[Infowarrior] - Cato report on overuse of SWAT

[Richard Forno]

(c/o D)

<http://www.cato.org/new/pressrelease.php?id=42>

July 17, 2006

Time to Curb Rise in Deadly Paramilitary Police Raids
Cato study and interactive map document bungled SWAT-style raids

WASHINGTON -- The last 25 years have seen a 1,300 percent increase in the
number of paramilitary raids on American homes.  The vast majority of these
are to serve routine drug warrants, including for offenses as trivial as
marijuana possession, according to a new study by the Cato Institute.

"These raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting
nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the
terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping," writes Cato
policy analyst Radley Balko, "usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary
units dressed not as peace officers, but as soldiers."

"Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America" provides a
legal, historical, and policy background explaining the trend.  Balko offers
a critique of "no-knock" and "short-notice" raids, explains how such
confrontational tactics cause violence rather than lessening risks, and
offers recommendations for reform.

The paper has an appendix of nearly 150 examples of documented botched
raids, including: the case of Alberto Sepulveda, an 11-year-old boy shot in
the head during a bungled raid in Modesto, California; Clayton Helriggle, a
23-year-old shot and killed when an inexperienced SWAT team raided a house
of college-aged men guilty of recreational marijuana use; Sal Culosi, an
optometrist in Fairfax, Virginia mistakenly killed by a SWAT team that had
come to his home to arrest him for betting on sports games; and Mississippi
police officer Ron Jones, shot and killed when Cory Maye, a man asleep at
home with his daughter and who had no criminal record, mistook Jones' raid
team for criminal intruders.

Balko has found more than three dozen examples of completely innocent people
killed in mistaken raids, twenty cases of nonviolent offenders who've been
killed, and more than a dozen cases of police officers killed by suspects or
mistakenly targeted civilians who thought the police were criminal
intruders.

Accompanying Balko's report, Cato is releasing also an interactive Google
Maps application that plots nearly 300 examples of mistaken raids since the
mid-1980s.  Users can zoom in to street level, and sort raids by their end
result (death of an innocent, death of a police officer, etc.), and the year
of the raid. The map is available at <http://www.cato.org/raidmap>.

Balko concludes that these policing tactics "bring unnecessary violence and
provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty only of
misdemeanors, they terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the
wrong residence, and they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and
injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children,
bystanders, and innocent suspects."

White Paper: <http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476>
 

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