SWAT/Paramilitarization

I have started blogging on Huffington Post. Check out my first post there, SWAT Raids: No One Is Safe. This is a basic statement laying out the case for why SWAT deployments are now out-of-control and need to be dramatically reined in. Sadly, even more outrageous and infuriating evidence of the need for SWAT to be reined in has already come out, as Scott's latest post here last night demonstrates. If you'd like to follow me on Huffington Post on a regular basis, visit my page there to make use one of the subscription options -- make sure to "like" the page on Facebook too. I will also be writing more editorials over the coming months in our own Drug War Chronicle newsletter; check out the latest one if you haven't already, here.

I don't know what else to say about this, except that it's just like all the other inexcusably brutal, incompetent and entirely unnecessary drug raid killings we've covered here:


As usual, the officers involved had every opportunity on earth not to shoot this woman's dog. She asked to put the dog in the bathroom and they said to go ahead and do that. Then, at some point, an officer went into the bathroom and killed the dog.

The guy they were looking for hadn’t even lived there in 12 years.

This FOX News segment with Judge Napolitano is a must-see that really captures how everyone is feeling about the raid in Missouri.

Radley Balko follows up with the best piece yet written about this epic drug war controversy. There is nothing more important to understand here than the fact that everything that took place in that video is standard operating procedure in the war on drugs. The vilification of drugs and drug users has given birth to a vicious recklessness that characterizes modern drug enforcement even, and sometimes especially, when police perfectly follow the law and the orders they're given.

Until that changes, nothing else ever will.

If you think our drug laws keep people safe, I would love to hear your thoughts on this video from a drug raid in Missouri:

You just watched as police shot 2 dogs in the presence of a small child, only to find nothing more than a small bag of marijuana. Incredibly, the parents were charged with child endangerment, not the police who fired guns inside the home.

The madness of prohibition just can't be illustrated much more powerfully than this. You have to see it with you own eyes to fully absorb the brutal callousness of the people who carry out these violent attacks on peaceful families. Even knowing as I do how often events like this take place, I still shuddered while witnessing the suspect's grief at discovering his dogs had been shot.

This is the vicious reality that the drug war's defenders can't and won't ever acknowledge. Blaming drugs for violence might be easy enough to do when it suits your agenda, but the role of our laws and their enforcers in creating horrific bloodshed is too real to be ignored.