U.S. Drug War Plague: Paramilitary Police Raids

U.S. Drug War Plague: Paramilitary Police Raids

As many as 40,000 times per year, American homes are raided by paramilitary police forces dressed and armed as soldiers, according to a shocking new study by the libertarian Cato Institute.

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"These raids ... 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" is the name of the study. The book-length document provides a legal, historical, and policy background of how this disaster evolved. Balko examines the dangers of "no-knock" and "short-notice" raids, explains how such confrontational tactics cause violence rather than lessening risks, and offers recommendations for reform.

"Overkill" includes 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.

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Cato has also released 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

(Source: Cato Institute press release. The full text of "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America" is available online: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476 )