SWAT/Paramilitarization

Two more SWAT raids gone bad leave a Detroit girl dead by police gunfire and a Georgia grandmother hospitalized with a heart attack. It's time to start thinking about how we can rein-in paramilitarized policing.

Policing the drug laws is supposed to be dangerous work, but the numbers year after year don't seem to bear that out. And too often when police do get killed enforcing prohibition, the very aggressive tactics that they claim keep them safe are the ones that do them in. The human (and canine) targets of aggressive raids pay the price, too.

Police in Columbia, Missouri, have endured all kinds of criticism in the week since a video of one of their SWAT raids went viral. This week, they issued new policies regarding SWAT raids. It's a start, but only a start.

Another SWAT raid over pot, another dead dog, another traumatized family. But this one was caught on videotape, and now the outrage is spreading across the land.

America's war on drugs -- or, more precisely, suspected drug users or sellers -- claimed two more lives late last week, as police conducting drug raids in Memphis and South Florida shot and killed two people in their own homes. In both cases, police said the homeowners were armed.

Those SWAT cops really shouldn't have shot the mayor's dogs. Last year, a raid gone bad led to ground-breaking Maryland legislation to begin reining-in aggressive SWAT teams. Now, the author of that bill is back with another. It's about time.

What a year! A lot happened in 2009 when it comes to drug policy, much of it good. Last issue we reviewed the international developments. This last week of the year, we take a look at what we see as the ten most important domestic drug policy stories the year brought us.

If you're a cop and you slug an innocent bystander in the face for no reason during a drug raid, it's going to cost your employer big time. At least that's what happened a couple of weeks ago in Minneapolis.

A Prince Georges County, Maryland, SWAT team raided a mayor's house last summer, shot his two dogs, and manhandled the mayor and his mother-in-law because they thought they were marijuana traffickers. They weren't, and the cops have acknowledged as much. Now the county sheriff has investigated the incident and concluded his boys did nothing wrong. The mayor disagrees -- and he's going to court.

The killing of Tarika Wilson, an unarmed mother holding her child, and the maiming of that child, is an inevitable consequences of the overuse of SWAT teams and the growing paramilitarization of the drug war.