Imagine a nation in which hooded, unidentified paramilitary units can storm the houses of citizens with no warning in the dead of night, setting off flash grenades and slaying innocent occupants, all with virtually no repercussions and no oversight.
Welcome to modern America.
Radley Balko's Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, released by Cato in July, takes an appalling, in-depth look at the entire system that has metastasized as civilian police forces nationwide feed off the frenzy and funding stirred up over the ludicrously declared "War on Drugs." SWAT teams, sealed warrants, reliance on unreliable confidential informants ("snitches"), Defense Department materiel handed off to local police departments ... all have created a convergence of a system and a mindset in which units more suited to the streets of Baghdad than Main Street USA have stripped away the rights of Americans to claims their homes as their castles.
More than 40,000 military-style police raids are carried out each year, according to Balko, and they are "needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping." Neighbors, visitors, pets, children, even other police officers, have been killed in the rain of fire resulting from these adrenaline-fueled, over-weaponed botched raids.
This study traces the rise of infatuation with SWAT units, which today is largely used to serve drug warrants dozens of times a day across the USA, to L.A. police chief Daryl Gates' use of them and the Reagan administration's official declaration that the drug war was a part of "national security," thus opening the doors to Defense Department giveaways and discounts of weaponry to towns such as Jasper, Florida (population 2,000), which has a police force of seven and hasn't had a murder in 14 years.
Along with the military mindset that is planted in small-town America with such giveaways, usual civilian police procedures are being eroded, such as adherence to habeas corpus, evidence gathering and assumptions of innocence. Civil review boards that try to investigate wrongful deaths (mistaken addresses account for an alarming number of raids going bad), for example, are stymied by sealed and often discarded warrants, so that citizens trying to hold an agency accountable are limited to investigating whether proper procedure was followed in the actual raid - and not whether the target was a legitimate one or not.
The practice of overusing these SWAT teams is self-reinforcing because despite the cheap initial start-up usually funded by the feds, the units are expensive to maintain. As a result, more and more raids are carried out, many of them of questionable legitimacy and execution, in order to justify the teams' existence and to feed the paramilitary beast through a policy known as "civic asset forfeiture," in which a suspect's private property is seized and kept -- even if no charges are ever filed.
Since the World Trade Center attacks, local agencies have appealed to citizen fears of terrorist strikes to justify the existence of these paramilitary units (in one cited case, they were used to confront high school students loitering outside a high school; in another odd response call, they were dispatched to talk someone out of suicide). But the question needs to be asked: How, exactly, would an overarmed SWAT team have prevented 9/11? Or the Oklahoma City bombing?
The most alarming aspect that Balko's study addresses in the encroaching militarization of civilian police forces is the shift from viewing citizens as those who need to be protected and served to "enemies" who need to be overpowered and annihilated for the good of the mission. And when alarmed citizens, rousted in the dead of night attempt to defend themselves, a harrowing double standard awaits them, according to the study:
To make matters worse, while courts have been extremely deferential to police who fire on innocent civilians, they've been far less forgiving of citizens - even completely innocent citizens - who fire at police who mistakenly raided their homes.
.... The dichotomy is troubling. Victims of botched paramilitary raids are expected to show remarkable poise and composure, exercise good judgment, and hold their fire, even as teams of armed assailants are swarming their homes. Victims of paramilitary raids have no training in how to act or what to expect as a raid transpires. The police officers who conduct the raids, on the other hand, are usually required to undergo at least an hour of training per month.
Yet civilians who fire back at police officers who wrongly conduct forced-entry raids on their homes are frequently prosecuted, whereas police who erroneously fire at innocents during botched raids are almost never disciplined, let alone fired or charged with a crime. Civilians are expected to exhibit extraordinary judgment. Egregious mistakes by raiding police officers are readily forgiven.
(Balko's dogged investigative reporting on Cory Maye, which was pursued on his blog, The Agitator, stemmed from initial research for this report - and covers just such a case of self-defense referenced in the blockquote above. A full-length news feature on Maye's plight is scheduled, Balko tells me, for the October issue of Reason, which should be on newsstands soon.)
Overkill offers several suggestions for reform after giving its detailed overview, some addressing the judicial issuance of warrants, some focusing on accountability, all with the understanding that the true solution -- undeclaring the ridiculous "War on Drugs" - while being the most effective answer is surely not the most politically viable.
Meanwhile, it's up to those of us who prize our civil liberties to educate ourselves, vociferously object to these intrustions and become locally and nationally involved in rolling back this militarizing creep in our domestic law enforcement agencies. Reading all of Overkill (available as a PDF on the Cato site or as a volume of its own that can be ordered) is the best beginning I can imagine.