Door-Busting Drug Raids Leave a Trail of Blood | Hacker News Reader

Door-Busting Drug Raids Leave a Trail of Blood

nytimes.com

79 pointsgerbilly30 comments

No-knock raids kill police. They kill civilians. They kill animals and babies. They are the worst, most dangerous way to serve a warrant, according to police themselves. Yet these same police continue to use them because preventing someone flushing their weed down the toilet is more important than killing a baby in a crib. As long as our society accepts this justification, babies, people of all kinds, and animals will be killed and property destroyed. Police will get richer. Meanwhile, in WA, OR, CO, AK, etc. people go to the store and buy their weed peacefully without incident in a nice, safe, comfortable environment that is a tax boon to the states and better for all of society.

So the difference is just exactly how you want to make that extra money, and who in society makes it. As a society we can choose to go with the status quo, empowering police departments across the country while they shoot and kill more and more innocent people to enrich themselves, or we can finally legalize something that people are going to do anyway and use that money to fund our schools and hospitals to better society. The sad part is that most people are so closed-minded on the subject, they only see the first option. Then they get mad when babies get killed when that's a direct result of a policy they supported and voted for.

I don't think this is about weed. It's about a structure that's set up with all the wrong incentives. Police departments get to seize assets related to drug offenses with no due process. Departments are being flooded with money to buy military resources, with the provision that they use them within the year. And once they have the resources there's a whole industry of ex-military businesses designed to train departments in SWAT-like techniques.

When your local police department trains on equipment meant for executing urban warfare, is it any wonder that the wars come to our cities?

Oh, without a doubt weed is just an excuse to feed the rubes. I should've been more clear. I agree with your thoughts on armaments buildup in police departments. It's no wonder at all.

Radley Balko's book "Rise of the Warrior Cop" goes into these issues in depth. He looks at the history of how the war on drugs, among other things, has contributed to the rise in military equipment and tactics being used at the local level.

There are a shocking number of no-knock raids which have resulted in death of not only officers and some offenders, but innocent people who's homes were raided based on wrong information and in some cases the police literally getting the address wrong.

http://amzn.to/2mlNWxj

These need to be banned. No, I don't want to hear your pet exception. Loss of evidence isn't enough to justify the state murdering people.

> These need to be banned.

It seems unlikely that the state will voluntarily cease this activity, as it achieves the quintessential goal of the state of instilling fear and creating the impression that the state lives in a legal and moral framework divorced from and above the common law.

In libertarian circles, we often hear people advocate responding with violent self-defense. While this is perhaps more likely, if done with frequently and vigor, to result in meaningful change, it also continues to utilize a "might-makes-right" approach to political change, which I find even more abhorrent than the legislative process.

So how do we achieve this ban peacefully?

One way might be to make the money for these settlements come partially or entirely from police union treasuries. Right now cops don't give a shit if someone is awarded millions in a wrongful death suit because, hey, it's not like they're paying for it-- that cost is all on the taxpayer. If it actually hit them in the wallet they might be a little more careful.

Perhaps police should be licensed like professionals (doctors / lawyers) and be required to have malpractice insurance. Premiums could be based on their prior conduct. Gross misconduct would result in them losing their right to work in law enforcement. I imagine that would solve the problem.

> Perhaps police should be licensed like professionals (doctors / lawyers) and be required to have malpractice insurance.

Or just not covered by a near-blanket immunity from liability. If they were exposed to personal liability, you wouldn't need to expressly require liability insurance, they'd see the need quickly. And insurers would probably take care of the equivalence of licensing requirements by the factors that controlled insurance pricing.

Police officers are exposed to personal liability more often than you'd think. But police unions almost universally require that the municipality indemnify or otherwise insure their officers for any personal liability.

It's similar to D&O (director and officer) insurance that every corporation carries. Directors are exposed to substantial personal liability from stockholder suits, but all that cost is just passed through to the corporations.

For many, many reasons I don't think professional liability insurance is a good comparison. Suffice is to say that being a cop is not a traditional professional occupation. The incentives just don't line up the same way. It's like arguing we could make the internet safer by making programmers personally liable for their bugs. There's some superficial logic to it, but only when you ignore the reality of the labor market and how it's structured.

You've made a somewhat strange comparison:

> [advocating that police officers be personally liable for their conduct is like] arguing we could make the internet safer by making programmers personally liable for their bugs.

What I like about this comparison: It treats police brutality as a systemic civic problem, like bugs in software that lead to global insecurity on the internet. Police brutality, like internet fragility, is a problem that threatens (at least nearly) everyone. Also similar is that people are reluctant to recognize the peripheral damage - police brutality decreases the quality of government and capacity for civic engagement for everyone, not just the victims.

Things I don't like about this comparison: The idea of personal liability for programmers because bugs because internet insecurity is an incredible abstraction. Compared to, for example, police officers who literally break down people's doors and shoot them, it's pretty hard to see the similarity in terms of the connection. Also: a company that decides to deploy a product that contains bugs has an opportunity to audit the software in order to prevent that. There's really no similarity in that respect.

These cops know better - nobody thinks that breaking down someone's door in the middle of the night and terrorizing their family is proper behavior for an adult in a free society. But they do it anyway. This is malicious, horrific conduct and it's a stretch to say that liability is improper for the perpetrators.

It actually works. Police in more armed areas of the country don't as often engage in BS (as apposed to justified) no-knock warrants because it's not worth risking lives over the chance that someone hears a bang at the door and grabs their gun to defend their family.

For me? Leave. When you're fighting for the right not to have your door broken down and be murdered, it's time to leave.

> So how do we achieve this ban peacefully?

Move outside the U.S.? Other developed nations seem to have solved the problem. I can only conclude that our approach to policing and criminal justice in the U.S. reflects a moral defect in the American people. I'm not sure it's fixable.

More importantly, who wants to spend their life trying (and almost certainly failing) to fix it, while being cursed by the very people you try to help? When the prescription for a society is a Christ-like figure, that society is in deep shit.

> In libertarian circles, we often hear people advocate responding with violent self-defense.

It's not worth it. You'd probably get yourself and your family killed. The police has military grade equipment, SWAT teams have military training.

> Innocents have died in attacks on wrong addresses, including a 7-year-old girl in Detroit, and collaterally as the police pursued other residents, among them a 68-year-old grandfather in Framingham, Mass. Stray bullets have whizzed through neighboring homes, and in dozens of instances the victims of police gunfire have included the family dog.

I think about this almost daily. Sometimes I seriously have trouble falling asleep because I'm afraid that the next wrong door will be mine.

Am I the only one?

>I think about this almost daily. Sometimes I seriously have trouble falling asleep because I'm afraid that the next wrong door will be mine.

>Am I the only one?

No, but it isn't a very rational fear. Do you have trouble sleeping because you're scared of driving your car? How about choking on your food when you eat? When was the last time you tested your Carbon Monoxide detector? Ever plug anything into an electric outlet? How long each day are you staying seated?

There are a hundred mundane things you likely do daily - each of them coming with a risk of death.

Most people don't factor the risks of the more mundane things they do and they actively overestimate the risks of other, less mundane events.

That depends on your definition of rational. Clearly, it's not the greatest risk, not even remotely close to that. But there are a lot of interesting cognitive biases at play here, and some of those exist for a reason.

For instance: it doesn't actually matter which risk is greatest; it's rational to fear that which is most avoidable. After all, that's where your attention is best spent. And similarly, we're social creatures and benefit from that hugely: and it's rational to spend attention not just on risks that you personally can avoid, but on those you can avoid with your community. And it's rational to spend extra attention to avoid in particular those risks which are exploitable by competitors: i.e. violence. After all, those risks (unlike "natural" risks) have a tendency to snowball. And then of course you have the fact that this kind of extreme violence poses risks to the community at large by undermining the trust a community needs to exist in the first place.

Humanity may well be one of the most peaceful of comparable species (in terms of probability of serious injury by others of the same species), but part of that may plausibly be precisely because we're particularly sensitive to violent abuse. Is that irrational if it grants such huge benefits? If it is, is any empathy rational?

In any case; I don't think the analysis can be quite as simple as risks ranked by probability of dying.

At minimum, pointing out irrationality doesn't necessarily help much to alleviate the fear.

>At minimum, pointing out irrationality doesn't necessarily help much to alleviate the fear.

The only way to get over an emotional fear is to recognize that the emotional fear is at odds with reality. This is ignoring psychological fears of which there may be nothing you can do. For psychological fears I am referring to very specific phobias that may or may not be the result of a traumatic experience.

People scared of clowns usually had a bad experience as a child. My uncle swapped my Barney VHS with Stephen King's IT. For a long time I was scared of clowns. But it just isn't rational for me to be scared of clowns and I eventually got over that phobia.

Some people are terrified of the color yellow. There's no rhyme or reason - they just are. I'm sure there are various treatments ("exposure" seems to be a common one, similar to PTSD treatments) but some people will just have to live with their phobias playing a large and disruptive part of their lives.

Being so terrified of police, terrorists, people throwing pennies off of buildings, etc. are simply things I cannot empathize with. If I was worried about every freak accident in life I'd never leave my house (but what if a meteorite struck my house? [0])

[0] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/02/130220-russi...

Putting police and terrorists in the same category of threat is as irrational as fearing terrorists.

There are two million people in prison in the USA. Given the state of our justice system, it's hard to say that those who are selected for this treatment is very much less random than a lottery.

It's a very reasonable concern.

You're missing the key point of my message.

It's not rational to expect fear to be an unbiased estimator of risk. If you regard fear as a motivation, then it would be irrational to ignore factors other than risk.

And that means that merely stating that things are not very risky is not a valid basis for concluding that it is irrational to fear them.

I think that, in general, I do weigh threats to my life from the state (ie, threats to my liberty) more heavily, and I think that such a grading curve is necessary for freedom to prosper.

...and it's not just accidents. What they did to @aaronsw they can do to any of us.

But interestingly, I do actually sometimes have trouble sleeping for the other reasons you mentioned. I live in a school bus, and driving it is, naturally, a source of anxiety.

I also carry a multimeter and always check before we plug-in at campgrounds (this after finding some pretty bad wiring).

But all in all, your point is super sound.

This is why I want to move out into the desert, somewhere far out, where I can see anyone coming for miles. Sadly, cops do whatever they want in America, because Americans are brainwashed to think everyone is a criminal, or if the cops are involved, they were somehow asking for it.

Rather than run away from the problem let's get together and fix it for everyone.

While this is a nice sentiment, I'd be happy to hear any real productive advice you might have. I've been fighting this and the war on drugs for a while. As time goes on, sadly I feel like we're losing more ground than we're gaining.

Well basically anything which says "let's just give up" is just not helpful. There has been progress.

I'm not saying move out of the US. I'm saying I'd like more warning when anyone sneaks up on me. Who's giving up?

Never forget that the police work for elected officials that you vote for and put in office. The best way to hold them accountable is at the voting booth (or better yet, run for office yourself).

If you have an example of a politician who is against this kind of thing, please tell us. Seriously, I'd like to see how they describe their position.

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