Check this one.

Fifty-three cops stormed two restaurants in downtown Aspen at dinner time, with guns drawn. Doesn’t seem like the safest way to do things, does it? The raids netted a whole two ounces of cocaine. Oh, and eleven immigration violations.

It gets worse. Turns out the sheriff of Aspen is a drug war critic, and prefers to deal with drug crimes in a less militaristic manner than storming public places of business with assault weapons. So the DEA agents who headed up the investigation decided not to tell him about the raids.

Yet another Bush example of the Bush administration’s federalist principles in action.

Imagine what might have happened had officers from the local sheriff’s department been in the area of the raids, unaware of what was going on, and saw only armed figures in black storming a restaurant. You might’ve ended up with two police agencies trading bullets over a couple restuarants full of civilian diners. Sound farfetched? Have a look at this story.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2005 at 3:38 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.