SWAT

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.

Swat or SWAT may refer to:

• SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), a paramilitary unit of law-enforcement agencies
  • Swatting, a hoax intended to provoke a response from SWAT or other emergency personnel