As I have stated time and again when cops do right I'll stand up for them.
When they are wrong I'll criticize them to the hilt.
The actions of paramilitary ops for the purpose of issuing warrants and arrests have to be curtailed the same as the high speed chase.
A national review of police standard operating procedures is in order at this time and the sooner the better.

Cato: Paramilitary Raids on U.S. Homes More Frequent
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, July 18, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The last 25 years have seen a 1,300 percent increase in the number of paramilitary raids on American homes. The vast majority of these are to serve routine drug warrants, including for offenses as trivial as marijuana possession, according to a just-released study by the Cato Institute.

"These raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping," writes Cato policy analyst Radley Balko, "usually by teams of heavily-armed paramilitary units dressed not as peace officers, but as soldiers."

The use of hyper-militarized, heavily armed police units to carry out routine search warrants has become increasingly common since the 1980s, concludes Balko.

These raids leave a very small margin for error, the author writes. A wrong address, bad timing, or bad information can - and frequently does - bring tragedy. The information giving rise to these raids is typically collected from confidential informants, some of very dubious reliability.
The white paper study, "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America," provides a legal, historical, and policy background explaining the trend.

Balko offers a critique of "no-knock" and "short-notice" raids, explains how such confrontational tactics cause violence rather than lessening risks, and offers recommendations for reform.

The paper has an appendix of nearly 150 examples of documented botched raids:
• Alberto Sepulveda, an 11-year-old boy, was shot in the head during a bungled raid in Modesto, Calif.
• Clayton Helriggle, a 23-year-old, was shot and killed when an inexperienced SWAT team raided a house of college-aged men guilty of recreational marijuana use.
• Sal Culosi, an optometrist in Fairfax, Va. was mistakenly killed by a SWAT team that had come to his home to arrest him for betting on sports games.
• Mississippi police officer Ron Jones was shot and killed when Cory Maye - a man asleep at home with his daughter and who had no criminal record - mistook Jones' raid team for criminal intruders.
Balko has found more than three dozen examples of completely innocent people killed in mistaken raids and 20 cases of nonviolent offenders who have been killed. He also uncovered more than a dozen cases of police officers killed by suspects or mistakenly targeted civilians who thought the police were criminal intruders.

Balko concludes that these policing tactics "bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty only of misdemeanors.

"They terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence, and they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects."

The author laments that, in his opinion, policy-makers seem to be oblivious to this disturbing trend in police work. Few are willing to question the policies that make the raids possible.

An example: On Aug. 5, 2005, at 6:15 a.m., a SWAT team converged around the Sunrise, Fla. home of Anthony Diotaiuto. They came to serve a search warrant based on an anonymous tip and an informant's purchase of a single ounce of marijuana from the 23-year-old bartender and part-time student.
"Going back to the Diotaiuto case, for example," the author writes, "one might ask why the town of Sunrise, Fla., a town with a population of just 90,000 and which reported only a single murder for all of 2003, would need a SWAT team in the first place.

"And why would the town use that SWAT team, first thing in the morning, to break into the home of a young man with no history of violence?"
A 2001 California commission on the issue found that although SWAT teams are generally justified, defended, and thought of as responders to emergency situations, such as hostage crises and terror attacks, they are most commonly used for relatively routine drug search and arrest warrants.
According to Balko, the trend of paramilitary drug raids is indeed an unfortunate outgrowth of the war on drugs: "Troubling as they are, these raids are merely one small part of a wholesale assault on individual liberty and the Bill of Rights brought on by America's futile, 30-year attempt to eradicate the drug supply."

Beyond simply ending the nation's drug war, the author recommends that Congress and state legislatures pass legislation holding the police agencies involved with carrying out a forced-entry drug raid strictly liable for any mistakes they make.

"Should police target the wrong home, wrongly shoot an innocent person, or wrongly injure or kill a nonviolent offender, damages would come directly from the budgets of the responsible police organizations," Balko writes.