Seconds later, officers battered in the front door and stormed inside, where they restrained the girl’s parents at gunpoint. One thing the officers did not find was evidence of a meth operation. The girl’s mother, Jackie Fasching, says that she would have told the officers this if they had given her a chance to open the door: “A simple knock on the door, and I would’ve let them in.”

Stories like the Faschings’ populate Rise of the Warrior Cop. These anecdotes, as well as data and interviews with police veterans, paint a troubling picture of law enforcement’s current mode: military guns, military vehicles, and military training; late-night, no-knock raids on all kinds of suspects; and every horrible-but-avoidable policing mistake you can think of, ranging from raiding the wrong house to accidentally burning a sleeping little girl to shooting a prostrate little boy in the head.

There are victims, like the Fasching family, who should have never been bothered; but there are also victims like the Whitworth family of Columbia, Missouri: a father, mother, and son who saw their pets—a pit bull and a corgi—shot during a late-night SWAT raid in which police were searching for marijuana. (And found it, a misdemeanor amount and pipe belonging to Mr. Whitworth, or more than enough to retroactively justify a raid meant to capture a trafficker.)

This is a history of sorts, but it is also a cri de coeur for policymakers to take up the tough work of reforming America’s police. And it’s hard to argue that reform isn’t needed. In 1980, domestic cops conducted roughly 3,000 paramilitary raids; in 2005, they conducted between 50,000 and 60,000. Eighty percent of towns with between 25,000 and 50,000 residents have SWAT teams; so, too, do the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Department of Education! SWAT teams have been used to break up charity poker games, shut down (legal) medical marijuana dispensaries operating in the open, even serve warrants on people suspected of committing student loan fraud.

This is not what SWAT was invented for. The late Chief Daryl Gates of the Los Angeles Police Department came up with the idea for a Special Weapons and Tactics team during the 1965 Watts riots, when armed rioters shot at under-armed and under-armored first responders. (He originally wanted to call it the Special Weapons Attack Team but was told he could not use the word “attack.”) Gates knew he had to see the idea to fruition after reading reports about the bloodbath Charles Whitman orchestrated from atop the University of Texas clock tower in August 1966.

The SWAT team was first deployed against a heavily fortified Black Panther hideout, and shortly thereafter against the Symbionese Liberation Army, who had holed up in South Los Angeles after a spree of murdering, bank-robbing, and kidnapping.

But something happened between May 17, 1974, when the LAPD used its SWAT team as a last-resort weapon against a psychopathic SLA, and this past summer, when the Wisconsin Department of National Resources used a SWAT team to raid the Society of St. Francis, a no-kill animal shelter that had taken in a baby deer. Apparently, keeping a wild animal without a proper license is illegal, so the SWAT team tranquilized the fawn, and then killed it. When asked by local media why the Department of Natural Resources didn’t just call the shelter and ask it to surrender the deer, an agency spokesman replied: “If a sheriff’s department is going in to do a search warrant on a drug bust, they don’t call them and ask them to voluntarily surrender their marijuana or whatever drug that they have before they show up.”