Who Would Have Thought! The Department Of Education Apparently Has A SWAT Team

Today's post comes from the ABC television affiliate in Stockton, California, Channel 10. They recently ran a news story, both on their news broadcast and also on their website. The article covered a SWAT team raid against a home in Stockton earlier in June. Details from the news report include the following:

• At 6:00 am in early June, a SWAT team broke down the front door of homeowner Kenneth Wright.
• Mr. Wright does not have a criminal record and had no idea why a SWAT team would break down his door.
• As the SWAT team rushed through the broken down door, they encountered a non-aggressive Mr. Wright in his boxer shorts who they quickly grabbed and took him outside his home.
• The SWAT team also woke up his three kids, aged 3, 7, and 11 and placed all four of them in the back seat of a police car, with Mr. Wright bound in handcuffs..
• The SWAT team then commenced to search the entire house.
• Mr. Wright and his kids were left in the car for six hours, according to the news report.
• The SWAT team left without accomplishing their objective.

Sounds like pretty serious stuff. It must have been a worthwhile, serious matter since there were 15 Federal SWAT team members involved along with a single Stockton police car. What could they have been looking for, especially since Mr. Wright has no criminal past?

Apparently, this raid was not about drugs. It was not about prostitution. It was not about terrorists. It was not about murders. The SWAT team was looking for Mr. Wright's estranged wife for... delinquent student loans. That is right. The U.S. Department has "a law enforcement branch of Federal agents that carry out search warrants and investigations" according to the news report.

What's next, a Seal team for Headstart? An artillery unit for the Department of Agriculture? What ever possessed the political class to allow SWAT teams to track down student loan holders who do not pay their bills? Would it not be better to just have a U.S. marshal or two arrest the people who have not paid their loans? Are these perpetrators too violent to be handled by ordinary U.S. marshals, so violent that a full SWAT team needs to be deployed?

Trust me, I have no problem with bringing justice to those people that abuse taxpayer dollars but isn' this a little overkill? And really a little too over the top for the situation:

• Given they were looking for Mr. Wright's estranged wife, why did they handcuff Mr. Wright and keep him in a hot police car for six hours? I would have thought that one of the 15 SWAT team members would have noticed that Mr. Wright is not a female.
• Why did it take so long to search the house? If you look at the TV broadcast, Mr. Wright does not live in a mansion, it looks like a typical suburban home. Searching the house for the person they were looking for should have taken 15 minutes, tops.
• Why was child services not involved to care for the young kids for six hours rather than throw them in a police car?
• If the SWAT team was worried that Mr. Wright would contact and warn his estranged wife, why not take him to a secure location rather than sticking him in a police car for six hours in his underwear with handcuffs on?

But a another major atrocity, besides the obvious infringement of Mr. Wright's civil rights and the stomping of his freedom, was the issue of taxpayer cost. Let's do a little math:

1. Given that the team arrived at the house at 6:00 am and kept Mr. Wright under custody for six hours, it is not a stretch to assume that the entire day was spent on this one event.
2. At five days a week, 52 weeks in a year, each SWAT team member works 260 days a year.
3. Without any data, I am assuming that the average SWAT team member costs $50,000 a year to the taxpayer.
4. Thus, one day out of 260 days and $50,000 a year in salary cost equates to a daily taxpayer expense of about $192 per person or almost $3,000 for the entire SWAT team to spend an entire day on site.
5. This assumes that the Department of education had a Stockton area SWAT team. If not, then the cost of transporting the SWAT team to Stockton for this notorious non-payer of student loans would have been much higher.

This outrageously high cost raises the question: how much did Mr. Wright's estranged wife owe the government? Must have been a lot since it cost the taxpayers almost $3,000 to come up empty, excluding any travel costs. Thus, it will cost even more to bring her to justice. Unless she owes hundreds of thousands of dollars, I question the logic of using heavily armed troops to raid a private citizen's home.

I also question the justification of having SWAT teams under the jurisdiction and direction of the Department of Education. There has to be a better way to apprehend non-violent student loan holders who do not pay back their loans. How inefficient is it to use 15 member SWAT teams to track down what is probably thousands of delinquent loan payers? No way this is cost efficient.

But should we expect anything more from the political class? Infringement of rights, endangering American lives, excessive costs, and inferior results. This could describe any of  thousands government operations. This is the type of inefficiency that Step 1 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would directly address.

In the process of reducing Federal government spending by 10% a year for five years, Step 1 would do a ground up, zero based audit of all government functions. This massive audit's intention would be to identify waste, duplication, inefficiency, and outright abuse of taxpayer dollars. If we do not get spending and waste under control, and the insanity of allowing the  Department of Education to have SWAT teams, our freedom and our economic future is doomed.

That is why Step 1 is so critical to execute now. Who knows what the next step of insanity might be if we do not act now; could we possibly see the equipping the Health and Human Services Department with Apache attack helicopters to track down those Americans who ignore Obama Care's requirement that every American purchase health insurance? Seems far fetched but ten minutes ago didn't Department of Education SWAT teams also sound far fetched?



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