I just finished reading Overkill, Radley Balko’s white paper from 2006 on the rise in SWAT-style policing. From the 1960s until now, paramilitary police units have gone from being rarely used specialty forces, only called when lives were in immediate danger, to being a routine way of serving drug warrants and a number of other situations with a non-violent offender. Balko has been studying this trend for years at the CATO Institute and is now a senior editor at Reason Magazine. I’ve been following his work for a long time, and I think he’s getting at the heart of a very problematic trend in this country, one that started with the drug war and is being continued with the war or terror. We’ve allowed greater militarization within our civil society because we’re at “war”.

Balko chronicles numerous instances of innocent people having their homes invaded and being physically harmed solely because police either got the address wrong or were lied to by an informant. The recent case of Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta, the innocent 88-year-old woman who was shot by invading police officers (one of whom was later charged with murder), was one of the first incidents to actually gather some widespread attention. Even while SWAT teams are glorified on TV, some high-level reflection on their use is starting to occur.

At the CATO Institute website, an interactive map is set up to review hundres of botched raids nationwide. Two from this area were particularly maddening:

In March 1992, police in Everett, Washington storm the home of Robin Pratt on a no-knock warrant. They are looking for her husband, who would later be released when the allegations in the warrant turned out to be false.

Though police had a key to the apartment, they instead choose to throw a 50-pound battering ram through the apartment’s sliding-glass door. Glass shards land inches away from the couple’s six-year-old daughter and five-year-old niece. One officer encounters Robin Pratt on the way to her bedroom. Hearing other SWAT team members yell “Get down!” Pratt falls to her knees. She then raises her head briefly to say, “Please don’t hurt my children.” At that point, Deputy Anthony Aston fires his weapon, putting a bullet in her neck, killing her.

Officers next entered the bedroom, where Dep. Aston then put the tip of his MP-5 assault submachine gun against Larry Pratt’s head. When Pratt asked if he could move, another officer said that if he did, he’d have his head blown off.

Though a subsequent investigation by a civilian inquest jury found the shooting “unjustified,” the officer who shot and killed Pratt was never charged.

And amazingly, one of them happened while they were filming an episode of Cops:

In May 1992, police in King County, Washington conduct a no-knock raid with cameras from the television show Cops in tow.

Police break open the door of the Glover family and their four children. They put a gun to Floyd Glover’s head and order him to the floor. Theresa Glover is handcuffed at gunpoint. Despite being half-dressed, and with the cameras still rolling, police at first refuse to let her cover up. Other officers then storm the children’s bedroom, screaming, “Everyone on the floor!”

Police had targeted the wrong home.

Cops would later decide not to air the raid. The same police department had conducted two other “wrong door” raids in the previous year.

I don’t know the full history of how SWAT teams have been used in the Seattle area (I moved here in 1997), but I do know that compared to the rest of the country, we’ve had way fewer incidences than other major cities since the early 90s. Someone will have to fill me in on whether there was ever a public debate over their use or whether police officials just realized their ineffectiveness and stopped the practice. (Or do they still continue to do them in some places with more oversight?)

This topic also leads to a related discussion that plays a role in paramilitary drug war policing – on confidential informants. When people talk about the Stop Snitching movement, they often confuse the real issue, even the clueless rappers who go on TV to defend it. In many cases like the one of Kathryn Johnston, the raid is predicated upon the word of a confidential informant, a person the police relies on to give them information on where drugs are being sold. In Johnston’s case in Atlanta, it was discovered that the police bypassed using an actual informant and then tried to get a former informant to lie for them to say they did. But in many cases, individuals will become confidential informants in order to make money or to take down a rival. They can very easily entrap others and send them to prison. In this context, the Stop Snitching movement isn’t the clear cut moral issue some believe it to be. But the distinction is often lost in the outrage when eyewitnesses to real crimes stay silent.

It’s not a surprise that much of this paramilitary policing goes on in poor, minority neighborhoods around the country. Some of it has been supported by those without racial animosity, but out of a belief that by attacking the drug trade in these communities we’d be helping them. As should be clear to anyone, knocking down people’s doors at 3AM doesn’t help anyone in any neighborhood. The list of tragedies chronicled by Balko in his white paper is terrifying. When you send police to serve basic drug warrants, especially at night, you invite violent confrontations rather than what the original intent of these team were, to diffuse them.

In the comments recently, I had a good discussion with Tuor about the wastefulness involved with sending American taxpayer dollars to places where corruption is rampant due to political leaders who aren’t held accountable because they have close ties to a lucrative natural resource. Places like Alaska:

Gravel will be in Alaska later this month for a speech in Anchorage. He will appear before an Anchorage civic group, Commonwealth North. He goes north with mixed feelings. He’s concerned about the corruption scandal and what that does to the state’s reputation nationally. He says Alaskans were too fast to embrace all the federal largesse Stevens sent home, wasted too much of the money and instead should have invested in creating a world-class education system.

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted.

Arnold Relman writes about the pharmaceutical industry in The New Republic. His column is a response to a book by Richard Epstein that blames excessive regulation for stifling innovation when it comes to developing new drugs. Relman picks apart Epstein’s arguments and shows what has happened to the pharmaceutical industry as it has tried to be seen as maintaining a commitment to America’s health while also being beholden to their shareholders.

Epstein comes from the school of thought that believes that health care should be an individual responsibility and that government should not be involved. In this mindset, the forces of the marketplace will theoretically produce the optimal result. What we’ve discovered as we’ve moved more and more in that direction is that it doesn’t happen. The desire to maximize profits in the pharmaceutical industry has often run contrary to what the average American sees as the optimal result. Drugs are incredibly expensive and the companies have tremendous power to limit our ability to find alternatives. In addition, the regulatory mechanisms don’t go away, the pharmaceutical industry just uses them to protect their market position. A good example of this is how the pharmaceutical industry has strong-armed the FDA into keeping people from being able to import cheaper drugs from Canada.

While the pharmaceutical industry has maintained that the high cost of drugs are a result of the need to recoup the costs of R&D, Relman points out that even the former CEO of Merck disputes that claim. The high costs of drugs are based upon what the market will bear for that drug. And as we’ve discovered with health care in general, market forces tend to work better for the things we want than for the things we need. As a result, America’s pharmaceutical industry is one of its most profitable sectors, even as they continue to complain about the high cost of doing business. Drug prices don’t go down over time, they usually go up.

Pharmaceutical companies have given us a lot of new drugs in the past decade or so. Many of them, as Relman notes, are copycat drugs that do things very similar to existing drugs. The market contains a number of anti-anxiety medications, cures for erectile dysfunction, and cures for diseases like restless leg syndrome that we never knew we had. In the end, the system skews towards drugs that are cheaper to produce (many of which appear to be more recreational in nature), which are then heavily advertised to doctors and patients, while fixing more life-critical conditions are a lower priority. Even for the life-critical drugs, Epstein argues for less regulation in the certification process and maintains that safety concerns will just shake out as doctors and patients discover the benefits and drawbacks of particular drugs on their own.

One particular area of the pharmaceutical industry, though, creates some conflict among two traditional factions of the Republican Party. Highly addictive drugs used for pain management are a major source of concern for social conservatives, but have been a major cash cow for certain firms with close ties to high-profile Republicans. Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, is one company that has had to surf this divide. Some of Purdue’s top execs recently received probation and were fined over $600 million for misleading the public as to how addictive their drug was.

The verdict against the executives was different from the more traditional way that anti-drug officials in the DEA have attacked this problem – by going after doctors who specialize in pain management. Because of the addictiveness of OxyContin (which came to be called Hillbilly Heroin), many doctors were accused of supporting illegitimate drug use and found themselves being aggressively and often unfairly prosecuted. It took action from people who’ve lost loved ones in order for those who manufactured this drug to be held accountable for lying about its medical properties.

This outcome shouldn’t be a surprise. In a profit-driven system, Purdue Pharma’s actions were perfectly rational. Admitting that your product is as addictive as heroin when crushed into a powder is bad for the bottom line. So instead, they hired now-Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani to lobby in support of the drug. They paid the father of a victim of an OxyContin overdose, Steven Steiner, to travel around the country to campaign against medical marijuana, a drug that has some similar uses to OxyContin, but is much safer (and yet still illegal at the federal level). And to underscore how much pull they had, people at high levels of the Justice Department tried to get the Virginia prosecutors to go easy on Purdue.

OxyContin can be a very useful drug for people living with severe pain. The solution is not to ban doctors from ever prescribing it any more than it’s not the solution to allow the free market to dictate how it’s marketed and sold to the American public. The answer is to ensure that government oversight provides both patients and doctors with the most accurate information possible and give them the freedom to make the most informed decisions possible, not to criminalize addiction so that people aren’t afraid to help others or get help. The FDA and the DEA should exist to protect us, not the pharmaceutical companies.

This is to get my lame post off the top…

We now know a little more [emphasis mine] about the shooting that occurred yesterday in Bothell downtown Seattle:

The shooting suspect is being held at the King County Jail, under investigation of being a felon in possession of a firearm, assault and committing a crime while under DOC supervision. He served prison time for selling cocaine.

Well done! Another non-violent criminal turned into a violent one thanks to the drug war. Are we winning yet?

UPDATE: Richard Pope in the comments has dug up the full list of this man’s violations and it’s a long one, starting in 4-2000 when he was either 12 or 13. It looks like I was a little too quick to assume what I did here. I will be re-implementing my “no posting after DL” policy immediately. :)

Congressman Inslee is going to introduce a bill to kick off the impeachment process in the House for Attorney General Gonzales.

On the subject of Gonzales, here’s a good CNN.com flashback.

Iraq:

The extent of the deterioration in US-Saudi relations was exposed for the first time today when Washington accused Riyadh of working to undermine the Iraqi government.

The Bush administration sent a warning to Saudi Arabia, until this year one of its closest allies, to stop undermining the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki.

The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the defence secretary, Robert Gates, are scheduled to visit Jeddah next week. A diplomat in Washington said of the two governments: “There is a lot of bad blood between the two.”

Saudi Arabia:

The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve arms sales totaling $20 billions over the next decade for Saudi Arabia and its neighbours, The New York Times reported in Saturday editions.

Coming as some U.S. officials contend that the Saudi government is not helping the situation in Iraq, the proposal for advanced weapons for Saudi Arabia has stoked concern in Israel and among its U.S. backers, the Times said. The package of advanced weaponry includes advanced satellite-guided bombs, upgrades for its fighters and new naval vessels.

Israel:

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abul Gheit said Saturday that Arab countries were waiting for a clear indication from Israel that it was interested in discussing peace with its neighbors.

Speaking to Al-Ahram newspaper, Abul Gheit said an Arab peace-for-land initiative that offers Israel normalization with the Arab world in return for a full withdrawal from land occupied during the 1967 Israeli-Arab war was aimed at establishing a Palestinian state through negotiations.

Abul Gheit said opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu told him during talks in Jerusalem earlier this week that he was not opposed to the initiative. Netanyahu was said to be opposed to the Arab peace plan because he redeemed it dangerous to Israel’s security.

I know what you’re saying right now. Wait a second, Lee, that last item doesn’t sound so bad. It’s not. Here’s some more details from occasional neocon supporter Amir Taheri:

The plan is the brainchild of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah who unveiled its basic principles almost five years ago. At the time, Israel dismissed the plan as nothing but a public relations exercise by the Saudis who wished to divert attention from the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Five years later, Israel’s President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admit that the plan is a serious diplomatic proposal, and should be treated with something other than disdain.

The lesson to be learned here is that the people who have been saying all along that the Arab world can’t be trusted in the peace process have never really understood the real motivations of the leaders in that part of the world. September 11 didn’t just change how we perceive terrorism. It changed how the leaders in the Arab world saw it as well. It was no longer a local problem for them, it became a much more serious liability. And the Saudis, despite their many faults, understood that they were entering a time where they might not be able to use their longstanding trump card, antagonism of Israel, as much as they use to, if at all.

In 2002, when the Saudis first unveiled this proposal, Dick Cheney visited the Middle East with his own mission, to convince the Saudis and others to be on our side in the invasion of Iraq. At the time, two of the most prominent neocons, Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, slammed Cheney’s efforts:

Nor is it entirely clear what message Cheney delivered to his Arab friends, even in private. We had hoped Cheney would approach the Saudi royal family with the same tough choice the administration presented Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf a few months ago: You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists. You decide.

Instead, Cheney seems to have avoided putting the Arabs on the spot. He told Arab leaders both publicly and privately that the United States had made no decisions regarding Iraq. This relieved the Arab leaders of the need to make a choice, at least for now. We have no doubt that Cheney made clear America’s grave concerns about Iraqi weapons programs, and he described the kind of inspections regime the United States wants in Iraq. But this was hardly news to Arab leaders. Probably the most surprising aspect of Cheney’s message, to those leaders, was that the United States still didn’t know what it wanted to do. As the vice president himself put it at a press conference with President Bush this past Thursday, “I went out there to consult with them, to seek their advice and counsel to be able to report back to the president on how we might best proceed to deal with that mutual problem.” Funny, that’s just what Warren Christopher said on his failed trip to Europe.

The Arab leaders, meanwhile, had their own game plan for the Cheney trip, and they stuck to it with impressive unity and determination. On the eve of Cheney’s arrival, Arab officials outlined their strategy to the Washington Post: “They intend to press the United States hard . . . to shelve any plan for a military strike against Iraq and to concentrate instead on [the Saudi peace plan] and on easing the violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories.” The goal was not to listen to American plans, but to change them, to force the United States to “re-examine” its policies in the Middle East. As one Saudi official told the Post, “The U.S. is concerned with an old issue, Iraq. They are making it a priority when it should not be. . . . Iraq can afford to be delayed. The other issue cannot.” In the tiny United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan told Cheney he was against a strike on Iraq and demanded that the Bush administration “stop the grave and continued Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people.” Just about every other Arab leader told Cheney much the same thing.

So while we’re now stuck in Iraq, spending billions of dollars to arm the country that’s trying to overthrow a government that we’re spending billions of dollars to prop up, the rest of the Arab world is still trying to continue moving forward on an Israeli peace proposal that all the very serious people mistakenly thought was just a ruse. And it should be obvious to even the most casual observer that if we’d just listened to the leaders in the region in 2002 and focused on solving the problem that they wanted to solve, rather than assuming that they had ulterior motives, we’d be in a much better state of affairs today.

Max Blumenthal hangs out with the craziest people on earth (thanks to FishinCurt for the link).

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted, and reigning champion N in Seattle is out of town, so you all have a chance.

ThinkProgress explains. This is an open thread.

Yesterday, Congress voted on the Hinchey-Rohrabacher Amendment. The Hinchey-Rohrabacher Amendment would have prevented the Federal Government from spending taxpayer dollars to arrest and prosecute medical marijuana patients in the states where it’s already been made legal (Washington is one of them, of course, passing a law via voter initiative in 1998). Now I expect the Republican Congressmen of this state to vote against it. We already know that Reichert, McMorris-Rogers, and Hastings don’t give a rats ass about the voters of this state. But three two Democratic Congressmen also voted against this bill. And one of them, Norm Dicks and Adam Smith, changed their vote from last year. Can we have an explanation from their offices for why they’ve decided in the past twelve months that the people of Washington State need to be protected from their own decisions? Can someone from either Norm Dicks’ or Adam Smith’s office explain why it’s so important for them him to have the federal government come here to overturn our laws? The second question also goes for Rick Larsen, who has consistently voted against this bill.

We are long past the point of where the old notions of “we need to protect the children” hold any water. In states where medical marijuana has been legalized, the numbers of underage marijuana users has actually decreased more than in other states. I think we deserve an explanation from our Representatives on this. There is absolutely no rational justification for voting against this bill, and they know it. The old days where votes like this aren’t noticed are over. I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or not. When you vote against the sick and dying to advance the special interests of those who benefit from having more people flowing through our criminal justice system, we should know why.

UPDATE (–Goldy):
I just received an email from Derrick Crowe, Communications Director for Rep. Adam Smith:

We noticed the vote this morning and have a submitted a statement for the record to correct the error. Adam should have been a Yes on Rollcall vote 733, the Hinchey Amendment to HR 3093, the Departments of Commerce and Justice, and Science, and Related Agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008. Adam has consistently voted Yes on the Hinchey Amendment in years past.

So in fact, Rep. Smith voted for Hinchey-Rohrabacher. Not sure exactly how common it is for the House Clerk to get these things wrong, but apparently this time around he did. Apparently, Smith misheard the reading of the bill, and has since corrected his vote. Not sure how common that is either.

UPDATE 2: Dominic Holden has more, but still no word from Congressman Dicks…

If there’s any lingering doubt that the U.S. Department of Justice is in a serious state of disrepair, this video from TPM of the Attorney General’s testimony from yesterday should put that to rest.

UPDATE: This is also an open thread.

Dino Rossi’s idea man wants us to stop being so mean to the poor pedophiles in the Catholic Church:

In the Seattle PI this week, AP writer David Pitt shares some sobering statistics:

DES MOINES, Iowa — Blacks in the United States are imprisoned at more than five times the rate of whites, and Hispanics are locked up at nearly double the white rate, according to a study released Wednesday by a criminal justice policy group.

The report by the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based think tank, found that states in the Midwest and Northeast have the greatest black-to-white disparity in incarceration. Iowa had the widest disparity in the nation, imprisoning blacks at more than 13 times the rate of whites.

For years, this disparity has continued to worsen, even as the numbers of people we send to prison in this country reach record levels. A public official from Iowa demonstrates the typical blind spot for the why this is happening:

Paul Stageberg, administrator of the Iowa Division of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Planning, said the results are not surprising, but the causes are subject to interpretation.

He said the state’s disproportionately high black arrest rates are likely linked to high poverty rates among blacks and lower educational achievement.

He’s completely wrong. The disparity does not result from any characteristic of the black community itself. It results from the way drug laws are enforced. I know I sometimes sound like a broken record on this front, but this problem is both well-known among those who study this and widely ignored by everyone else. And it’s long past due that we focus on the real reasons why our prisons are bursting at the seams and dispropotionately filled with minorities.

The chart at his link is from arrest data from 1996. It shows the number of individuals per 100,000 sent to prison for drug offenses – broken down by race. It’s important to recognize that surveys have repeatedly shown that there’s no difference in drug usage rates between different races. The difference lies in whose usage is targeted by the police and whose usage is ignored.

In the years since, things have actually gotten slightly better, but the disparity is still alarming. A report from Human Rights Watch in 2003 notes:

African-Americans are arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for drug offenses at far higher rates than whites. This racial disparity bears little relationship to racial differences in drug offending. For example, although the proportion of all drug users who are black is generally in the range of 13 to 15 percent, blacks constitute 36 percent of arrests for drug possession. Blacks constitute 63 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons. In at least fifteen states, black men were sent to prison on drug charges at rates ranging from twenty to fifty-seven times those of white men.

[emphasis mine]

The disparities we see today do go beyond just drug offenses. Violent gang activity also leads towards a higher number of minorities going to prison. But what’s rarely ever made clear whenever these reports surface in the media is how our eagerness to put young black people in jail for drugs also leads to that outcome. Teenagers and young adults in black communities, who are doing things that most white teenagers get away with, are sent away to prison even if they have no prior record of violence. But instead of being “reformed” behind bars, they go in the opposite direction, making gang connections, becoming bitter at the lost opportunity they have, and returning to the world much more likely to commit a violent crime. Our drug laws have served to create a criminal class among African-Americans. We used to believe that stronger enforcement of drug laws in black communities were a benefit to them. Now we clearly understand that their enforcement does little more than just reinforce the stereotypes about the inherently criminality of blacks in our society.

Talking about these issues politically can be extremely difficult. The notion that blacks are more prone to crime and therefore require more strident policing finds acceptance among both liberals and conservatives. The myth that drug prohibition keeps us safe and that criminalizing drug use is necessary continues to eat away at our society in complete silence.

On Thursday night, I joined SeattleJew at an anti-violence vigil at Pratt Park in Seattle, led by Pastor Robert Jeffrey. Just as in other major cities, Seattle’s black community has fallen victim to this modern day incarnation of Jim Crow. At the end of Jeffrey’s passionate sermon, individuals lit candles and got up to speak about those who’ve been lost in the crossfire. Some were wearing T-shirts of the lost loved ones they mourned, while others spoke of brothers and sisters whose lives ended too soon. Not surprisingly, drugs were a common theme among the stories. Those who used drugs in this community were always in fear of being arrested.

As someone for whom illegal drugs were always nearby throughout college and afterwards, in both college towns and wealthy white suburbs, I don’t have stories of friends being killed and no one I personally know of has ever been arrested. Money certainly plays some role in that, but race plays a much bigger one. Our drug laws and the racial bias in their enforcement have created two entirely separate justice systems in this country that divide us in ways much more extreme than any of the ways we divide ourselves. And hopefully the next time grim statistics from our prison system make people scratch their heads and wonder what’s going wrong, the media will have more of a clue as to where to point the finger, rather than simply asking those in our criminal justice system who don’t have the courage to look into their own role.

On Larry King last night, Larry Flynt said he has a whole list of people in D.C. who have been up to no good (a la Senator Vitter). In particular, he was shocked at seeing one Senator on his list.

Wild-ass speculation…Go!