On a scorching August day in 1966, Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas tower with a footlocker full of rifles, ammunition, and supplies. Over the next 96 minutes, he turned the campus into a war zone—killing 14 people and wounding dozens more. He had already murdered his wife and mother the night before. By the time police finally reached him and ended the siege, the damage was done. It was one of the first mass shootings in modern American history, and it changed everything.
But perhaps not in the way people hoped.
The horror of that day prompted police departments across the country to ask themselves a pressing question: What if this happens again? They weren’t wrong to wonder. What followed, however, was not a reckoning with gun laws, mental health care, or the fragile scaffolding of masculinity. What followed was war gear.
The first SWAT team was formed in Los Angeles in 1967, just one year after Whitman’s rampage. The idea was simple: create a specially trained unit that could respond to high-risk situations—mass shootings, hostage crises, active threats. Tactical, targeted, and used sparingly. In theory.
But theory has a way of becoming dogma in American policing. And by the 1980s, SWAT wasn’t just a backup plan—it was a frontline tool. As the War on Drugs gained momentum, the mission shifted. Suddenly, SWAT teams were no longer waiting in the wings for the next tower sniper. They were battering down doors to serve low-level drug warrants.
By the 2000s, that drift had become routine. According to data from the ACLU, up to 80% of SWAT deployments today are used for executing search warrants—mostly for nonviolent drug offenses. In Utah, it’s 83%. In Maryland, more than 90% of SWAT deployments were for simple searches, with roughly half targeting nonviolent offenses. The kind of danger that Whitman represented? That’s only about 7% of all SWAT activity nationwide.
We were told that militarization would make us safer. But instead of neutralizing active shooters, SWAT teams are often used to raid homes in the middle of the night, throw flashbang grenades into children’s rooms, and enforce drug laws that disproportionately target poor and Black communities. It’s no coincidence that some of the most high-profile tragedies—Breonna Taylor’s death among them—involved these very tactics.
What began on a tower in Texas has rippled into neighborhoods across the country. The fear of one man with a rifle turned into a justification for thousands of men with battering rams. Instead of keeping Whitman’s horror contained, we used it to scale up the kind of policing that treats everyday homes like war zones.
This isn’t to say that tactical response units have no place. But when 3 a.m. drug raids become more common than responses to actual violent threats, something’s gone wrong. We’ve allowed a reactive logic—rooted in a single day’s terror—to shape decades of policy. And in doing so, we’ve lost the thread.
As we mark another year since the Whitman shooting, we should remember not just the lives lost, but the choices made in its aftermath. The rise of SWAT was a decision. Its expansion into routine drug policing was a decision. And continuing down this path is a decision.
It’s not too late to make a different one.