Balko on SWAT raids
Radley Balko’s study of the increase in paramilitary police raids by SWAT teams is now available from Cato. They’ve also produced a map of botched raids, using Google Maps, to show the distribution of raids that involved some kind of serious error. I’d like to see a table of that data as well (or, because I’m greedy, the whose dataset). There are a lot of things one could do with the data beyond just plotting the incidents on a map, though this is certainly an effective way to draw attention to the issue. The monograph itself contains summaries of a large number of the botched raids. The rise of paramilitary policing is a serious problem in itself—just on the very narrow grounds that mistakes are common—but is also clearly bound up with larger questions of criminal justice policy in the United States, and America’s astonishingly high rate of incarceration.