Pubdate: Thu, 06 Apr 2000 Source: Orange County Register (CA) Copyright: 2000 The Orange County Register Contact: P.O. Box 11626, Santa Ana, CA 92711 Fax: (714) 565-3657 Website: http://www.ocregister.com/ Section: Local News,page 8 POLICE POWERS At first glance,the photograph of helmeted, assault-rifle-toting military personal on the front page of Saturday's Register looked like a photograph of peacekeeping forces in Bosnia. But a closer look revealed that the invasion force was a SWAT team descending on an Anaheim neighborhood. The Anaheim SWAT team, the county bomb squad, Irvine police and FBI agents raided the home of 70-year-old surgeon Jerry D. Nilsson, an associate of Dr. Larry Ford, the Diofem founder who killed himself last month. This increasingly bizarre case has all the makings of a TV mini-series. A family man, Dr. Ford committed suicide days after his partner was shot. Caches of weapons, explosives and chemicals were found at his suburban home. And now there's the military-esque raid of Dr. Nilsson, who had recently lost his medical licence for unrelated allegations. The mystery will no doubt continue. But appearances can be deceiving. Even. unusual findings - buried guns, chemicals, explosives - can have innocent explanations. And just because law enforcement has a big show of force doesn't mean that the target necessarily has done anything illegal. Irvine police officials, who directed the Nilsson raid, didn't return our calls. But an Anaheim police spokesman told us that the SWAT team would have been used if law enforcement has "information that it was a high-risk entry," and that Dr. Nilsson "had a big interest in firearms." Yet soon after the high-profile raid, police released Dr. Nilsson and said they found no explosives. The surgeon told the Register: "It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen in my whole life. ... They told me they thought I had a bomb. It was a big overreaction." The Anaheim incident was no fluke. Increasingly police forces, federal agents and sheriff's departments take a militaristic approach to local law enforcement that stands in contrast to the more traditional cop-on-a-beat approach. There's been a major "sea change" in police thinking, Joe McNamara told us; he is a fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, a former police chief in San Jose and Kansas City and longtime New York City policeman. "They're more in a military mind-set and everyone [is viewed] as a potential suspect." The SWAT-team concept, he explained, was developed in the 1960s because police weren't able to effectively handle hostage and other high-risk situations. It was a good approach in rare instances, but now departments are using it for routine arrests - something he describes as "bizarre." "The amount of force routinely used today [by police] would have triggered a congressional investigation in my early days of policing," he said. But these days Congress is funding these types of activities. Because of the drug war, he said, police too often view themselves as an invading army rather than as servants of the community. And that drug-war thinking - the sense of being under siege, the hair-trigger mentality - spills into non-drug-related cases. On a more practical level, Mr. McNamara worries that "It's not just the dollar cost, but the cost of taking those uniformed officers off the street where they're available for citizens." The answer is to demilitarize police departments by calling an end to the drug war. In the meantime, police officials should at least think twice about military-style raids unless they are dealing with hostage situations or other extreme circumstances. - --- MAP posted-by: Allan Wilkinson