CATO Institute – by Radley Balko
Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing.
Description:
Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.
These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.
This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.
About the Author
Radley Balko is a policy analyst for the Cato Institute specializing in vice and civil liberties issues. He is a columnist forFoxNews.com and has been published in Time magazine, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Forbes the National Post, Worth, Reason, and several other publications. Balko has also appeared on CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, NPR, and MSNBC.
http://store.cato.org/reports/overkill-rise-paramilitary-police-raids-america
“And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.”
There was a time, maybe back in the ’80′s, that I was totally behind the various police departments, there to serve and protect law abiding citizens.
Now, when I hear of one going down “in the line of duty”, there’s a sense of satisfaction. A SWAT team member is icing on the cake.
I’m waiting for the day when a whole SWAT team is ambushed and taken out by a couple of innocent Constitutionalists who are defending their property with righteous might and tactical savvy.
“Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing.”
Screw that! It’s already disappeared. Americans don’t own their homes anymore. The banks and the homeowners associations do and it’s their castle and according to them, he has NO RIGHT to defend it from unlawful intruders and can enter or take it from him at any time. Hence, the forced evictions by military police and so on, even if you are dying of cancer. It’s a sick and sad world.
I hate to say it, but this is what Americans begged for because the TV convinced them drugs and crime were out of control. The original excuse for these tactics was that too many people were flushing drugs down the toilet when cops knocked on the door to execute a search warrant, so doors had to be kicked in during surprise raids. Now your door can be kicked in for not paying your overdue fees on library books.
And no one complained, because the TV also convinced them that civil rights only protected criminals, and that we needed to “get tough on crime” if we wanted to live in a civilized society. Now all of the real crime is committed by agents of the government, and you’re going to have to do the fighting if you ever want to live in a civilized society again.
But God save the almighty TV. Most Americans can’t imagine life without the thing, and they stare at it for hours every day just to make sure they remain brainwashed, never learn anything important, and can’t read anything more complicated than a comic book.