The publicity given to SWAT teams in large cities encouraged smaller ones to start their own units, even if it had been years since these municipalities had experienced the kinds of violent crimes that would justify “special weapons and tactics.” And in the 1990s, the Law Enforcement Support Program was created to, as The Post’s Radley Balko put it in his history of police militarization, “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “grease the pipeline through which hard-core military gear flows to civilian police agencies.”
Sometimes Hollywood didn’t just imitate this militarized style of policing; it made active contributions to it. The squads that were a precursor to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Weapons and Tactics units trained on Universal Studios sets.
Aaron Spelling claimed in his memoir, “A Prime-Time Life,” that the department changed the way its SWAT units operated after Spelling’s show “S.W.A.T.” premiered. Spelling had his SWAT cops travel around together in a van. The LAPD apparently liked the idea so much that the department set up its own dedicated SWAT vehicles.
Action stories about policing also glamorized tactics that police departments are trying to restrict.
“You would not want your officers in a car, rushing through the streets of New York City or San Francisco … endangering the lives of innocent bystanders … over a stolen car,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which makes recommendations to law enforcement agencies about policing techniques.
And police recruiters have grappled with the temptation to suggest that life imitates art. Lee Brown, commissioner of the NYPD from 1990 to 1992, had a saying that captured the tension between two different visions of policing: “We preach service and we hire adventurers.”
Wexler said some police departments, rather than contesting the Hollywood image, have courted it by running recruiting ads that use the visual language of action movies to attract potential officers.
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