Police Raids

Dead kids, dead dogs, broken doors, broken windows... what can we do to rein in those SWAT teams? There are answers.

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.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon visited Washington this week, but on the ground back home, it was business as usual as prohibition-related violence continues to wrack the country.

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.

No letup in Mexico's prohibition-related violence this week, with another 208 killings to add to the toll.

The prohibition-related violence in Mexico took an ominous turn this week as supposed cartel armies attacked military bases in the north. And then there's the typical toll of dead cops, dead narcos, and dead civilians.

Things that make you go hmmm... In one incident in Mexico this week, gunmen attacked a convoy carrying two prisoners. In the aftermath, the two prisoners were turned over to the Mexican Marines. Next thing you know, one of them turns up dead on the side of a road and the other has gone missing. Hmmm.

Mexico's prohibition-related violence took nearly another 300 lives this past week, including three US citizens connected to the US consulate in bloody Ciudad Juárez. That pushes the death toll since President Calderon sent in the army little more than three years ago over the 18,000 mark.