My department's SWAT team was excellently commanded, and populated with genuine good guys. Mostly inactive Marines and Army. Hardly ‘butt crack’. Some were decorated vets...including my personal hero, the commanding sergeant. I was invited to join...I was an excellent rifleman; but being the sniper was a duty that would have been fun in the training, and hell in actual practice: better left to someone better than I.
100 search and arrest warrants a year is about what the top ten cities in any given state, by any particular unit, might be surmised to perform. And we're ‘damned’ both ways. Major badness gets nipped...but every once in a while, things just go boink. But these guys do a lot more good than harm. Only thing that gets heads is “Man Shoots Dog”. Not much press for the thousands of officers injured in the line by ‘Fido’ [”He was such a quiet dog”]
Lighten up. Think! BTW...I do recall several 'Dog Shoots Man" headlines in the last year. But that's not where I was going, xactly.... :^)
Well, I have a stupid question: what ever happened to surrounding a house, and cop on a bullhorn saying “We have you surrounded. Come out with your hands up?”. This seemed to work fairly well FOR ABOUT 70 YEARS, and was safer and less costly for everyone involved. I thought that SWAT teams were designed for life-and-death situations (armed kidnappings, hostage situations, and so on). Not potheads.