March 19, 2017 10:49AM

NYT Report on Paramilitary Drug Raids

By Tim Lynch

The New York Times has a special investigative report about the militaristic drug raids that are now happening every day in the United States. 


Here is an excerpt:

As policing has militarized to fight a faltering war on drugs, few tactics have proved as dangerous as the use of forcible‐​entry raids to serve narcotics search warrants, which regularly introduce staggering levels of violence into missions that might be accomplished through patient stakeouts or simple knocks at the door.


Thousands of times a year, these “dynamic entry” raids exploit the element of surprise to effect seizures and arrests of neighborhood drug dealers. But they have also led time and again to avoidable deaths, gruesome injuries, demolished property, enduring trauma, blackened reputations and multimillion‐​dollar legal settlements at taxpayer expense, an investigation by The New York Times found.


For the most part, governments at all levels have chosen not to quantify the toll by requiring reporting on SWAT operations. But The Times’s investigation, which relied on dozens of open‐​record requests and thousands of pages from police and court files, found that at least 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers died in such raids from 2010 through 2016. Scores of others were maimed or wounded.

It’s terrific reporting that covers so many of the problems: the unnecessary violence, the dilution of constitutional safeguards, the flimsy police investigative work, the cover‐​ups when things go bad, and the lawsuits that will ultimately burden taxpayers.


Cato has been sounding the alarm on this trend since 1999, with the publication of “Warrior Cops.” That was followed by Radley Balko’s study, “Overkill,” and there have been countless events, media appearances, opinion articles, and book chapters since. Indeed, one of the NYT’s own reporters, Matt Apuzzo, acknowledged a few years ago that “the criticism of the so‐​called militarization of police has largely come from libertarian quarters for several years. They have kind of been the lone voice on this, folks like the Cato institute.” 


For related Cato scholarship, go here.