Is it the media for playing it from the POV of the cops?

Is it politicians for predicting doomsday scenarios if we go soft in the WOD?

Is it something else?

You would think this problem would be relatively easy to solve if people wanted it solved. There is zero reason for cops to be doing these raids and there is no excuse for the sort of sloppyness that confuses young male drug dealers with elderly women. Either they were grossly negligent or they lied about their pre-raid investigation. All you have to do is start throwing these cops in jail and the raids will stop overnight.

A bit of well crafted publicity, hitting the airwaves and teh bloggers nationwide, might reel in those rouge judges.

I’m guessing 10 to 1 that the highest ranking LEO in the area is appointed, not elected too.

Unlike their informants, I’m much less likely to spend the money on anything illegal, at least.

I’m of the opinion that any such raids should be video and audiotaped with cameras and mics on every officer, so that there can’t be any doubt about what happened, when, and how.

And like Reynolds said on his blog – use sparingly, and (if not none) reduced immunity for screwups. There’s a time and a place for no-knock or announce-and-bust-in raids. The problem is they’re used for too many other times and places.

This point only rarely makes its way into discussions of the morality of this bloody outrageous horseshit, but it should.

Then, of course, there is the morality of the thing itself.

I was over it a long time ago: no power on earth can make me “respect” cops now. They’re despicable, precisely because they’re “only doing their jobs” (phrasing in popular defenses). They might have done their profession enormous honor by standing up against this sort of thing a long time ago, but they’ve gone a different way. And now, the work is attracting all the wrong sorts, for all the wrong reasons.

None of it is going anywhere good.

There’s also the issue that knock-announce tend to go like this:

knock lightly, count to 2, break in door.

Not really knock-announce, if you ask me.

The officers had a legal warrant, “knocked and announced” before they forced open the door and were justified in shooting once fired upon, he said.

I’m quickly losing what respect I have left for law enforcement.

The only thing I disagree with is the notion that drugs are winning this war. Nobody wins. Cops lose because they waste their time and blood killing and capturing people that shouldn’t be prosecution targets. Users lose because they have to become criminals to engage in largely harmless activities. Non-users lose because they’re the ones who get caught in the crossfire and they pay for all this death in loss of freedom, privacy and taxes. We all lose because drug hysteria fuels all kinds of junk science that is preventing us from finding out how harmful drugs are and more importantly stopping us from seeing if there are any benefits to be had.

The only ones who win are the politicians who use scare tactics as a campaign issue.