Surely rhetoric plays a role in the way drug arrests are carried out, but there's another reason. During the hysteria over the crack epidemic in the 1980s, more and more money flooded police forces to create SWAT teams. This wasn't just in the big cities dealing with what was a really big problem. In small cities and towns across the country, police departments created elite militarized forces.

My first newspaper job was in a small town in Colorado in the late '90s that was as far from the problem as you could imagine. They had a SWAT team there, and rather than draw it down once everyone realized crack would never be a problem there, the police started deploying it for pot busts, domestic abuse cases - basically anything more than a traffic stop.