A couple of days ago in this article I debated come commentators about cop SWAT teams. I pointed out how they commonly were abused, and we’d be better off without them.

This new story comes from Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of the University of Virginia, which was established by that great civil libertarian, Thomas Jefferson. Two college girls went to buy bottled water. The SWAT team thought they were buying beer — horrors! — and swooped down:

“The seven agents surrounded the terrified girls’ car; one of them pulled a gun, others attempted to break the windows.”

What a horror. And it was as recently as the 1970s that the drinking age in many states, including the Michigan I grew up in, was dropped to 18. Yet this Zomo SWAT team assaulted these poor girls. Well, at least the girls got an education they never would have gotten from UVA: they know America is a police state.

But don’t we need SWAT teams to fight terrorists, serial killers, etc.? The article notes:

“According to an analysis conducted by The Baltimore Sun of SWAT team raids in Maryland (the only state to have passed a law requiring accountability regarding SWAT team activities) during a six-month period in 2009, raids involving emergency situations, such as hostage-taking and bank robberies, comprised a mere six percent of SWAT team assaults.”

That’s it: 6 percent. Which means the other 94 percent were for such things as assaulting 19-year-old girls buying bottled water.

It’s obviously a case of bureaucratic bloat. All bureaucracies seek to expand relentlessly. In the private sector, bureaucracies are kept in check by competition; if they get to big, they kill profits and the company goes broke.

In the government, sector, there’s no such check. If they need more money, taxes are raised. In the case of police departments, their bureaucracies also benefit from the largesse of federal programs to “help” local police by giving them military equipment. For example, from the National Institute of (In)Justice website:

“1033 Program: Permits the Secretary of Defense to transfer, without charge, excess DoD personal property to State and local law enforcement agencies.”

Actually, there is a check on this waste: The federal government has run up a $222 trillion (with a “t”) tab of unfunded liabilities. So the Swats Gone Wild mindset soon will be checked like a college girl whose Spring Break was cut short by her parents canceling her credit card.

That will mean canceling federal funding for local SWAT teams. And with local budgets also under fire, the SWAT teams soon will be curtailed, even eliminated, in favor of old-fashioned policing.

And fewer SWAT teams will mean, maybe, coeds can go buy bottles of water without being assaulted.

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — A Sacramento area family is mourning the death of their mentally disabled son, who was shot to death by a sheriff’s deputy after the family had called the sheriff’s department for help in restraining him. Newspaper accounts suggest the deputy ordered the young man — a severe germophobe — onto the ground, which sparked intense struggling. After a tussle, the deputy shot the man in front of his family.

As is typical, the sheriff defended the officer and said that he was well within his rights to use deadly force, which is no doubt true given that current law gives officers wide latitude to restrain and even kill people. Comb through newspapers across the country and one will find many incidents of officer-involved shootings and aggressive behavior by the authorities, who, as an aside, increasingly look like paramilitary rather than community officers. Police say society has become more dangerous, but crime rates are falling even during tough economic times. The number of officers killed on duty is at record lows.

In my view, the reason for the incidents is the nature of policing has changed. Following the 9/11 attacks, officers have convinced themselves that every member of the public is a potential threat. Every local police department is awash in grants from “Homeland Security” to buy the latest toys and weaponry. Attitudes have changed and the local police aren’t your friends any more.

Calling the cops

From a practical standpoint, these incidents remind us to think carefully before calling for police help. From a policy perspective, it’s time for a wide-ranging debate about use-of-force issues that’s not dominated by police unions and their political courtiers.

This is from the Los Angeles Daily News this week: “Abdul Arian, the 19-year-old Winnetka man killed in a hail of police bullets on April 11, was buried Tuesday at the Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood. … [M]any attendees who knew Arian expressed anger about the way he died, following a car chase through the San Fernando Valley that ended on the 101 Freeway … .” Arian is pictured nearby.

I’ve written about such shootings at the hands of deputies and police officers. Sometimes they are justified, but often the killings leave me wondering whether those officers would have reacted as they did had it been their child driving the car or their mentally ill son squirming on the ground.

Many people have been outraged at the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida and liberal critics have blamed those “stand your ground” laws that allow the use of deadly force by ordinary citizens when they are under attack rather than forcing them to retreat before defending themselves.

Such laws might embolden people, but I wish these critics — who insist on putting a racial tilt on a matter that has far broader implications — would also look closely at government-sanctioned use of force. If “stand your ground” laws embolden armed citizens, what happens when armed officials are given the broadest legal latitude to kill and also are protected by their departments and their unions?

Police officers sometimes have to use deadly force. We all understand that. It’s an oftentimes tough job. But we keep seeing the fruits of America’s slide down that slippery slope toward a police state: 6-year-olds searched at airports, armed police patrolling the halls of junior high schools, drones deployed over U.S. skies to crack down on crime, SWAT teams arresting the sellers of unlicensed raw milk, armed agents shutting down peaceful medical marijuana clinics, code officers and other regulatory agents granted the powers and weaponry of peace officers, trigger-happy police who seem to reach for their weapons before trying other, less-deadly alternatives.

We’ve become a society of checkpoints and searches and increased surveillance wherever we go. We have federal officials who monitor bank accounts and gain added powers to snoop on us, broad anti-terrorism laws that allow the authorities to detain citizens indefinitely without due process. Many conservatives applaud these expansions of power because of their concern about terrorist threats and street crime. Liberals applaud them also, given how eager they are to use government to “improve” our society. The more laws and regulations one passes, the more authorities one needs to enforce them.

Where’s the criticism?

Whatever happened to civil libertarians, who must be in hiding somewhere? Why aren’t Christians — who are more than willing to flex their political muscle on gay marriage and other issues — talking about the impact of these policies on the least among us, or thinking seriously about those in jails and prisons?

We’re creating a brutal and inhumane society. This is from a recent Los Angeles Times article: “A Los Angeles County commission investigating jail abuse heard tearful testimony … from clergy and civilian monitors who worked in the lockups and said they witnessed deputies assaulting inmates and bullying witnesses to keep quiet. One jail monitor broke down as she recounted being intimidated by a deputy whom she said saw beat an unconscious inmate. A weeping jail chaplain described deputies calling him a rat after he reported another beating.”

When officials misbehave so egregiously, it undermines our society and our form of government in deep and disturbing ways.

Ultimately, it is up to we, the people, to push the pendulum back in a more sensible direction. Since 9/11, Americans have placed their security over their freedom, but I’m sensing an understanding of the problem among serious people from all political perspectives.

When Americans think about public employee issues these days, they think about the pension crisis.

But as serious a problem as that is, the biggest public-employee issue relates more directly to who we are as a people and what kind of society we want to live in. We need to demand that the authorities behave more like members of our community and less like an invading army.

By JOHN SEILER

Editor’s note: This article was rewritten to reflect more recent information, which corrected some of what was reported.

The evidence that America now is a full-blown police state keeps pouring in. Governments short of revenue even are assaulting those with alleged school-loan problems.

In Stockton, original reports were that local police launched an assault on a man’s house, searching for his wife. Her offense: she didn’t make her federal student-loan payments.

Reported News10.net on Thursday (the link includes a video):

The resident, Kenneth Wright, does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe why what he thought was a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 in the morning.

“I look out of my window and I see 15 police officers,” Wright said.

As Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts, he said the officers barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn.

“He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there,” Wright said.

According to Wright, officers also woke his three young children, ages 3, 7, and 11, and put them in a Stockton police patrol car with him. Officers then searched his house.

“They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids,” Wright said.

Later Reports

However, later reports told a slightly different story. Reported FoxNews.com:

A California man who initially claimed to a local television station that he was roughed up by “SWAT team” members who allegedly battered down his front door to execute a search warrant related to his estranged wife’s unpaid student loans was targeted due to an ongoing probe into alleged financial aid fraud.

The search allowed for the seizure of any student financial aid documents, W2 forms and electronic communications….

One of Wright’s neighbors, a woman who identified herself only as Becky, saw the raid, which started at 6:45 a.m. and lasted until at least 10:45 a.m., she said.

“They surrounded the house; it was like a task force of SWAT team,” she told the station. “They all had guns. They dragged him out in his boxer shorts, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him.”

Multiple calls to a Stockton Police Department spokesman were not returned on Wednesday. According to ABC 10/KXTV, the Stockton Police Department said it was asked by federal agents to provide one officer and one patrol car for a police presence when executing the search warrant.

“All I want is an apology for me and my kids and for them to get me a new door,” Wright said.

It may be some days before the exact nature of what happened becomes clear. However, we do know already:

1. A raid occurred involving numerous heavily armed officers who assaulted Wright’s home as if he were a Taliban member in Afghanistan.

2. Given that he was not an armed criminal, only allegedly involved in a financial impropriety, the size and potency of the assault on his home was far in excess of what was necessary to arrest him. Just a few years ago, this situation would have been dealt with by plain close officers knocking on his door and issuing him a subpoena or a search warrant.

3. Governments at all levels refuse to disclose what really was going on even to respected members of the meida.

Federalization

This raid also shows how the federal government now has completely taken over our lives. Localism is dead. A federal program that seems to most people to be benign, promoting learning and jobs skills, turns out to be another police-state enforcement agency. Maybe more people now will wish that President Ronald Reagan had fulfilled his 1980 campaign promise to complete abolish the U.S. Department of Education (De-Ed).

What America’s founders feared, that state and local governments would be dissolved into a gigantic edifice of oppression, has occurred — enforced even against alleged student loans improprieties.

It’s worth noting that student debt has gotten out of hand. Student debt is the latest “asset bubble” that soon could burst, following the real-estate debt bubble, which burst in the mid-2000s, and the dot-com bubble, which burst in 1999.

Too many kids go to school for too many worthless degrees. They waste four or more years that they could use building a career and piling up experience and savings, but instead end up with a pointless diploma and a mountain of debt.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

When Michelle Bisutti, a 41-year-old family practitioner in Columbus, Ohio, finished medical school in 2003, her student-loan debt amounted to roughly $250,000. Since then, it has ballooned to $555,000.

It is the result of her deferring loan payments while she completed her residency, default charges and relentlessly compounding interest rates. Among the charges: a single $53,870 fee for when her loan was turned over to a collection agency.

“Maybe half of it was my fault because I didn’t look at the fine print,” Dr. Bisutti says. “But this is just outrageous now.”

Let’s note that number: $550,000. That’s not a home loan that you might pay off over 30 years while you live in the place. It’s an unsecured loan. And there’s worse:

Unlike other kinds of debt, student loans can be particularly hard to wriggle out of. Homeowners who can’t make their mortgage payments can hand over the keys to their house to their lender. Credit-card and even gambling debts can be discharged in bankruptcy. But ditching a student loan is virtually impossible, especially once a collection agency gets involved. Although lenders may trim payments, getting fees or principals waived seldom happens.

One of the reasons America’s economy developed rapidly was because people could go bankrupt. They could make mistakes and start over. By contrast, in Europe, even to this day, it’s hard to get out of bad debts. You effectively become an indentured servant, a slave, to the banks.

Now the same has happened in America to federal-backed loans to students. You become the government’s slave — for your whole life. Because unless you win the lottery, there’s no way you can pay back that $550,000 loan. The education you thought would free you into a life of a well-paying, interesting vocation, instead enslaves you.

And could bring a SWAT team barging into your home, guns pointed at your nose.