FeedsSafety worries prompt SWAT purchase
Officers with the Westland Police Department will soon be safer during dangerous situations due to a new armored vehicle purchased with forfeited drug money.
According to Westland Police Chief James Ridener, the team is currently using a decommissioned military transport vehicle with more than 100,000 miles on it that the department purchased used more than a decade ago. It’s a vehicle, he suggested, that is starting to show its age.
“The van we’re using now, we tried to deploy it and the door fell off,” he said. “DPS (Department of Public Safety) had to weld it back on for us.”
He said that police department officials have been working with the city administration for about a year to determine how and with what the timeworn vehicle could be replaced and to iron out the details.
On Monday, Westland City Council members unanimously approved the purchase of an $114,113 armored rapid deployment SWAT vehicle from Red Holman GMC in Westland through the Oakland County Cooperative Program.
“There was no general fund money used—it was all drug forfeiture money,” he said. “The bad guys got to pay for it.”
State law allows law enforcement agencies opportunities to take possession of anything used or intended to be used to facilitate drug dealing as part of related arrests.
“We’re definitely excited about the opportunity to purchase a state of the art vehicle for our tactical response unit,” said Westland Mayor Bill Wild.
The new vehicle, which can carry up to 12 people, is used to protect officers during both SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) related incidents and during narcotics related interactions, such as drug raids.
“It is armored to defeat rifle rounds,” he said.
Ridener said that he hopes that the department will be able to take possession of the specially made vehicle around November. Once they do, however, he said that he expects the vehicle will be pressed into service regularly.
“We’ll use it probably every week for narcotics,” he said.
The members of the department have already had an opportunity to put a demonstration vehicle through its paces, he said, to insure that it would meet the needs of the department before any money changed hands.
“We used it for a couple of weeks,” he said. “Everybody liked it.”
One of the primary benefits of the new vehicle is safety. Should a situation turn ugly, Ridener said that the new vehicle would also make it significantly easier to safely extract wounded officers from the scene.
“They could drive into the shooting and retrieve a fallen officer,” said Wild.
According to Ridener, it’s a possibility that took center stage recently after a suspect shot two police officers in Capac last week. The transport will also offer officers a chance to get in the vehicle from either side as well as from the rear.
