the last few years due to the events noted above (Jenkins et al 2021;Walby, 2021) and a national audit of police use of force (Bennell et al 2021;Cobbina, 2019). Portions of the program were changed under President Obama in 2015 but were reversed under the Trump Administration in 2017.…”