"SWATTers" didn't turn them into a "joke", police did that themselves. Even w/o people calling in false reports, SWAT teams still get used for an ever increasing amount of minor crimes.
Peter Kraska, a criminal justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University, found that the prevalence of SWAT teams, among police agencies serving populations of at least 50,000 people, doubled from the mid-1980s to the late-1990s, rising to 89% of police agencies by the end of this time period. Among smaller police agencies (covering areas with between 25,000 and 50,000 people), the proportion with SWAT teams rose from 20% in the mid-198-s to 80% in the mid-2000s. Kraska says: "When people refer to the militarization of police, it's not in a pejorative or judgmental sense.Contemporary police agencies have moved significantly along a continuum culturally, materially, operationally, while using a Navy SEALs model. All of those are clear indications that they're moving away from a civilian model of policing." A 2014 ACLU report, War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing, concluded that "American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized ..." The report examined 818 uses of SWAT teams by more than 20 law enforcement agencies in 11 U.S. states from the period of July 2010 to October 2013. Military-style tactics used by such teams include nighttime raids, use of battering rams, use of flashbangs, overwhelming displays of force, and the wearing of helmets and masks. The use of SWAT teams became especially common for drug searches. The ACLU study found that 62% of SWAT deployments were for drug raids, and that 79% involved raids on private homes; the study found that only "7% fell into those categories for which the technique was originally intended, such as hostage situations or barricades". In some cases, civilians, including infants, were killed or injured due to police use of force in military style raids. In other cases, residents of affected neighborhoods reported experiencing psychological trauma as a result of militaristic law-enforcement tactics. The use of force and military-style equipment during such raids prompted criticism, particularly from civil libertarians such as Radley Balko, who wrote on the topic in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) have been accused of operating a secret "black site" in Homan Square where suspects were held without being booked and registered and where they could not be found by their attorneys or families. Suspects were allegedly shackled and beaten.
Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams are law enforcement units in the United States that use specialized or military equipment and tactics. First created in the 1960s for riot control or violent confrontations with criminals, the number and usage of SWAT teams increased in the 1980s and 1990s during the War on Drugs, and in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. In the United States today, SWAT teams are deployed 50,000-80,000 times every year, 80% of the time in order to serve search warrants, most often for narcotics. SWAT teams are increasingly equipped with military-type hardware and are trained to deploy against threats of terrorism, for crowd control, and in situations beyond the capabilities of ordinary law enforcement, sometimes deemed "high-risk". Other countries have developed their own paramilitary police units (PPU)s that are also described as or compared to SWAT police forces. SWAT units are often equipped with specialized firearms including submachine guns, assault rifles, breaching shotguns, sniper rifles, riot control agents, and stun grenades. They have specialized equipment including heavy body armor, ballistic shields, entry tools, armored vehicles, advanced night vision optics, and motion detectors for covertly determining the positions of hostages or hostage takers, inside enclosed structures. The increased use of SWAT teams is a hallmark of increased police militarization. The Cato Institute's Radley Balko wrote that during the 1970s, there were about 300 SWAT raids a year and as of 2005 there were 40,000 a year. SWAT teams being used for gambling crackdowns and serving a search warrant are routine in some places, like Fairfax, VA. "There has been a more than 1400% increase in the amount of SWAT deployments between 1980 and 2000, according to estimates ... by Eastern Kentucky University professor Peter Kraska." Balko states that in 2007, "... a Dallas SWAT team raided a Veterans [organization's] ... charity poker games. In 2010, a team of heavily armed Orange County, Florida, sheriff's deputies raided several barbershops, holding barbers and customers at gunpoint while they turned the shops inside out. Of the 37 people arrested, 34 were taken in for "barbering without a license". The Orlando barbershop raids were subsequently challenged in court, and in 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that it violated "clearly established Fourth Amendment rights" for the government to conduct "a run-of-the-mill administrative inspection as though it is a criminal raid". The ACLU has stated that "... heavily armed SWAT teams are raiding people's homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs", causing people to "needlessly di[e] during these raids", in which neighborhoods are turned into "warzones".
Excessive bolding to aid the mentally challenged who still defend this shit from having to read all of that.