Story one is a tale of a militarized police raid on a house thought to contain nonviolent criminals, none of whom were actually there. The video demonstrates that the difference between a "knock" and "no knock" raid has largely collapsed.
Ross says he didn’t hear the police announcement until after one officer had already attempted to kick in the door. Had that officer been successful, there’s a good chance that Ross, the police officer, or both would be dead. The police department would then have inevitably argued that Ross should have known that they were law enforcement. But you can’t simultaneously argue that these violent, volatile tactics are necessary to take suspects by surprise and that the same suspects you’re taking by surprise should have known all along that they were being raided by police. Well you can, and police do, and judges and prosecutors usually support them. But the arguments don’t logically coexist.Story two is a follow-up story on Kelo v. New London, showing that -- after the government's seizing and destroying of people's homes, for 'economic development' -- nothing ever got built.
Story three is another story about the closures and fines of children's lemonade stands.
Of the four stories, the one about Scalia is a report on an academic conference at which he offered some provocative but theoretical thoughts; the Kelo piece is about a historic injustice, but one ten years old; and the lemonade piece is about a small number of overweening idiots in government across the country. Only the piece about the police raid points to a current, urgent problem.
Sure looks awful on Drudge, though.
15 comments:
With respect to the polic raid, like Cass said, it's just some guys abusing their authority. Happens all the time.
What do you expect anybody to do about it?
And yeah, that's sarcasm.
Eric, when someone's trying to make the case that X is a systemic problem, evidence (not anecdotes) ought to be part of that case.
In a country of over 300 million people, you can find all sorts of stories: female teachers sexually abusing boys, women being forced to pay alimony to deadbeat husbands, etc. All these things happen, but are they systemic problems?
What takes them from anecdotes to solid evidence is some evidence of relative frequency. You can make up arguments I've never put forward ("Nothing should be done about X"), but my point is - and has always been - that scattered anecdotes do not constitute proof that Amerikkka is a police state.
Produce evidence of relative frequency and you have an argument. But saying "A BAD THING HAPPENED IN ONE OF THE 50 STATES" doesn't effectively make that argument.
I have never argued that any of these anecdotes should be ignored.
OK, let's look at the linked article. This statement makes no sense whatsoever and is a perfect example of spurious "arguments by anecdote":
First, note that the police say they knocked and announced themselves before the raid. The knock and announce requirement has a long history in U.S. and English common law. Its purpose was to give the occupants of a home the opportunity to avoid property damage and unnecessary violence by giving them time to come to the door and let the police in peacefully. As you can see from the video, the knock and announce today is largely a formality.
Looking at one (arguably incorrectly executed) knock and announce and concluding that it proves ANYTHING general about "the knock and announce of today" is just criminally sloppy writing. You can't extrapolate from one incident to all/most incidents without more evidence. Just doesn't stand up to common sense.
This, OTOH, is a valid point:
Finally, note that police department officials say they “do not have a written policy governing how search warrants are executed.” That’s inexcusable.
He's right. That is inexcusable.
Finally, this is just plain funny (albeit unintentionally so):
... it’s concerning that this would even be up for debate.
In a real police state, it wouldn't be up for debate. The very fact that Balko has been writing these articles for as long as I can remember and mainstream papers like the Post publish them directly undercuts the claim that Amerikkkkkkkka the Horrible is a police state. Kind of like Keith Olbermann shrieking about the Bush administration chilling free speech and suppressing criticism from the world's biggest microphone whilst getting paid big bucks to do what he claims is no longer possible :p
Clearly, the police/government AREN'T suppressing debate about their tactics. How ignorant of them.
This is no way to run a police state :p
I think the reason the Washington Post took Balko on is that they're convinced it's happening often enough that it'll prove a major national story worth the investment in a full-time journalist focused on it.
But there's a certain point at which the gears slip. The individual case may be an anecdote, but it's the anecdotes in which real people die. As Stalin's famous joke implied, when you make the jump from anecdotes to statistics you lose the emotional impact that can drive changes.
Of course, those statistics can be broken down into lots of anecdotes. For me, the problem is real because one of those killed was a very decent young man I happened to know. He wasn't a statistic: the number of young eye-doctors killed by SWAT teams for gambling on football games at Applebees on the weekend has to be pretty close to 1. But he's still dead, and he didn't deserve to be, and it's the police's aggressive takedown procedures that are solely responsible for his death. They could have sent him a letter and he'd have showed up at court to face the charges and pay the fines. Instead, they came at him with guns drawn, and one of them put a .45 slug in his chest because of a negligent discharge.
Again, I've never argued that no knock raids should be ignored.
Or that they're not a real problem.
Or that real people aren't being killed in some of them (though that's still quite rare).
Or that the police never overreact.
Or that police never overreact and kill people needlessly.
Or even that anecdotes should be ignored.
To use an analogy that ought make sense to you, Grim, I can quote all sorts of anecdotal evidence that people in the US military break rules and commit crimes - even serious ones. But those anecdotes don't prove there's a systematic problem with the military being out of control, or that the military is any more dangerous than the rest of the populace.
I've read truly horrifying stories about women being raped in the military (violent rape). But the existence of those anecdotes doesn't prove that the military has a "rape problem" (or at least they don't establish that military folks are more given to violent rape than civilians).
These are not trivial distinctions. They're important ones.
So what would you accept as "proof" we have a "problem" with the no-knock raids? Or asset forfeiture?
Admittedly each single incident can be called an anecdote. So exactly how many do we string together to create a "problem"?
Here is my criteria - does the trend line go up, down, or is it steady in relation to the population? From what I have read, and I do not have the data handy, the use of no knock swat raids has been in a steady escalation over the last few years.
So what would you accept as "proof" we have a "problem" with the no-knock raids? Or asset forfeiture?
That's the right question to ask, I think. I'd want to see the same sort of numbers I'd want for the military rape brouhaha. Not just part of the data, IOW, and not just selected instances where something went tragically wrong.
How many no knock raids are executed each year? Is that number going up or down? Why?
What percentage (and actual numbers) of no knock raids are wrongly executed: wrong house, used in situations that didn't warrant them, etc?
What percentage (and actual numbers) of such raids resulted in injury/shooting/death? Again, what were the circumstances? (you can have a breakdown: criminal shot first, police shot first, etc. - not saying these are the right categories, but some way to classify shootings.
There's absolutely no way to tell how serious the problem is by simply reading a few upsetting news stories. I don't buy that if even one person is wrongly hurt/scared per year, the entire tactic must be abolished forever. By that yardstick, we wouldn't have all sorts of things that societies judge are worth continuing even when they sometimes cause problems or even kill someone.
Police carrying guns at all falls right into this category. So does private gun ownership, for that matter. Is "even one death" or "even 10 deaths" per year a reasonable standard for allowable harm in a nation of over 300 million people?
It might be, if every single one was wrong executed. But I rather doubt that. No one writes about the ones that are executed rightly or safely.
Interestingly enough, my son was interested in going out for SWAT when he graduated from the academy. He ended up deciding against it simply b/c his department never uses their SWAT guys. That's something Mr. Balko won't be writing about anytime soon :p
They sit around all the time and on the extremely rare occasions when the dept, needs someone, they use the state of GA teams.
I want context. I want complete numbers. I don't trust one sided coverage of anything. The media re notorious for one sided coverage. Believe it or not, I'm actually highly skeptical of the value of no knock raids but when people start talking about us living in a police state, they lose me right away.
We don't live in a police state or even anything close to a police state. Defining that term down does nothing to clarify matters.
How many people
Another great question: what is the relative %/number of bad shootings in no knock raids vs. other types of law enforcement tactics?
How can we tell if they're worse or more dangerous without any comparison to the alternatives?
Executing a no-knock raid for credit card fraud?
You got your head where the sun don't shine.
The mere fact that the cops tried to remove all the cameras pretty much demonstrates they knew they were doing something wrong.
There's an interactive map here; http://www.cato.org/raidmap
(Doesn't look like it's been updated past 2011)
But I don't think you're actually interested in any numbers.
The wikipedia page on no knock raids quotes a source saying that the number of warrants issued for them has gone from 3,000 a year in 1981 to 50,000 a year in 2005.
Something's going on.
The US is a police state--you just haven't run afoul of it yet. It's not a very good police state (yet), or maybe just fairly benign, (As I originally said),
but when the machinery of government, be it the local police, the DEA, the TSA, the NSA, the IRS does what it wants like this, yeah, you're in a police state.
The statistical approach doesn't appeal to me, Cass, as concerns this problem. The problem for me is one of the right relationship between a free people and the state, including especially those forces the state brings to bear on that people. To ask whether it very often leads to death seems to me to be to miss the point: the point is, ought the state to crash into your home with a battering ram and guns drawn, ready to kill you at the slightest sign of resistance to being thrown into chains?
I'm persuadable that there are a few very limited cases when the answer to that question is "yes," that it's perfectly appropriate. Should a suspected terrorist cell be hiding in an apartment, expected to render severe resistance -- perhaps even endangering a whole building or city block -- well, sure, I can see why we'd employ this kind of force.
But for most cases, it's not right for the government to think of treating members of a free people in this way. It's a problem not because it frequently leads to tragic results, in other words, but because it is itself an affront.
So when Eric says that America is a police state, what you hear him saying isn't the same thing that I hear him saying. I hear him saying that the American government has come to think of its police powers being appropriately deployed against the citizenry in a certain militarized way, regularly, ordinarily, 50,000 times a year.
Now there are 300 million Americans, so 50,000 times a year means that there's only one such raid for every 6,000 people per year. Say they all come off safely, with no one killed. The problem is that it changes the character of the people to be regularly subject to the threat of such raids. It changes the character of the relationship between the state and the citizen.
We've had a lot of such changes lately, and perhaps this is not the worst one -- compared with the changes wrought by Obamacare, or by immigration law, or in other ways. Still, it strikes me as a problem even if all of those raids come off without a hitch.
As regards the military rape analogy, I see your point, but do you see mine? The military doesn't have a "rape problem" from my perspective not because the rate of rape is actually lower than among the civilian population; rather, it doesn't because the military's culture is dead set against it and trains against it consistently, and enforces the standards as it is able.
If it did otherwise, it might have a rape problem even if there were no rapes (or very few). If it trained men not to worry about consent and take what they wanted, to think of women as vehicles for satisfying their appetites, that would be a problem even if the men actually didn't follow through on it and no rapes were occurring.
Now a consequentalist might argue that, actually, if rape is undesirable and those outcomes were actual we might really prefer to start training men to think of women as vehicles for satisfying their appetites -- the consequence of lower actual outcomes of rape would serve as adequate justification. But I'm not a consequentialist (and neither are you, clearly). I think it's important to be right on principles, not just outcomes -- indeed, principles more than outcomes.
And it gets even better here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/02/05/troubling-new-details-about-the-violent-police-raid-in-iowa/
The cops use the swat team because they know one of the people in the house has a gun permit.
Eric:
First, please stop putting words (or arguments) in my mouth. Secondly, you're running a whole lot of questions together that ought to be separated. I actually agree with Grim that one of them is, "Should the police be allowed to do this at all?"
It's a great question and it deserves a serious answer. I suspect that answer is, "Only in very rare and strictly defined circumstances".
Another question would be (in relation to any one incident): Were there rules in place? Were the rules even followed? Using situations where the rules weren't followed to argue that a rule is bad per se makes no sense unless it's accompanied by some sort of evidence that the rule can't be followed.
Another question would be, "What other tactics might the police use in these situations? How effective are they? How dangerous/likely to be abused are they?"
You insist on suggesting that I approve of these raids, but that requires you to ignore what I've actually said.
Finally to Grim's point:
when Eric says that America is a police state, what you hear him saying isn't the same thing that I hear him saying. I hear him saying that the American government has come to think of its police powers being appropriately deployed against the citizenry in a certain militarized way, regularly, ordinarily, 50,000 times a year.
First, "The American government" isn't a single entity. We're talking about literally thousands of local and municipal police depts. governed by over 50 different sets of state statutes. It's ludicrous to talk of "the American govt." as though there were any sort of coordinated effort going on. Many police depts don't even have SWAT forces.
I suppose it's possible to have a debate where one party arbitrarily redefines something with a fairly well understood meaning to allow them to apply it wrongly. But a police state has a well defined meaning and that meaning does NOT fit this scenario at all.
Feminists do this all the time. They like to say, "All sex is rape", but to do that they need to redefine rape as PIV sex. That's NOT the meaning of rape, and unilaterally redefining the term makes debate all but impossible. Or they say, "Disparate impact is discrimination". But calling one thing another, doesn't make them the same.
So I'm going to continue to object to the misuse of the term "police state".
Finally, telling me that I'm not interested in numbers after I've explicitly said I AM interested in numbers is needlessly insulting. You've just accused me of bad faith - another tactic that makes reasonable conversation difficult. Numbers require interpretation and careful analysis. I have not taken the time to perform that analysis so I would never claim I understood the numbers until I had actually put in the work required (as I have many times on my own site).
That's different from "not being interested" in something I already said would be exactly how I would evaluate some of your arguments. I've carefully avoided attacking you personally, and would appreciate reciprocal restraint.
I think Grim clarifies nicely- I've expressed some issues with the 'police state' assertion in the past here- but I'm geting more convinced as I consider it more deeply.
I think perhaps an important point is this-
"Another question would be (in relation to any one incident): Were there rules in place? Were the rules even followed? Using situations where the rules weren't followed to argue that a rule is bad per se makes no sense unless it's accompanied by some sort of evidence that the rule can't be followed."
Who makes those rules? Who decides they are proper and just? The police using SWAT raids more and more is what you'd expect in an increasingly regulated state- one where the deference isn't to the citizen, but to the government agency and it's power to regulate. I see it in city planing, where legislation can sometimes be unclear, or not account for certain circumstances, and the planning department chooses to interpret it a certain way, and that's how they execute their regulatory power, whether I like it or not, no matter how logical my argument against that interpretation in that case is. I have virtually no effective appellate opportunity- the head of the planning department has handed down a memo, and that's the interpretation, period. In theory, I could go to the City Council, but they have no interest in me or the others like me- small operators in their world. Under these sorts of systems, we all suffer. It takes me backto a statement Grim once made about police and the difference between the LEO model vs. the Peace Officer model. One is about what is right, the other about regulatory power.
Government too big, too powerful, too 'one size fits all'.
What Doug said.
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