Special
Weapons
and
Tactics teams are police units in the United States that use specialized or military equipment and tactics. First created in the 1960s for
riot control or violent confrontations with gunmen, the number and usage of SWAT teams increased in the 1980s and 1990s during the
War on Drugs, and in the aftermath of the
September 11 attacks. In the United States today, SWAT teams are deployed 50,000-80,000 times every year, 80% of the time in order to serve search warrants, most often for narcotics. SWAT teams are increasingly equipped with military-type hardware and are trained to deploy against threats of
terrorism, for crowd control, and in situations beyond the capabilities of ordinary police, sometimes deemed "high-risk." Other countries have developed their own
paramilitary police units (PPUs) that are also described as or compared to SWAT police forces.
