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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.

Are cops constitutional? In a 2001 article for the Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal, the legal scholar and civil liberties activist Roger Roots posed just that question. Roots, a fairly radical libertarian, believes that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t allow for police as they exist today. At the very least, he argues, police departments, powers and practices today violate the document’s spirit and intent. “Under the criminal justice model known to the framers, professional police officers were unknown,” Roots writes.

A reader who asks his name not be used writes about the drug raid video from Columbia, Missouri: I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan. ... Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call "cordon and knock": they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity...

This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Alvarez v. Smith, a challenge to the state of Illinois' Drug Asset Forfeiture Procedure Act (DAFPA). (Disclosure: the Reason Foundation, publisher of Reason.com, joined in an amicus brief in the case.) The six petitioners in Alvarez each had property seized by police who suspected the property had been involved in a drug crime. Three had their cars seized, three had cash taken. None of the six were served with a warrant, none of the six were charged with the crime. All perfectly legal, at least until now. ...(snip)... In...

http://www.reason.comhttp://www.reason.com/blog/show/130429.html Gotcha! Radley Balko | December 6, 2008, 1:28pm Like Mark Draughn, I've been somewhat skeptical of Barry Cooper, the former drug cop turned pitchman for how-to-beat-the-cops videos. He comes off as more of a huckster than a principled whistle-blower, which I think does the good ideas he stands for (police reform) more harm than good. But damn. I have to hand it to him. This might be one of the ballsiest moves I've ever seen. KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing...

snip... James Colomb spent the bulk of his career working in an oil field, then was injured. The family’s sole source of income now is his disability check. Ann Colomb—“Miss Ann” to those who know her—is a homemaker. It was from this unlikely setting, the United States alleged, that Ann Colomb and three of her four sons ran one of the largest crack cocaine operations in Louisiana. Over the course of a decade, prosecutors said, the Colombs bought $15 million in illicit drugs with a street value of more than $70 million... ...But in the ensuing months, the government’s case...

Earlier this month, the U.S. Justice Dept. asked seven U.S. attorneys across the country to step down from their positions. Critics of the Bush administration, including California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, have since questioned the move, noting that it seems to have been politically motivated. The Bush administration counters that these U.S. attorneys were fired because their priorities were out of line with administration policy. Specifically, the DOJ told the New York Times that the prosecutors were being replaced "based on a review of their performance in carrying out Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's violent crime priorities." According to the DOJ, one...

Sometime this spring, the Supreme Court will hand down its decision in the case of Hudson v. Michigan. At issue is whether or not police who used an illegal "no-knock" raid to enter a defendant's home can use the drugs they seized inside against the defendant at trial. To understand the importance of this case, some background is in order. As the name indicates, a "no-knock" raid occurs when police forcibly enter a private residence without first knocking and announcing that they're the police. The tactic is appropriate in a few limited situations, such as when hostages or fugitives are...

A favorite standby of pundits and columnists is to predict what developments will transpire over the next 12 months. I've decided to take the reductio ad absurdum approach, and predict what might happen in 2006 should the most disturbing trends of the last few years with respect to liberty and personal freedom continue unabated.

When Drunk Driving Deterrence Becomes Neo-Prohibition Wednesday, October 05, 2005 By Radley Balko This fall Mothers Against Drunk Driving marks its 25th anniversary. The organization certainly has much to celebrate: Deaths from drunk driving are down more than 35 percent since the early 1980s. We no longer chuckle at the bumbling drunk who can barely get his key into the ignition — we scorn him. Hopefully, we arrest him, too. Unfortunately, MADD has come to outlive and outgrow its original mission. By the mid-1990s, deaths from drunk driving began to level off, after 15 years of progress. The sensible conclusion...