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Cato Dispatch for June 15, 2006

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(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

High Court Upholds 'No-Knock' Raids

"The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that police can use evidence collected with a warrant even if officers fail to knock before rushing into a home.  Justice Samuel Alito broke a 4-4 tie in siding with Detroit police, who called out their presence at a man's door then went inside three to five seconds later," the Associated Press reports.  "The case had tested previous court rulings that police armed with warrants generally must knock and announce themselves or they run afoul of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches."

Radley Balko, a Cato policy analyst and author of the upcoming Cato White Paper "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Drug Raids in America," says: "The Supreme Court's decision today in the case of Hudson v. Michigan is regrettable.  The rise of paramilitary-type police units conducting 'no-knock' raids on American citizens is a disturbing trend in domestic law enforcement.  Police excess, procedural errors, and reliance on 'confidential informants' of dubious character have caused hundreds of violent raids to be waged on completely innocent civilians.  Dozens of nonviolent offenders, bystanders, and innocents have been killed or injured as a result.  Because the courts have set the bar extremely high in allowing victims of botched raids to sue police officers and their superiors, the only real defense left against wholesale disregard for the rule requiring police to 'knock and announce' before entering private residences was to exclude evidence seized in illegal raids.  Today, the Supreme Court removed that defense.

"Because of today's decision we can expect to see an even more pronounced increase in the use of illegal, military-style no-knock raids.  And we can expect to see more innocent civilians wrongly targeted."

In "No SWAT," Balko writes that 'no-knock' raids are "often launched on tips from notoriously unreliable confidential informants. Rubber-stamp judges, dicey informants, and aggressive policing have thus given rise to the countless examples of 'wrong door' raids we read about in the news. In fact, there's a disturbingly long list of completely innocent people who've been killed in 'wrong door' raids. It's impossible to estimate just how many wrong-door raids occur. Police and prosecutors are notoriously inept at keeping track of their own mistakes, and victims of botched raids are often too terrified or fearful of retribution to come forward."

Senate Spending Spree

"The Senate is poised to send President Bush an emergency spending bill meeting his funding requests for America's two ongoing wars and aid to Gulf Coast hurricane victims," according to the Associated Press.  "The chamber is to vote Thursday on the $94.5 billion House-Senate compromise measure, the lion's share of which -- $66 billion -- is to support U.S. troops overseas through September.

"Still, there is increasing concern in Congress about the cost of the war in Iraq and the fact that the spending is kept on a set of loosely policed books kept separate from the rest of government operations. The bill would bring to almost $320 billion the tally for the campaign in Iraq and $89 billion for the one in Afghanistan.  The bill contains $3.7 billion for Louisiana flood control projects, and Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu and GOP colleague David Vitter are confident their state will receive $4.2 billion of $5.2 billion contained in the bill for direct grants to states. Louisiana plans to use its share to repair and rebuild housing stocks."

In the Cato book Downsizing the Federal Government, Chris Edwards, Cato's director of tax policy studies, writes that federal spending has soared under President George W. Bush, and Hurricane Katrina has made the federal budget situation even more desperate.  In his book, Edwards provides policymakers with solutions to the growing federal budget mess, identifying more than 100 federal programs that should be terminated, transferred to the states, or privatized in order to balance the budget and save hundreds of billions of dollars.  Downsizing the Federal Government also addresses the systematic causes of wasteful spending, and it overflows with examples of federal programs that are obsolete and mismanaged.

Emergency Room Diagnosis

"Emergency medical care in the United States is on the verge of collapse, with the nation's declining number of emergency rooms dangerously overcrowded and often unable to provide the expertise needed to treat seriously ill people in a safe and efficient manner," reports The Washington Post.  "That's the grim conclusion of three reports released [Wednesday] by the Institute of Medicine, the product of an extensive two-year look at emergency care."

"Long waits for treatment are epidemic, the reports said, with ambulances sometimes idling for hours to unload patients. Once in the ER, patients sometimes wait up to two days to be admitted to a hospital bed. As a system, U.S. emergency care lacks stability and the capacity to respond to large disasters or epidemics, according to the 25 experts who conducted the study. It provides care of variable and often unknown quality and depends on the willingness of doctors and hospitals to lose large amounts of money."

In the Cato book Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care, Arnold Kling, a Cato adjunct scholar, argues that the way we finance health care matches neither the needs of patients nor the way medicine is practiced.  The availability of "premium medicine," combined with patients who are insulated from costs, means Americans are not getting maximum value per dollar spent.  Using basic economic concepts, Kling demonstrates that a greater reliance on private saving and market innovation would eliminate waste, contain health care costs and improve the quality of care.

Kling also proposes gradually shifting responsibility for health care for the elderly away from taxpayers and back to the individual.

Greg Garner, editor, ggarner@cato.org