“Drug War Police Tactics Endanger Innocent Citizens”

That is the charge brought by Cato Institute analyst Radley Balko in his latest FoxNews.com column about the use of military-style SWAT teams against non-violent drug offenders, mirroring the conclusions he made in his recently released study called “Overkill:The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America“.

I’m currently reading through the case studies of botched drug raids that appear as an appendix to “Overkill” and hope to give a more detailed reaction to the complete 97-page study in a week or two.

But based on my reading of the report so far, I’d 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.

And unfortunately, as he notes in his article, there is no immediate sign of this worrying trend being arrested.

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