Robyn Blumner has a good column on Hudson in the St. Petersburg Times.
Last week in Chicago, 400 drug cops conducted a massive raid on an 800-unit public housing complex in Chicago. They raided every apartment, despite having just 10 search warrants. The raids were conducted to bust up a gang-drug operation that was putting out a potentially lethal form of Fentanyl-laced heroin, which authorities say is responsible for dozens of overdose deaths across the country.
Still, every apartment? With or without a warrant? The implication seems to be that if you live in public housing, your rights are disposable when it comes to drug policing.
A SWAT team member in Monroe County, Michigan has his submachine gun stolen from his personal vehicle. Local authorities won’t identify him. This is actually a pretty common problem. The military has a sophisticated system for tracking its weapons. But when those weapons get transfered to local police departments through the Pentagon’s various giveaway programs, the tracking technology (not to mention training) doesn’t come with them. There’s one little town in Florida that has twice as many M-16s (seven) as it does traffic stoplights (three). A 2003 newspaper investigation of the proliferation of miitary gear in Florida’s police departments is pretty shocking.
The Drug War Chronicle puts together a nice account of the Hudson case. It includes this quote from Jack Cole, a former narcotics unit commander in New Jersey:
This means forget it — they’re not going to knock and announce. Why would they do that if there are no teeth in the law anymore?
It was already hard enough to get police to knock and announce, because if they just went through the door without the announcement, the person charged had to convince the judge, while all the cop had to do was say ‘I announced.’
This is going to lead to more injured and dead people, and they’re not all going to be the people we’re targeting because we so often hit the wrong house. There are a lot of innocent people who are going to be hurt as a result of this, as well as police. If somebody broke down my door in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t assume these are good people. I’d be reaching to protect myself and my family.
Cole now heads up the organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
Here’s a good roundup of blog reaction to Hudson.
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on Sunday, June 25th, 2006 at 9:03 am by Radley Balko
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