Videodrome is Motherboard’s weekly look at the weird old archival footage lurking around the web. Check out old posts here.It’s Friday, which means it’s party time, right? Only problem is, sometimes you’re sitting there sucking back a ‘grita, with Buffett playing at the volume it should be at, and the police come and smash down the door like you’re some two-bit meth dealer. I know, I know, we’ve all dealt with it, but have you ever wondered exactly what techniques The Man is trained to use to riff your chill? Well, this 1974 video from the Department of the Treasury — the home of the Secret Service — is the perfect retro guide to house raids.It doesn’t take but a few seconds for this video to get rocking and rolling. First, you’ve got the chubby old guy in a suit waving around his dinky revolver, and then you’ve got a room full of goobers running around like they’ve never stuffed a suitcase full of money before. It’s all shot through a glaringly-70s tweed lens, and it makes you wonder if the officers watching it in training classes weren’t just laughing their asses off.But the video is also poignant because of that very first cop: He’s raiding a house wearing nothing but a suit and a small pistol. In the 40 years since, the police have become almost infinitely more militarized, and now police agencies won’t even deliver a warrant without a SWAT team. The CATO Institute has an excellent tracker for botched raids, but there’s no better evidence of how gung-ho cops are now than the 2008 raid in which a SWAT team raided their Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home and killed his two dogs in a totally botched drug raid.How did we get here? Well, most of the credit (or blame, depending on who you are) for bringing military weapons and tactics to the police can be given to former LAPD chief Darryl Gates and his operations in South Central, like Operation Hammer. Of course, the LAPD turning hard core is what caused one Compton high school kid to basically invent gangsta rap, but that’s a whole separate topic we’ll have to explore some time soon. In any case, let’s all enjoy the quaint old days when cops didn’t look like storm troopers.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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