Posted by Dennis Herrick on August 22, 2008 at 13:00:00:
Published 8/17/08 in the Union Leader
Regional SWAT Teams in N.H. Under Scrutiny
By Peter Jamison
Valley News Staff Writer
Bristol, N.H. -- The way into Bristol leads east along Route 104, a country highway with easy turns that skirts the base of Ragged Mountain and runs for a time along the Smith River, past cleared fields, dense forest and tumbledown colonial-style homes. This pastoral landscape hardly seems a fitting backdrop for armored cars and masked men bearing assault rifles.
But it was here, on Aug. 2, 2006, that then-Bristol residents Thomas and Tina Mlodzinski say they were awakened at 3:54 a.m. by a 20-man police SWAT team that broke down their door, handcuffed them in their bedrooms and interrogated them for 90 minutes in their nightclothes. The officers had come for Tina Mlodzinski's son, Michael Rothman, who was arrested on an assault charge that prosecutors later dropped.
The majority of the men who came to the Mlodzinskis' apartment that night were armed with assault rifles and, according to the family, were wearing military-style uniforms. But they had not arrived as members of a public police agency. Instead, they were acting as officers in the Central New Hampshire Special Operations Unit, a nonprofit, regional special operations team with a $90,000-per-year budget and a staff of 85 -- larger than the SWAT team of the Los Angeles Police Department.
The special operations unit, which covers six towns in the Upper Valley, is just one of six such regional teams in the state. All are incorporated as nonprofits and subject only to oversight from governing boards made up of local police chiefs.
While the teams are staffed by professional police officers drawn from the communities they serve, they carry weapons and employ tactics few associate with the small-town cop on the beat.
After years of operating in relative obscurity, the organizations are now coming under greater scrutiny. On July 16, the Mlodzinski family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against members of the Central New Hampshire unit. But 10 days later, a more serious incident thrust another special operations team into the limelight.
On July 26, the Western New Hampshire Special Operations Unit -- another regional SWAT team that provides coverage to Sullivan County -- was involved in an incident that ended with the shooting death of a Charlestown man who had holed up inside his home and the wounding of a state police officer.
That incident is now being reviewed by the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office, and few details have been released. But news of the fatal encounter, combined with the filing of the Mlodzinski lawsuit, has inevitably given rise to questions about the nonprofit SWAT teams. Who are they? Why are they needed when the state police fields its own SWAT team, ostensibly prepared to handle calls throughout New Hampshire? Who pays for them? Perhaps most important -- who's in charge?
This much is clear: The groups are on the rise. Since the first regional team was founded in the late 1990s, the ranks of the state's regional special operations units have swelled to include a total of 223 members, the Valley News found. Combined, the teams make up a force almost nine times the size of the New Hampshire State Police SWAT team, and much larger than any individual city's team.
Fueling this growth has been an influx of Homeland Security dollars and what supporters of the groups say is a growing need for tactically trained officers in rural New Hampshire.
“I come from an agency that did 4.5 million radio calls a year, and before that I was on a team that covered Lowell and Lawrence down to Boston,” said Tilton Police Chief Robert Cormier, who formerly worked in Los Angeles and Massachusetts and is now commander of the Central New Hampshire Special Operations Unit. “And I can tell you it's just as dangerous being a police officer up here as it was in L.A., for a couple of reasons.” Among those, Cormier said, is that officers in rural areas grow “complacent,” and are thus unprepared for tragedies that can strike “at a moment's notice.”
But not everyone is convinced. Michael Mello, a criminal law professor at Vermont Law School, said the nonprofit regional teams strike him as a disturbing local example of what law-enforcement scholar Peter Kraska has dubbed “the militarization of Mayberry” -- that is, small town police officers' growing use of strategies and equipment normally reserved for military forces or paramilitary units in urban police departments.
“There's a real danger, it seems to me, in shifting the focus from local community policing, which is what really works -- cops on the beat, building and developing relationships between law enforcement and the communities in which they operate -- to the sort of flashier, sexier approach to law enforcement where you get to play with a lot of really cool toys, and feel like you're in Baghdad,” Mello said.
“The reality is that you're in New Hampshire, and there is a real question in my mind whether the tactics are appropriate.”
Homeland Security Funding Key
Some public officials interviewed last week professed a lack of familiarity with the teams and their operations.
State Sen. Joseph Foster, D-Nashua, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- the Senate committee responsible for oversight of law enforcement issues -- said he hadn't previously known of the teams' existence.
“I can't say that I was aware of what you're talking about,” Foster said in an interview when asked about the regional squads. “I feel like Nashua has a special unit, but I think it's in the police department. I could be wrong.”
New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General James Boffetti said he was aware of the teams, and believed they served as a valuable tool for local police departments, but acknowledged that he was not especially familiar with their structure or workings. The teams are not under direct oversight by the Attorney General's Office, he said.
“I know that these sorts of special operations units exist in many communities, and I think they have developed some protocols for how this group gets activated,” Boffetti said. “To be called a special operations unit, each member has to go through some specialized training. I would expect that it's done in consultation with the local chiefs of police.”
According to state legislative records, the first organized discussions of forming the regional teams took place in 1999, when state law enforcement officials started talking about how to prepare for an incident on the scale of the tragic shooting spree that had taken place earlier that year at Columbine High School in Colorado. A 1999 law eased jurisdictional lines between municipalities for “special reaction teams,” paving the way for regional squads that could deploy officers across town boundaries.
The legislation gave officers acting with special operations units “the same powers … duties, rights, privileges and immunities” they would have when acting as police officers in their own municipalities, and provided the groups' member towns and police departments with full protection from liability for their employees' actions while serving beyond town boundaries.
The teams organized themselves with an eye to procuring the funds necessary to mount and maintain a tactical squad, which employs more expensive equipment and requires more advanced training than ordinary police forces. Their status as nonprofit corporations allows them to accept donations, receive federal grants, and operate tax-exempt as would a municipal agency, team officials say.
“Budgets are stretched,” said Belknap County Sheriff Craig Wiggin, commander of the 22-member Belknap Regional Special Operations Group. “To obtain funding for these kinds of programs and this equipment, you have to think outside the box.”
The Southern New Hampshire Special Operations team, the state's first, was registered with the Secretary of State's Office as a nonprofit in 2000, according to state records. The remaining five teams were registered between 2002 and 2004.
If the Columbine High shooting spurred the proliferation of the teams beginning about a decade ago, it was another tragedy, albeit indirectly, that allowed them to grow.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the newly formed U.S. Department of Homeland Security funneled substantial sums of federal dollars over several years into cooperative regional efforts to prepare for and combat terrorism. New Hampshire's regional special operations teams were among the beneficiaries of this strategy.
“We had to explain to Homeland Security that we do have risks here, even though it's New Hampshire,” said Cormier, commander of the Central New Hampshire unit and chairman of the New Hampshire Tactical Officers Association, a group of command officers from the state's tactical teams. “We think of terrorists and we typically think of somebody coming over here from the Middle East. But the majority of our dealings with terrorism is American-born terrorism, like Columbine and that sort of thing. They are classified as American terrorists.”
Cormier added, “Anyone can become a terrorist at a moment's notice.”
From 2003 through 2005, according to state records, each recognized regional special operations unit was given a grant of between $20,000 and $27,000. Additionally, some units were given grants specifically to buy equipment, such as night-vision goggles or armored vehicles. Belknap County's team was given a $175,000 Homeland Security grant in 2005 to purchase a Bearcat, an armored vehicle produced by a company that also contracts with the U.S. Army Special Forces.
The Belknap team, in particular, has benefited from federal largesse. The group was started with $500,000 procured by U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, who billed it at the time as “a collaborative homeland security initiative comprised of law enforcement officers and fighting professionals.” The team has just spent the last of that money, Wiggin said, and is now mulling how to pay for itself.
In addition to grant money, the teams also support themselves with contributions from individual police department budgets, donations, and, in some cases, fees levied on towns in their coverage areas. The Central New Hampshire Special Operations Unit, which covers the Upper Valley towns of Canaan, Enfield, Hanover, Haverhill, Lyme and New London -- as well as roughly 30 other municipalities -- charges each member town $2,500 per year. When officers from member departments are called out with the unit, the town police departments that ordinarily employ them foot the bill for their time.
Homeland Security funding has dried up in the past few years, as the federal department has shifted from funding regional anti-terrorism initiatives to protecting the country's infrastructure, Cormier said. But despite the recent decline in federal funds, regional special operations teams still find themselves toting much more firepower than your average New Hampshire police department.
The Central New Hampshire unit has not one, but two armored vehicles. (Cormier stressed that he considers them “rescue vehicles” that could be vital, for example, in ferrying away a hostage released out the door of a barricaded building.) The Western New Hampshire Special Operations Unit recently began equipping the operatives on its 16-member squad with AR-15 assault rifles. Before that, said Sunapee Police Chief David Cahill, who serves on the unit's board of directors, tactical officers with the unit were issued fully automatic Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns.
When it comes to training the officers who use such equipment, each team has its own protocol -- variations, according to team officials, on the standards laid out by the National Tactical Officers Association. To be part of the New Hampshire Tactical Officers Association, regional teams must, at a minimum, provide two extended courses on special tactics for new members within one year of joining, as well as an annual physical agility test, and ongoing training of at least eight hours a month, according to Berlin Police Sgt. Don Gendron, head of the Berlin/Gorham Emergency Response Team.
Some teams meet the standards. The 56-member Southern New Hampshire Special Operations Unit, the Western New Hampshire unit and the Berlin-Gorham unit train at least one day a month, team leaders say. Others exceed them. The Belknap and Central New Hampshire units and the 31-member Seacoast Emergency Response Team train two full days each month. All of the units also send some members to specialized training programs in advanced tactics such as marksmanship and hostage negotiation.
“They're not just unleashed and told, ‘Go have fun,' ” said Newport Police Chief David Hoyt, who sits on the board of the Western team. “The team is not just assembled by a bunch of officers that have no experience and no training.”
Yet there is no regulating authority, beyond each nonprofit team's board of directors, to ensure that individual operatives have had adequate preparation for high-risk situations. The New Hampshire Police Standards and Training Council, which regulates police academy curriculum and certification for all full-time officers in the state, does not oversee training for regional SWAT teams, council director Donald Vittum said.
Gendron said that new officers in his unit are sometimes allowed to respond to incidents even before they have completed introductory SWAT training, since the courses are only offered once or twice a year. In such cases, Gendron said, the untrained officers would be assigned a secondary role at an incident, such as guarding the perimeter of a scene.
Nor is the teams' training -- often provided through classes offered by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, or tactical experts from agencies such as the LAPD -- coordinated so that the various regional groups work together, or learn to collaborate with the state police. Sometimes one regional team will train with one or two neighboring teams, officials say, though such sessions are not planned on a regular basis.
“I'm not real schooled in their unit workings of how they operate,” said New Hampshire State Police Lt. Chris Aucoin, head of the 25-member state police tactical team. “They seem to be a valued asset of their communities. There seems to be quite an insurgence of them in the state, and I think that is based on the popularity of the concept.”
Civil Rights Violations Alleged
The regional teams are activated at the request of a town's top police officer, and, in accordance with state law, are technically subject to the local department's command when on call.
“If you think that there is any autonomous operation of these units, you are mistaken,” said Derry Police Capt. George Feole, commander of the Southern New Hampshire team. “The agencies, when activated, are responsible to the local law enforcement agency and community and they are subordinate to that.”
The teams respond to a variety of situations, some of which do not require paramilitary tactics. Cormier said the Central New Hampshire group is available for search-and-rescue missions and other emergency situations -- in late July, for example, the team traveled to Epsom, N.H., to help cope with damage from a tornado. Epsom Police Chief Wayne Preve subsequently wrote a letter to Cormier praising team members' “professionalism” and stating, “the assistance they gave was greatly appreciated.”
But the majority of calls, special operations team officials say, are of two kinds: “barricaded” suspects who have holed up inside a building and refuse to surrender to police, and the service of “high-risk” arrest warrants to individuals believed to be armed.
In theory, the teams are called into action only when danger exists to a suspect, a member of the public, or a police officer. In practice, circumstances often prove more complicated. Despite their heavy firepower, no regional special operations team has ever been fired upon -- at least until the Charlestown incident last month, in which it is still unclear who fired gunshots.
The case of the Mlodzinski family in Bristol illustrates the sorts of unpredictable circumstances that can call the team into action. In August 2006, the Bristol Police Department was seeking to arrest Michael Rothman, then 17, for allegedly beating another man with a nightstick. The victim told police he believed Rothman carried a firearm, according to an arrest warrant affidavit filed in Plymouth District Court.
According to the Mlodzinskis' lawsuit, some 20 members of the Central New Hampshire Special Operations team broke down their apartment door, arrested Rothman, who was sleeping, and interrogated his family members as to the whereabouts of the nightstick. Police did not find the weapon in the house, nor any firearms, according to court records. Prosecutors eventually dropped the assault charge against Rothman, who pleaded guilty to reckless conduct and was sentenced to six months in the Grafton County Jail.
Special operations officials and the Bristol Police Department have declined to comment on the incident, citing the pending lawsuit, which alleges a violation of the family's constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure and the use of excessive force.
The Charlestown incident on July 26 likewise shows how police special operations actions can stray from the scr1pt. While few details of the incident are known, officials have confirmed that the man who was fatally shot in the encounter, 53-year-old Anthony Jarvis of Charlestown, was not wanted in the first place by police. Officers seeking to serve an arrest warrant at Jarvis' house for his son -- who was wanted for allegedly stealing a flag and resisting arrest -- learned the older man was armed and, when he refused to come out, entered the trailer, leading to gunfire that killed Jarvis and wounded a state trooper.
Cormier insisted in an interview that his unit is called out only for life-threatening situations. “I do presentations for boards around the state and I've done many boards of selectmen meetings,” Cormier said. “And I had one board member say to me, ‘So if I have a fight with my wife, are you guys going to come crashing through the door?' And I said, ‘Absolutely not. Unless you’re going to take her hostage or you’re threatening to kill her, you’ll never see us.’ ”
Hoyt, the Newport chief, said one advantage of regional teams is that they can be activated under criteria less exacting than those used by the New Hampshire State Police SWAT team. The state police, Hoyt said, “might not come out as a team to a person that is being physically uncooperative but not threatening the use of any kind of deadly weapons -- say a person who's holed up in a house without a weapon. They wouldn't come out for that. Whereas a regional team would.”
John Gnagey, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, said regional SWAT teams are a fairly common phenomenon in states throughout the country, although he said he was not aware that some groups were organized as nonprofits. There are 11 regional teams in Massachusetts and three in Maine registered with the association.
There are no regional SWAT teams in the state of Vermont, according to Lt. Rob Evans, head of the Vermont State Police tactical team. Evans said his 18-member team covers the state, with the exception of smaller units in Burlington, Essex and Bennington. Evans said there is no inherent problem with regional tactics teams, provided their independence does not lead to a relaxing of training or standards.
“I have heard of some very good success stories with regional teams, and I have heard of some horrible, horrible failures with regional teams,” Evans said. “It's a serious business to be in, and if folks don't take it seriously, and it’s not professionally organized and maintained, there can be serious issues.”
SWAT Teams Used More Frequently
The question of what circumstances warrant the intervention of what is by definition a paramilitary team strikes at a larger issue in law-enforcement. SWAT teams were first developed in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s to cope with snipers and militant urban groups, such as the Black Panther Party and Symbionese Liberation Army, against which ordinary patrol officers found themselves outgunned.
Since then, SWAT team operations have expanded considerably, particularly in the service of arrest warrants. Critics say tactical teams, in part because of the appeal to officers of their flashy weapons and exciting missions, are being used inappropriately for ever more routine matters of law enforcement.
Mello, the criminal law professor, said the use of special tactics “makes sense to me in big-city urban police departments, where there can be a real need for SWAT teams, for a variety of reasons. You almost need to have military-grade firepower in order for there to be parity. I just don't know that that's really the case in rural New Hampshire or Vermont.”
According to statistics gathered by the Valley News from individual teams, there are a total of 223 regional special operations team members in the state. Not all of those members are tactical operatives: Some are doctors, paramedics or negotiators.
Each team responds to half a dozen to a dozen calls a year. In 2004, the Central New Hampshire Special Operations Unit was activated just three times. Not all members are required on every call -- Cormier said that 25 tactical officers are usually sufficient for a call, and that one reason for the 85-member team's substantial size is to allow leeway for smaller police departments in the region that can't spare team members on given nights.
The sheer number of tactical officers employed by regional nonprofit teams in New Hampshire is nevertheless striking, particularly when measured against the teams' call volume. By comparison, the Los Angeles Police Department SWAT team, which deploys more than 200 times a year, employs about 55 officers; the Dallas SWAT team has 50.
The New Hampshire State Police SWAT team has 25 officers, and team leader Aucoin said that staff level is appropriate to respond, independently, to any emergency in the state.
“We try to maintain enough personnel so that we could operate independently in almost any circumstance where we are asked to do that,” Aucoin said.
Some regional team leaders, however, say their teams can mobilize and arrive at the scene of a dangerous incident more quickly than the state police. Hoyt said the Western New Hampshire Special Operations team could respond sooner within Sullivan County than the state police could. Additionally, he said, a regional team brings the benefit of officers familiar with each other and with the area.
“It's a controlled team. They have regulations to follow. They have rules to follow. They don't argue who's in charge. It’s not a matter of, ‘Oh, I can do this because I’m a (state) trooper,’ ” Hoyt said, adding that he believed his regional team was trained as well as the state police SWAT team. “Everyone automatically assumes state police, they're God. Some have equal training, some have more training, some have less training.”
Chief Declines to Join
Not all police officials share Hoyt's confidence in regional teams, however. Acting Franklin Police Chief Rod Forey said the Central New Hampshire unit made a presentation to the Franklin City Council about a year and a half ago, inviting the city into its coverage area. Forey is strongly opposed to joining. He said he has more faith in a law enforcement team whose training and officers are overseen by a state agency. Another benefit, Forey said, is that the services of the state police SWAT team, unlike some regional squads, come at no cost.
“We are unequivocally not joining that,” Forey said. “We feel that we can use the services of the New Hampshire State Police, which are a fully trained SWAT team. They're available. They're free. All of them are full-time state troopers, they’re highly trained, and that’s who we’ll be using.”
As for the speed of response, Forey noted that the Central New Hampshire regional team, like the state police, has to pull together tactical officers from far-flung towns when called upon. “I find it hard to believe that if you put a stopwatch to both teams that either team could get here faster,” Forey said.
The town of Holderness recently opted to give up its membership in the Central New Hampshire unit -- a notable fact, since one of the incidents that spurred the team's founding was a 2002 hostage crisis in Holderness.
Holderness Police Chief Jeremiah Patridge said he could no longer find room in the department's budget for membership fees, and that he felt confident in the quality of state police SWAT coverage.
“This day and age, with gas prices and things like that, you've got to make some cuts,” Patridge said. “The state police covered our situation prior to our joining the regional special operations unit, and we were comfortable with that.”
Other small-town police officers sing the Central New Hampshire team praises. Enfield Police Chief Richard Crate said he had called the team into his town three times to serve high-risk warrants (two were drug arrests, and the third suspect was believed to possess a fully automatic weapon) and that the team was “very professional -- just outstanding.” The Enfield Police Department supplies one officer to the regional team.
“If we have an incident, whether it be the three incidents that we've had in town for search warrants or something similar to what took place in the central part of the state involving the tornado, it brings in about 50 people,” Crate said. “It brings that number of people into my community within two hours, if not sooner. That large number for a small community is very beneficial.”
Cormier, in defending the existence of regional teams, cited instances of sudden and unexpected bloodshed, such as the 1997 rampage of Carl Drega, who killed four people in Colebrook before being fatally shot by police officers. Violence can erupt unexpectedly in quiet settings, Cormier said, and when it does, teams of highly trained police officers can protect people. Few outside of Colorado knew of Columbine High School, he said, before Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris opened fire on their classmates on April 20, 1999.
“If somebody went into my children's school and took my kids hostage and one of my kids died, I would certainly be grief stricken for years,” Cormier said. “But one of the things I would certainly be curious about is, what did that town do to protect my children? Were they ready for it? Did they have the team available? Why didn't somebody go in and rescue them?”
These days, Cormier said, law-enforcement officers cannot avoid those questions.
“There's an expectation that we prepare for the worst now, where I think when I became a cop that really wasn't the case. We were reactive all the time, and now we're expected to be proactive. We’re expected to be prepared.”