I’ve done about a half-dozen radio interviews today, most of which were with sympathetic hosts. I had my first hostile interview this morning at a station in Charlotte. The host was a sub for the usual guy, who I guess is fairly libertarian.

Doesn’t bode well for what’s coming when the guy invokes 9/11 in the introduction. What’s funny is that each time he made a point (”these raids aren’t ever conducted on small-time dope users”; “nobody gets shot in these things”; “yeah, but no innocent people ever get shot in these things”), I’d provide evidence to the contrary. Which only seemed to make him angrier. He ended the interview in O’Reilly-esque fashion: “Well, you can show me all the research and data you want, but the bottom line is….” Then, something about how we have to protect our men in blue. After I hung up, he said something about how a ruling the other way would make it harder to fight terrorism.

Terrorism. 9/11, 9/11. God bless America.

A reader who continued to listen after I was cut off writes:

I heard you on the radio this morning. Too bad you were unable to talk with the usual host of the morning show. He’s really good.

I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear that every caller after you hung up agreed with your position . . . One caller had rented to a real degenerate, so he kicked him out. The state never changed this convict’s address. After visiting the house several separate occasions looking for this man and being told he did not live there anymore, the police still “no knocked” the house at 2 in the morning, and harrassed the family that were the current tenants.

I think the key to winning the public over on this is stressing just how often “wrong door” raids happen, and asking what they’d do if someone mistakenly stormed their house at 3 in the morning.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 11:21 am 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.