Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Good grief. SWAT teams in the US are utterly out of control. It's one thing to have resources for the relatively rare armed robbery/hostage/mass shooter situation, to respond to an outbreak of violence; it's quite another to be using them for drug raids and other contexts where they initiate or are the sole cause of violence. This goes hand in hand with the confrontation-obsessed gun culture we have, in which a subset of gun owners dwell constantly on the omnipresent risks of crime and the need for elephant-grade stopping power, despite the clear long-term trend of falling crime.

The Cato institute has worked with journalist Radley Balko (who is the expert in this area) to produce a map of botched SWAT raids: http://www.cato.org/raidmap

I really see no other course for citizens other than to start attending public meetings and speaking up whenever public figures spout truisms about the safety of law enforcement officers being top priority. It's not top priority, that's why they get paid the big bucks - to put the safety of law-abiding citizens above their own.

>SWAT teams in the US are utterly out of control.

America is dominated by cults of violence, cults of death. Its military-industrial groups do nothing but produce death and destruction at the press of a button, and yet Americans do nothing about it.

This problem won't go away until the real issue is address: the utter lack of humility in your average public, and dire amounts of arrogance in the ruling elite. It is pure and utter know-best that makes this irreversible. Until people accept the humility for change, it doesn't happen...

The real problem is that the war on drugs if fantastically profitable for everyone involved: drug cartels, police, and for-profit prisons alike. Just look at the original criminalization of marijuana (and indeed the English adoption of the Mexican word used to invoke racist hatred and fear) which was basically spearheaded by Dow so they could sell their inferior synthetic substitutes for hemp.

Legalizing drugs would make all the violence go away over night, and let us spend the money directly on the social problems drugs cause (which obviously haven't been reduced in the least be criminalization).

> The Cato institute has worked with journalist Radley Balko (who is the expert in this area) to produce a map of botched SWAT raids: http://www.cato.org/raidmap

That's a really bad map. "Botched" is such an arbitrary term and it doesn't capture the way a perfectly executed raid will often damage lives. ("we only terrorized their kids! standard procedure.")

The data is pretty obviously woefully incomplete. Does anyone actually believe that that there have been only 13 "unnecessary raids on doctors or sick people" in the last 30 years? Those are the ones the author knows about. It's an infographic that hides as much as it reveals.

That's a fascinating map. One of the interesting things it shows is that the density of botched raids is not correlated to population density.

What that suggests is that the raids are the results of authories in some areas not knowing what they're doing while authorities in other areas do.

Also note how many raids are the result of a single informant. I was browsing raids in my area and most of them were from a single informant; in one case even an informant who had a known antagonistic relationship with the subject of the raid.

What's disturbing is how many of them are based on a single informant and also look like not the slightest effort was made to verify that information. Literally picking up a guy off the street for some minor crime, telling him you'll let him go for a bigger fish, getting an address from him, and sending in the goons without another thought. If it's a big enough crime to justify a SWAT raid, then surely it's big enough for just a little bit of investigation.

It seems dangerous in two ways. Both that most of these tips are probably for completely innocent people who may now be subject to extreme levels of violence with no justification, and that once in a while, one of them might be for something much worse than they thought, putting the officers themselves in a lot of unnecessary danger because they didn't do any investigation.

If you are a small(ish) town cop and you get fancy new military gear then you're going to want to use it no matter if you need to or not. People like playing with toys.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I like the map but it is worth noting the default view displays 30 years worth of incidents.

>the security apparatus at every level of jurisdiction are utterly out of control

ftfy

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