That Other War

Rodney Balko writes of no-knock raids and three recent deaths. Here are some excerpts:

Today, actual war weaponry, armor, and tactics are as much a part of the war on drugs as Reagan's rhetoric implied back when the drug war was young. And law enforcement officials shrug off the deaths of innocents as if they were the same sort of collateral damage you'd find on a battlefield...

Though these highly volatile raids are often justified on the premise that drug dealers are heavily armed, a subsequent survey of no-knock raids by the Lima News last year found that most raids in that city failed to yield any weapons at all. In fact, a third of the raids conducted by the Lima police department between 2001 and 2008 turned up no contraband—drugs or guns...

It's possible that all three officers in these cases were justified in discharging their weapons. This method of drug war policing—bringing paramilitary-style units to bear on suspects in a highly volatile, confrontational manner—creates dangerous, high-stakes scenarios where both cop and suspect have to make split-second decisions under unimaginable circumstances (though it's unfortunate that people on the receiving end of these tactics aren't given the same consideration and leniency the cops are). There's no margin for error. It's the tactics that are the problem. Neither Ayers, Wilson, nor Guizan were violent people. Nor were any of them the target of a criminal investigation. Had the police used less violent methods in each incident, all three would still be alive today...

Nearly a quarter century after Reagan's Verdun speech, deployments of SWAT-teams and similar paramilitary police units into the homes of American citizens have increased from about 3,000 per year during Reagan's first term to around 50,000 annually today. The vast majority of these are to serve drug warrants, though we're now seeing them used for white collar crimes and to raid poker games, as well. America's police departments now sport military-grade weapons, vehicles, and armor. Each year, we get about a dozen cases like the three described above, plus a few dead cops and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of drug-war deaths involving less sympathetic victims. And it's as easy to obtain illicit drugs today as it was in 1982.