As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been reading through Cato Institute analyst Radley Balko’s new paper, “Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America“, on the ever increasing use of heavily armed SWAT teams against non-violent drug suspects.
Now that I’ve had a more detailed read I do have one criticism, but overall I am sticking with my initial impression of Overkill, namely that
“I agree with the thrust of what he is saying, namely that paramilitary tactics are only applicable to extraordinary, violent crimes in civil society - such as hostage-taking and bank robberies - as well as battlegrounds overseas.
Thanks to federal funding, encouragement and support, the militarisation of drug prosecutions is not only unnecessarily endangering and adding turmoil to the lives of countless citizens but is in many cases counter-productive in its aims of preventing violence.”
The thing that struck me the most about the paper is not just the way in which innocent lives were cruelly disrupted and trampled upon, but the cold, casual and even deliberate disregard the police in question had for their victims; it was as if they were seen as enemy soldiers on a foreign battleground. Most people instinctively apologise for bumping into someone on the street, but certain law enforcement officers couldn’t even bring themselves to offer a similar, nominal, apology - let alone a more substantial one - for inflicting on what is for some people the most traumatic moment of their lives.
Whether this conduct is due to the militaristic-like atmosphere they have been put into, or not, it still has the unfortunate effect of tarring many of their good and honest colleagues with the same rough brush, creating more distrust of law enforcement. A good dose of humility mixed in with personal restitution by these rogue cops wouldn’t be inappropriate in many cases.
The paper is not all doom and gloom though, offering some good policy reform suggestions as well as highlighting some police departments, albeit a small minority, who have recognised the inherent problems with using SWAT teams on non-violent suspects.
The only major criticism I have, which Radley Balko has himself recognised, is that an interactive map on the Cato Institute website accompanying the release of Overkill provides excessive ammunition for critics of the report to dismiss it in its entirety. Created ostensibly to showing how, for “isolated incidents”, these botched SWAT raids have taken place all over the country at regular intervals, because it only lists a sampling of botched SWAT-style raids in the hundreds out of a total estimated 40,000 - botched or not - raids, critics can then use the map as an easy stick to hit his report with.
Having said that, I think he has offered an effective rebuttal to these points in Overkill itself and subsequently on his blog. What critics have missed is that not only are these kinds of raids on non-violent offenders inappropriate in a civil society, they dont even seem to be necessary for the police themselves, at times even being counterproductive when it comes to diminishing violence and improving conviction rates.
Finally, just in case you’ve downloaded it and balked at its length - it comes in at just under 100 pages - the text is split into two columns and is broken up into three separate sections:
- 42 pages of background, arguments and policy recommendations
- 40 pages of around 150 case studies of botched raids
- 15 pages of footnotes
