Close Quarter Battle - S01:E07 - S.W.A.T.

In 1968, a new form of military policing was being developed in a rural area north of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Police Department sent an observer to this unit, and he, in turn, took this knowledge back to the LAPD. This contributed to the development of the department’s first Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) team. This CQB episode takes an historical journey to examine how this incident affected and changed police tactics around the world. Using CQB’s trademark “sub-second” analysis, the program also looks at how police S.W.A.T. teams train, plan and equip themselves for the challenges of urban combat. The dramatization of a 1980s S.W.A.T. siege of a gang safe-house demonstrates the complicated challenge of protecting innocent people who might be caught in the line of fi re, as well as the specifics of the squad’s training regimen, how they communicated, and the special equipment they used.