Monday, 18 October 2010

Botched Paramilitary Raids In The USA- An Epidemic of "Isolated Incidents"


View Original Map and Database 


The Cato Institute has produced a map of botched paramilitary police raids since 2006 in conjunction with the publication of Overkill by Radley Balko


"Americans have long maintained that a mans home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform. "

We are starting to get a pretty similar sort of pattern arising here-

2 comments:

john in cheshire said...

As I've said before, armed police terrify me. And until the individual armed police person is made to account for his / her actions, then there will be more needless deaths at their hands. If I have to be confronted with an armed person, I'd rather it was a soldier; at least they are trained to obey orders, and aren't as trigger-happy as the police. The needless killing of the barrister; Mr Saunders (i think) is a case in point.

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