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Newshawk: Increase Your Media http://www.mapinc.org/resource
Pubdate: Fri, 22 Sep 2006
Source: Home News Tribune (East Brunswick, NJ)
Copyright: 2006 Home News Tribune
Contact:
Website: http://www.thnt.com/hnt/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/825
Author: Ronald Fraser
Note: Ronald Fraser, Ph.D., writes on public policy issues for the DKT
Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization.
SWAT RAIDS THREATEN OUR SAFETY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES
You and your law-abiding neighbors in New Jersey might be just one
street address away from a life-threatening, midnight raid by a local
paramilitary police unit. As these so-called SWAT squads increasingly
become America's favored search warrant delivery service, bungled
raids -- including many to the wrong address -- have skyrocketed. In
these assaults on private property, scores of innocent citizens,
police officers and nonviolent offenders have died.
In a recent CATO Institute report titled "Overkill: The Rise of
Paramilitary Police Raids in America," Radley Balko describes how,
"Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization
of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling
rise in the use of paramilitary police units for routine police work.
The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics
warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home."
These raids -- as many as 40,000 per year -- terrorize nonviolent
drug offenders, bystanders and wrongly targeted civilians who are
awakened in the dead of night as teams of heavily armed paramilitary
units, dressed not as police officers but as soldiers, invade their homes.
[Remainder snipped]
MAP posted-by: Elaine
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