Click pic to interact with the interactive map
For those who think we post too many bad cop stories, I have the greatest respect for the good cops who do a hard, necessary job. But there are just too many violent, sadistic, crooked, and in many of these cases, incompetents among their ranks and the good ones should want to get rid of them. One would think every one of you do, too.
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.
When viewing the map, click on a balloon to read what happened on that raid.
The vast majority of these raids are a direct result of “The War On Drugs”.
I think they took that “war” thing a little to literally.
LEGALIZE
It’s the only solution.
29,
Benjamin, you are absolutely right. See what happens when you actually talk about the subject, Perry?
I have a problem with the philosophy behind the paramilitary attitude, I am not trying to draw a line and say “beyond here, no SWAT”. We need to examine how we are using police and their role in our society. The paramilitary ATTITUDE is what I have problems with, the equipment is a symptom, not the disease. Bad management is the real problem. The politicians are wrong here more than the individual cops.
You see, Perry, if we had started to actually discuss the topic instead of arguing about why we should be talking about it, you would have discovered that I do not blame cops per se, I blame managers, who in the case of the raid where the child Benjamin refers to was killed put improperly-trained cops in situations with wildly incorrect force postures with press embedded. That is a real problem and it needs to be discussed.
In the examples I gave, I live in NYC, where those situations demonstrate the need for better situational training.
We should be talking about better funding and training for cops, and changing the management mindset on how they should be deployed in a community.
But if every time the topic comes up, if cops and their supporters block discussion for fear it will turn into cop bashing, then the atmosphere actually becomes more condusive to the bashing they fear as there is no way for the discussion to become healthy debate.