This 12-minute video shows students how the Watts uprising, the Black Panthers and the racial discontent of the 1960s caused the Los Angeles Police Department to create the nation’s first SWAT team. Once established at the LAPD, and made famous by a popular TV show, the highly militarized SWAT approach to policing proliferated before being repurposed in the 1980s as a key weapon in the War on Drugs. The video provides students with an opportunity to connect a modern controversy, the debate over militarized policing, with a specific historical cause, and understand historical causation and how modern issues have historical origins. The video is useful as a way to flash forward while covering the 1960s to demonstrate how the increasingly militant civil rights movement of the late 1960s created effects we are still feeling today. It could also be paired with a unit on 21st century problems with historical roots in the 1960s.