And why they are bad as a general rule.
Even if police always got the right house and every raid were performed flawlessly (and that’s obviously not the case), the image of police dressed as soldiers routinely breaking into private homes to serve warrants for non-violent crimes is one we ought to find disturbing. At one time we did. There’s an old Cold War saying, “Democracy means that when there’s a knock at the door at 3am, it’s probably the milkman.” Masked government agents dressed in black barging into private homes in the middle of the night was once an image we associated with totalitarian states. We seem to be troublingly comfortable with it, now.–emphasis added
Indeed we seem to like the fact that police officers are armed with machine guns, tasers, databases, and can enter our homes on even the flimsiest of evidence.
Radley Balko continues to cover “wrong door no-knock raids” and police militarization here.
