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Thursday, February 2, 2012

Zombiefied Drug Trade by Bill Bonner

“But one night, I’m in bed and these guys in combat gear bust down the door and point rifles at me and my wife. It was a SWAT team of some sort. And then my son came home. They asked him what he was doing there. He told them he lived there. So they arrested him too…

“Of course, the door wasn’t even locked. They could have just turned the doorknob. But I guess that wouldn’t have been so exciting…

“They let me out of jail in a matter of hours…but only after signing a paper saying we wouldn’t sue the police for false arrest, etc. If I didn’t sign the paper they said the arrest would be on my son’s record for life…”


Zombiefied Drug Trade by Bill Bonner
Posted by at 1:19 PM
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Botched Paramilitary Police Raids: An Epidemic of "Isolated Incidents"

"If a widespread pattern of [knock-and-announce] violations were shown . . . there would be reason for grave concern." —Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in Hudson v. Michigan, June 15, 2006. An interactive map of botched SWAT and paramilitary police raids, released in conjunction with the Cato policy paper "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids," by Radley Balko. What does this map mean? How to use this map View Original Map and Database

Key

Death of an innocent. Death or injury of a police officer. Death of a nonviolent offender.
Raid on an innocent suspect. Other examples of paramilitary police excess. Unnecessary raids on doctors and sick people.
The proliferation of SWAT teams, police militarization, and the Drug War have given rise to a dramatic increase in the number of "no-knock" or "quick-knock" raids on suspected drug offenders. Because these raids are often conducted based on tips from notoriously unreliable confidential informants, police sometimes conduct SWAT-style raids on the wrong home, or on the homes of nonviolent, misdemeanor drug users. Such highly-volatile, overly confrontational tactics are bad enough when no one is hurt -- it's difficult to imagine the terror an innocent suspect or family faces when a SWAT team mistakenly breaks down their door in the middle of the night. But even more disturbing are the number of times such "wrong door" raids unnecessarily lead to the injury or death of suspects, bystanders, and police officers. Defenders of SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics say such incidents are isolated and rare. The map above aims to refute that notion.

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