An Epidemic of “Isolated Incidents” <http://www.cato.org/raidmap/>
An interactive map of botched SWAT and paramilitary police raids, released in conjunction with the Cato policy paper “Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids,” by Radley Balko.
The war against (some) drugs is totally out of control. It leads to these increasingly frequent “dynamic” entries and no-knock search warrants (estimated to occur 40,000 times annually).
The war on (some) drugs has also made the US the foremost incarcerator of any industrialized nation, locking up its citizens at 5-8 times the rate of other countries. See “Incarceration Nation” at Freedom’s Phoenix.
“Contemporary public policy is based on nightstick ethics — the notion that anyone who possesses a badge is automatically morally superior to anyone who does not. The first principle of nightstick ethics is that someone who got whacked automatically deserved to be whacked, and every nightstick whacking is a triumph of good over evil. Thus, all that is necessary to maximize the amount of goodness in a society is to maximize the number of government officials with nightsticks, and to maximize the incentives to swing those nightsticks as often as possible.” — James Bovard, Freedom in Chains, ISBN 0-312-21441-3