What the hell. I was fully prepared to stop responding to him.

But Patterico has now sunk to conducting amateur psychological evaluations of me based on prior blog posts.

He’s not just a prosecutor, he’s also a psychoanalyst! “Balko can’t see my light and wisdom, so there must be something wrong with his psychology.” A delightful bit of patronizing.

You really are lame, Patterico.

Not that the post deserves a response. But I’ll humor you: I was a libertarian well before that incident. And I was writing about no-knock raids well before then, too. What happened that night was annoying, but it was hardly the defining experience in my political ideology. I got over it in a couple of days. For the record, I’ve also had plenty of positive experiences with police officers. And frankly, I don’t generally blame them for this stuff. I’ve said it over and over again. But I’ll state it again: It’s bad policy that leads to these outcomes, not bad cops (the CYA engine that kicks in after the fact — well, that’s another story).

I have come to take the position on these tactics that I now take because I’ve read case after case after case of innocent people being killed, injured, and terrorized when one of these raids goes wrong. I don’t like it when agents of the government kill, injure and terrorize innocent people. That’s why I get so “emotional” about SWAT raids gone wrong. They carry an extremely small margin for error, and therefore simply aren’t appropriate for nonviolent offenses. My reactions to these cases aren’t rash or ill-considered. They’re the result of studying around 1,000 of these raids over the last 18 months, and noticing the same patterns occurring over and over when one goes wrong. The Johnston case has some telltale signs. But I’ve labeled every presumption I’ve made about the case as my opinion.

So, Patterico, go ahead and move on to your next ad hominem attack on my credibility. “Emotionally damaged due to a bad experience with the police” isn’t going to work. But keep trying. There are lots of other fallacies to choose from.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 7:37 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.