SWAT Team Research Articles

Culture as Action

Culture as Action

Taking care of the "good guys:" a trauma center-based model of medical support for tactical law enforcement.

The potential need for rapid medical intervention and access to a trauma center after major injury is crucial to the safety and success of SWAT team operations. This manuscript describes the genesis and development of a unique model for which advanced medical care is rendered by trained health care professionals within a regional trauma system in the support of a SWAT team. The model was developed jointly by the Newark, New Jersey, Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and The New Jersey Trauma Center-University Hospital, an academic, urban Level I trauma center. After the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the two agencies in 1995, the program became operational. The medical team is composed of physicians, nurses, and paramedics. Since inception, the medical team has provided medical support for 33 tactical missions and 99 training days. Ten patients were treated: 7 agents (syncope, fractured foot, blunt head/neck trauma, lacerations), 2 bystanders (chest pain, asthma), and 1 suspect (chest pain). The advantages of the Newark model in contrast to other programs of tactical medical support, are the operational activities of the team and the cost of the program was outlined.

Managing the global workforce: Challenges and strategies

Executive Overview The globalization of the workplace has become a fact of life for a substantial segment of U.S. companies, bringing a dramatic expansion of the scope of workforce management and a whole host of new organizational challenges. Using data collected from interviews with international human resource managers in eight large companies, this paper identifies three practical challenges to managing the global workforce and four strategies for meeting those challenges. The three challenges are: deployment. knowledge and innovation dissemination, and talent identification and development. The four strategies are: aspatial careers, awareness-building assignments, SWAT teams, and virtual solutions. A diagnostic framework for each challenge is provided that indicates when to use which strategy and basic implementation points are presented.

Gendered Class Analysis

We need a more gendered and internationally oriented class analysis. As monopoly capital confronts its crisis of overproduction and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall by scouring the globe for quick financial profits and cheaper sources of labor power and natural resources, its state and international representatives modernize counterinsurgency and crowd control SWAT teams to be the mailed fist behind the velvet glove of investment in the and women. The head of the women-in-development program of the Inter-American Development Bank has observed: Investing in women offers policymakers the highest economic and social returns at the lowest cost (Buvinic, 1997: 39). This represents a late 1990s version of a more feminized investment in the poor strategy initiated in the late 1960s by the World Bank (see Cockcroft, 1998). UN and other global estimates show women providing two-thirds of the hours of work, earning one-tenth of the world's income, and possessing less than one-hundredth of the world's wealth. According to the statistical calculations of the United Nations' Human Development Report 1995, women's economic contributions globally are undervalued by US$11 trillion. Just the unpaid housework of women is estimated at the market equivalent of 1,530 percent of the gross product (Bell, 1997). This superexploitation of women is a major consequence and cause of monopoly capital's seeking to fortify the relation between itself and villageor neighborhood-based domestic economies. Why is capital so interested in women? Besides the rise of feminism, there are structural reasons. Employers are aware of the central role of women in production. Following Seccombe (1992; 1993), we can recast-Marx's Department III (originally consumption) as that of the production of the sine qua non of all production: labor power. Department III of production does this on a daily and generational basis, organized through the family in a

The Role of Tactical Emergency Medical Support in Hostage and Crisis Negotiations

The use of tactical medics by members of hostage and crisis negotiations teams has not been examined in the literature or in the field. Usually, negotiations teams are deployed within the confines of the established inner perimeter along with the tactical team and tactical medics. While the likelihood of injuries or performance degrading medical problems for negotiators is less than that expected for SWAT team members, they may occur and need attention. Additionally, there are other roles that tactical medical personnel can play that are specific to the needs of police negotiators. This article will examine these possible roles.

Grounded research into U.S. paramilitary policing: Forging the iron fist inside the velvet glove

Police studies have paid almost no attention to the increase in the number of and significant changes in the use of police paramilitary units (PPUs) in the United States ‐ commonly known as SWAT teams. This research examines a self‐proclaimed community policing department's past and current use of its PPU using participant‐observation, in‐depth interviews, and quantitative data. The quantitative data document the increased use of the unit and the trend toward normalizing it into mainstay policing functions. The qualitative data reveal several cultural themes unique to these types of units, including a pronounced militaristic culture, a preoccupation with danger, a high level of pleasure from engaging in paramilitary activities, and an active construction of PPU's status as the “elite” police.

Improved Understanding and Control of Nosocomial Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus: Are We Overdoing It?

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the conceptual framework for controlling methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was relatively simple, straightforward, and aggressive. The MRSA problem was confined to large teaching institutions and caused extensive outbreaks with major associated morbidity. Nosocomial acquisition and transmission of the organism was assumed because communityacquired infection was rare, stringent isolation precautions to contain the patient and the organism were practiced widely, laboratories were inundated with hundreds of surveillance cultures labelled rule out MRSA, and patient and healthcare worker decontamination to eliminate the MRSA Marvins of the world was in vogue. This writer admits to being among a SWAT team of young investigators sent forth to stamp out MRSA in the hinterlands where salmon filled the rivers and streams. We even claimed some degree of success.1 Most of the salmon and salmon fishermen are now

Improved Understanding and Control of Nosocomial Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus: Are We Overdoing It?

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the conceptual framework for controlling methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was relatively simple, straightforward, and aggressive. The MRSA "problem" was confined to large teaching institutions and caused extensive outbreaks with major associated morbidity. Nosocomial acquisition and transmission of the organism was assumed because communityacquired infection was rare, stringent isolation precautions to contain the patient and the organism were practiced widely, laboratories were inundated with hundreds of surveillance cultures labelled "rule out MRSA," and patient and healthcare worker decontamination to eliminate the MRSA Marvins of the world was in vogue. This writer admits to being among a SWAT team of young investigators sent forth to stamp out MRSA in the hinterlands where salmon filled the rivers and streams. We even claimed some degree of success.1 Most of the salmon and salmon fishermen are now

SWAT team approach to ventricular assistance

In 1986, the Cardiovascular Research Institute in Sion, Switzerland, created a flying bridge-to-cardiac transplantation team. This team, consisting of two physicians, a physicist, a biomedical engineer, and two intensive care nurses, has participated in 23 bridges to cardiac transplantation in 11 cardiovascular surgery centers in Europe. The cardiac function of all patients was 100% supported by paracorporeal pneumatic biventricular Pierce-Donachy devices. Twenty of the 23 patients have had transplantation, and 11 are alive and well. The bridge-to-cardiac transplantation team, which travels with a transportable driver and the ventricle sets, supervises the bridged patients 24 hours a day until cardiac transplantation is performed.

A Swat Team for Urban Forestry

Municipal arborists are often limited in effectiveness because they do not know how to organize and use a small but effective network of influential citizens as a support group. Such a group is more useful than the usual "citizens' shade tree organizations" which are hard to maintain and mobilize. An effective support group would probably include municipal activists from the following categories: lawyers, public relations people, corporate leaders, university tree experts, media people, city engineer (if possible), wealthy citizens, and legislators or city council members. This urban forestry "SWAT Team" is not easy to collect, and the potential members require careful cultivation, but it can provide substantial, efficient, and speedy assistance in dealing with budget, labor, environmental, media, and citizen problems faced by the municipal arborist.

Staph Aureus and Corynebacterium Pyogenes Mastitis in a Free Stall Dairy

After sitting through so many mastitis lectures, one easily gets the impression that all practitioners who talk about mastitis really do is sit around doodling the time away at their desks with their nose in the latest journal until that fateful moment when the phone rings. On the other end of the line is a dairyperson in distress (vapid DAPID), calling all your expertise out to solve a mastitis problem. At that moment you mobilize, just like the SWAT team, grabbing your detco recorder, flowmeter, culture tubes and CMT paddle as you fly out the door and proceed code 3 to the scene of the crime.
 In real life the scenario goes more like this. You have just finished palpating 50 or 60 head with 2 more herds to go. The office has just called on the radio and asked if you could pick up an OB on the way. They report that the calf should be ready to come out because its tail has been showing for 2 days already. As you are hurriedly washing off your boots preparing to roar off in search of "the aroma", your dairyman casually asks, "Say doc, have you got anything good for mastitis?"

A SWAT Team for Nuclear Accidents

A SWAT Team for Nuclear Accidents

Jabberwocky Genes

J'ABBERWOCKY genes MICHAEL NEWMAN* A virus like a finger Is a bone widi protein coat, A dissonant dead ringer, A cellular sour note, That sometimes will malinger In eye, ear, nose, and throat, Depositing its stinger To get genetic goat. A class called retrovirus Is culpable in tumors; Like gossips they hot-wire us Wim metastatic rumors; Some rapidly retire us, While others are late bloomers That patiendy enmire us In neoplastic humors. A viroid, on the other hand, Must use alternate means; It has no coat, you understand, Comes nude to all its scenes: A couple of hundred nucleotides That don't amount to beans— And yet they ravage plant insides With Jabberwocky Genes Whose nonsense somehow multiplies In cytoplasmic slime, In ways this poem signifies With replicating rhyme: Beware die bushy-stump disease! Sequester your tomatoes!»Address: 302 West 12th Street, New York, New York 10014. Permission to reprint may be obtained only from the author. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 26, 1 ¦ Autumn 1982 | 127 The idiot has got the keys That spindle small potatoes: The tumblers are a mystery, But viroids have their ways, Perhaps learned at dawn of history, When life began its days: Vested in this invention, An evolutional honeybee, Does it, sarcling, mock convention With a pirated skeleton key? How does it do its damage? With a host-cell replicase Manganeasily unspecific Like DNA polymerase? Or does this RNA cousin Of the father of the Flu Cannibalize host RNA In molecular make-do? Does it steal a methyl-G credit card At ribosomal cash-machines? Does it catch the system off its guard And filter through its screens? A Joker, when a Wild Card, Can pass for Kings and Queens: Apparendy it isn't hard With Jabberwocky Genes. (further provenance: the Joker as Jabberwocky Jingle) Now take the foolishjingle That now and dien awakes Your myelin a-tingle With the sentiment it fakes; Like a singing swinging single, Entered in beefcake sweepstakes, Is the prion, meant to mingle With molecular mistakes. But those jingles can be jilted By a dose of Beethoven, Which obviates what's stilted In the sheathes of myelin: If the jingle-weed is wilted 128 I Michael Newman · Jabberwocky Genes By its more developed kin, Can a psychic soil be quilted To resist its material twin? Half a step from the Perfect Fifth interval Is the Devil's Dissonance, A sound like a shriek in a hospital, A deviant dervish askance— Do you think if Old Nick grew that half-inch Lucifer would accrue back to God, The scorpion turn to a chaffinch, And Finn rise again from his sod? Can music be immunological Against the jingle disease? Or is the hold just psychological, Just tones locked in a traumatic freeze? Are sequences locked in memory As tangible as Sin? Is an insult to harmony How material growtfis begin? (the forensic padiology of die gene) Were oncogenes put diere to stop us When our number became Legion, And a hypertonic cacophony Dominated die boundary region, With the virus a kind of a monitor Of stress on die design, A phosphokinetic Paul Revere That knocks on Tyrosine Till membrane proteins, once serene Magistrates of osmotic procession, Now muddle die ionic scene, Detuning die tonic succession? Yes, oncogenes are a self-destruct That's built in the molecular level, Set to go off at a critically massive Tritone dissonance of the Devil. Pythagoras set us a proportionate Norm By intervals of material strings, He knew of the Golden Mean of form And the spiral die triangle sings; Perhaps in this loop of feedback Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 26, 1 ¦ Autumn 1982 | 129 Is a clue to what Golden Rules mean: What we do unto die atmosphere, Environment does to the gene: It's known among statisticians That statistical aberrations Are curbed by endogenous mechanisms For die good of more grand orchestrations, The way immunological SWAT teams Counter toxic concentrations, The way dead wood is weeded from forests: Via terminal-mite infestations. They've finally found an answer To one question frequendy posed: How do viruses cause cancer? When will die case be closed? When will die Prosecution Of accused...

One Answer to Terrorism

At 4:15 on the rainy afternoon of February 3, 1975, a San Diego Sheriff's Department SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team mistakenly shot and killed fifteen-year-old Leland Phelps in Oceanside, California. The boy was being held hostage by a barricaded sniper. Seconds after Phelps was shot his captor, an out-of-work twenty-year-old carpenter, took his own life. A large gathering of spectators had pressed in to watch the drama. Many who saw what happened, and many others who later analyzed it on the basis of reports, blamed the police for the outcome. There is a widespread feeling that the police themselves created the situation, spawning circumstances of confusion and fear from which, in the language of law enforcement, “fatal force” was the logical result.