SWAT teams are the apex of law enforcement in the United States. The more dangerous the situation, the more likely you’ll be staring down the barrel of a SWAT team member’s gun. Because, let’s be real here, you won’t be seeing a SWAT team member tackle someone for jaywalking down the street. From your local police department’s SWAT team, all the way up to the FBI’s hostage rescue team, there are various levels of SWAT that are ready to respond to the most dangerous of calls. SWAT is an invaluable asset that is the backbone of law enforcement.
Across the United States, there are thousands and thousands of SWAT teams responding to incidents that your standard patrol officers aren’t trained or equipped to handle. But are all of these SWAT teams the same? The short answer is no… As you’ll come to find out, there are a variety of SWAT teams for a variety of situations across a variety of levels. If we were to explain to you every SWAT team in the U.S., this would have been a very long read. We don’t want to take that much of your time, so we’ll be breaking things down into Federal, State, and Local SWAT teams. We’ll be grouping together county, city, and town police as Local SWAT for simplicity’s sake.
So we’re sure you’re wondering… Why are there so many different SWAT teams? Is a Federal SWAT Team better than a local SWAT team? Do they all have the same training? Same missions?
Keep reading, and we’ll be answering those questions and much more.
Before we can jump into the complexities and nuances between the various SWAT teams across the country, we first have to define what a SWAT team is. While we know SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics, what makes a SWAT team… a SWAT team?
For starters, there’s no universal definition of a SWAT team. With the thousands and thousands of police departments scattered across the United States, and given the nature of how different one department can be from another, it should make sense that there is no uniform definition of SWAT. If you take two cops, give them a little bit of extra equipment and funding, are they now considered a SWAT team? What about twenty of them? What if they don’t get as good gear as the department across the state? Enough of the philosophical questions; we’re sure you can see how difficult this can become.
While there might be no consensus on what a SWAT team must have or must be, there is a generalized idea and consensus on what SWAT teams are and do. SWAT teams are designated law enforcement teams responsible for responding to incidents that are beyond the capabilities of traditional law enforcement, where they use specialized equipment, weapons, and tactics. Whether you’re a federal, state, or local SWAT team, a majority of your overlapping missions are going to be dealing with active shooters, barricaded suspects, hostage rescue, counterterrorism, VIP protection, riot control, and high-risk arrests and searches. The members of these SWAT teams may be assaulters, breachers, snipers, divers, bomb squads, canine handlers, medics, and others in various positions.
Keep in mind, though, that missions and personnel vary from department to department. The DEA SRT is more likely to be called upon for drug related crimes, and the FBI HRT will be called upon for hostage situations.
FEDERAL, STATE, & LOCAL SWAT: MISSION AND JURISDICTION
The bigger the SWAT team, the more room there is for a multitude of team member specialties. SWAT teams are also deployed based on preparation, locality, and urgency. Let’s give you an example:
Billy Joe is a well known criminal. One day, Billy decides to cut loose and rob a local convenience store in the town of Nowhere, Kentucky. Before he can take the money and run, the police show up to catch him, and he barricades himself in the store, taking the cashier as hostage. The town of Nowhere does not have a local SWAT team, so either the county or state SWAT team will step in to respond to the situation. But what if Billy Joe was in a major city and this was a bank robbery? The city SWAT team would be the ones responding, with possible help from the county or state SWAT team if able. Uh oh, it looks like Billy is actually holding dozens of people hostage and is beginning to make terrorist threats to the United States. This is where you’d most likely see the feds step in, like the FBI Hostage Rescue Team.
While these examples aren’t based in reality and are highly unlikely to be taught anywhere outside of a General Discharge blog post, they’re intended to showcase how each level of SWAT team, be it federal, state or local, comes into play when things go south.
The severity of the crime and where it’s being committed are the two major factors that determine which SWAT team will be responding to the situation. To reiterate, you won’t be seeing the FBI HRT come in to respond to a drunk guy holding someone hostage at a bar, but you might see them if they’re holding 50 people hostage in a church.
With that explained, does that mean Federal SWAT teams are better than State and Local SWAT teams? Yet again, that’s another “it depends”. Each one has different purposes. While anything can happen, a local swat team won’t experience the same high stakes situations to the degree and frequency that FBI HRT does. So while they’re both highly trained, each is suited for the needs of their mission and responsibilities.
Which leads us into our next key difference between each level of SWAT: their funding.
FEDERAL, STATE, & LOCAL SWAT: DIFFERENCES
Everyone’s heard the saying “Follow the money”. The same goes for law enforcement. The more money you have, the better equipment, training, and opportunities you get. Your local SWAT team will not be getting the same budget as the DEA SRT will, and for good reason. The DEA is scattered across the country, and deals with high profile drug busts. Your local SWAT team is concerned with issues that arise in their smaller area of responsibility. A SWAT team with the funding of Uncle Sam will be much more capable and lethal as compared to a SWAT team that has to budget and can only work off the coffers they get from the local taxpayers.
So does that mean that all hope is lost for the small guys? Not quite. An organization known as the National Tactical Officers Association, an entity that is trying to create uniformity amongst various SWAT teams, has made efforts to consolidate or coordinate amongst various departments to create more finely-tuned SWAT teams that are more capable, deadly, and efficient.
While not an official standard, they have created benchmarks and definitions, going so far as to define what a Tier ONE or Tier TWO SWAT team would be.
Another major difference between the various SWAT teams is the training they receive. While SWAT teams share common missions that we discussed before, there is no uniform training. For example, when you see a Navy SEAL, no matter who they are, you know they’ve gone through the exact same training as any other SEAL to become one. For SWAT, however, it’s much different. A SWAT member in Vermont may have learned some of the same fundamentals as a SWAT member in Washington, but they did not go through an identical process.
To take it another step further, not every SWAT member is full-time. There are also part-time SWAT members. Not every department has a dedicated SWAT team. There are plenty of SWAT teams that entirely consist of part-time members, meaning that being in SWAT is a collateral duty for them. In other words, on a day-to-day basis, they are doing their regular duties, be that patrol, detective work, training, etc., and if there’s a SWAT call, they’ll drop whatever they’re doing and round up and respond. So how does this relate to training? Well, a part-time team is highly unlikely to get the training and resources of a full-time unit, such as LAPD SWAT or NYPD ESU.
FEDERAL, STATE, & LOCAL SWAT: CONCLUSION
At this point, you might have noticed that we didn’t really touch on the State SWAT teams much. Well, as if the lines aren’t blurred enough when you compare Federal to Local SWAT, or Federal to State SWAT, they get even blurrier when you start comparing State to Local SWAT. There is no way to say that all state SWAT teams are bigger or better than a local SWAT team. The needs and size of the departments depend on the population of the jurisdiction they reside in. To put this into perspective, the Rhode Island State SWAT team resides over a population of just over 1 million people, while NYPD ESU, a city SWAT team, resides in a jurisdiction of over 8 million people.
Bottom line: No SWAT team is equal. You’ll find countless differences among the variety of SWAT teams across all levels of law enforcement. Each has their own unique purpose, training, and funding to enable them to accomplish the missions of their jurisdiction, population, you name it. They often work with each other to accomplish the mission at hand, and are all highly respectable members of law enforcement who are taking the extra step in keeping the public safe from harm.
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