Police/Suspect Altercations

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.

Calderon's war on drugs is closing in on the 20,000 dead figure, according to a running tally by the Mexico City newspaper El Universal. And the prohibition-related killing continues unabated.

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

If you want to reduce "drug-related" violence, sending in more cops and cracking down harder is exactly the wrong thing to do, a review of 20 years worth of studies has concluded.

The Mexico Drug War Update was on vacation last week, but now it's back. Weirdly enough, 420 people were killed in prohibition-related violence there in the past two weeks. Nothing to celebrate about that.

The body count in Mexico's prohibition related violence this week topped 19,000, as President Felipe Calderon's war on the so-called cartels continues to reap high levels of bloodshed.

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.