BY 7:30 ON THURSDAY MORNING, the capacious ground-floor convention center of the Oakland Marriott was filled with SWAT teams. Mostly men, mostly white, dressed in camouflage or black fatigues, they stood in groups of eight or ten, some eating pastries, others sticking to coffee and a dip of tobacco. A few wandered the expo hall, stopping by booths to test the feel of armored vests, boot knives, and sniper rifles, grab swag like grenade-shaped stress balls, or drop tickets into a box for a raffle of iPhone covers and pistols.
"Want to see the new toy?" a vendor asked a police officer in camo. He handed him a pamphlet for his company, Shield Defense Systems. "This will blind anyone for 10 minutes. Imagine, walk into a bar fight, blind everyone, then figure out what's going on. Some guys on drugs, you can put three slugs in their chest and it won't stop them. But blind him, and I guarantee you he'll calm down." The device attached to a gun and sent out a frequency that the vendor said temporarily scrambled its target's ocular fluid. The vendor turned to me—conspicuous for my lack of fatigues—and insisted the device caused no permanent damage (hence the name Z-Ro, as in "zero damage"), though he said it would probably make you nauseous. He expected it to be on the market this coming January.
The expo hall was just a warm-up to the main event: Starting at 5 a.m. on Saturday, 35 SWAT teams would compete in a two-day training exercise around the San Francisco Bay Area. The winning team would take home a trophy and the glory of having unseated the reigning SWAT champion—Berkeley, California.
Organizers of the conference, known as Urban Shield, said it was the largest first-responder training in the world; now in its eighth year, it has drawn teams from places as far-flung as Singapore, South Korea, Israel, and Bahrain. Each group would go through 35 tactical scenarios over 48 hours, with no breaks except the occasional catnap. An airplane was lined up for busting a gun smuggler, and a cargo ship would be seized by a terrorist after a make-believe earthquake. A "militant atheist extremist group" would take hostages at a church.
The event was paid for mostly by the Department of Homeland Security, but more than 100 corporations threw in money too, up to $25,000 each. In many of the scenarios, teams would try out the latest equipment on offer from Urban Shield's corporate sponsors—Verizon, Motorola, SIG Sauer. Many were military supply companies—FirstSpear, for example, was founded by former soldiers to make body armor and bandoliers for "US and allied warfighters." Here, they sold their stuff to cops. Then there were "platinum sponsors" like Uber, which gave police discount black-car rides for the weekend.
Urban Shield was started in 2007 by an Alameda County assistant sheriff named James Baker. In 2011, he told me, Homeland Security asked him to bring the event to other parts of the country, so he started a company, the Cytel Group, that would put on Urban Shield in Boston, Austin, and Dallas. "Urban Shield is a program that gets everybody working together" to respond to crises, he said. Baker's firm has also received $500,000 in state funds to write guidelines for SWAT teams, on things like how much gear each team is required to have. When I spoke to him, he was in Kenya, where he had been contracted by the State Department to organize an Urban Shield-like training.
For the vendors at Urban Shield, the task at hand was showing that these arsenals needed further beefing up. Semi-automatic rifles, for example, were once reserved mostly for SWAT teams and the military. Now they are standard squad car guns. At the Patriot Ordnance Factory booth, a vendor showed off the POF 308, a 14.5-inch military-style semi-automatic rifle that, he emphasized, fish and game officers used to shoot bears. An article in a gun magazine by a fish and game warden boasts that it's also handy for raiding pot farms and fighting "narcoterrorists." The vendor showed me the slightly smaller .223-caliber semi-automatics they'd started selling to the California Highway Patrol a year ago, for use in vehicle takedowns on the freeway. "The United States will forever be a nation of ready militia," the company's website said. For $5,100, it sold limited-edition, rotating bronze sculptures of a man in a tricorn hat, posed as though in battle, a sword on his belt, a tattered Colonial flag waving behind him, a POF semi-automatic rifle in his hand.
Farther down the hall, Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate was showcasing a drone. It not only captured video, but was designed to drop objects at specified GPS coordinates, "like Hunger Games, if you will," a representative from Robotics Research, DHS's contractor on the project, told me. Buzzing around her booth was a cylindrical, remote-controlled robot that sold for $1,100. If the robot was too big to fit into, say, a building's ventilation system, the police could make a smaller body on-site using a 3-D printer, then transfer the electric wiring.
The event felt surprisingly open at first—vendors talked to me freely and I could sit in on workshops—but by the second day, I started noticing cops whispering to each other while looking in my direction. Some came over to feel me out, asking what I thought of the term "militarization." One of them worked for the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a Homeland Security project to coordinate intelligence from local cops and federal agencies like the FBI. As I flipped through the counterterrorism handbook at his booth, he snatched it away. "That's for law enforcement only," he said. He told me he knew who I was.
THE NEXT MORNING, MY COLLEAGUE Prashanth Kamalakanthan and I showed up at the Port of Oakland for a Bay Bridge training exercise. Each team in the competition had been on the move for more than 24 hours. Teams had been taking a boat out into the bay and climbing up into the underbelly of the bridge to disrupt a fake IED. We were planning to film the exercise, but when we arrived, the site manager told us that wouldn't be possible. We could tag along, but no video.
I sighed, frustrated. When we'd applied for press passes, the sheriff's department had welcomed our presence. They even encouraged us to film, noting that video did a better job than photos to "depict the hard work and dedication displayed." But the day before we'd driven two hours to observe a raid on a pretend bomb factory only to be turned away, and now this. As we got ready to leave, we stopped by the trailer of HaloDrop, a robotics company that was displaying video screens, drones, and 3-D printers inside. They had intended to use their drones for recon on the bridge, but the sheriff's office was still waiting for FAA approval to fly drones in the county.
After filming an interview with the HaloDrop representative, we discussed our plans for the rest of the day. Should we watch South Korea do an assault on an armored truck, then head over to see the prison guards evict a right-wing sovereign citizens group? As we talked, the HaloDrop vendor approached. "I'm not getting a good feeling from you guys," he said. He warned us not to use the interview we'd just conducted. He had experience with the courts, he said. "I'll just leave it at that."
A few minutes later, a police officer came up to us in the parking lot and asked us to hand over our media badges. His captain had called, he said, and told him we had been filming at an unauthorized location. Where was that? I asked. "I don't know. I assume it's this site."
Hours later, I got ahold of Sergeant Nelson, the Urban Shield spokesman. He said we'd been kicked out for "taking photos of an unauthorized area."
"What area?" I asked.
"I don't know. I assume it was the Bay Bridge."
"We were not even near the Bay Bridge."
"I don't know what to tell you," he said.
It seemed pointless to argue that, in the United States, photographing a bridge does not require police authorization.
