Officer safety is usually cited as the main justification for the mass proliferation of SWAT teams over the last 30 years. Police say forced entry, flash grenades, and other paramilitary tactics are the only way offers can protect themselves while serving warrants on dangerous people like suspected pot dealers, poker players, optometrists who wager on football games, frail 69-year-old men suspected of selling painkillers, and women suspected of committing fraud on their student loan applications—to give just a few examples.

But what happens when police need to apprehend a genuinely dangerous person? We see this over and over: They don’t always send the SWAT team. And when they do, like they did in Columbine, the SWAT team sometimes waits outside until the shooting is over. So this week we had Whitey Bulger. He’s a suspect in at least 19 murders. He had 20 guns in his home when police apprehended him. So how did they do it? Once again, they didn’t send a SWAT team barreling into his home. Instead, they lured him out with a phone call, then arrested him peacefully.

Perhaps if they thought he had some pot in the house, it might have gone down differently.

“The Ballad of Kathryn Johnston,” by Shawn Mullins.

Dammit, Gary Johnson is coming dangerously close to making me admit that I actually like a politician—as opposed to the usual default position of merely not loathing one as much as the others.

The quote reminds me of Sen. Arnold Vinick, the best candidate the GOP ever nominated for president . . . and who, unfortunately, was entirely fictional.

Reason.tv’s Jim Epstein tells the story of his arrest and the arrest of Pete Tucker.

One thing about the video I found interesting: Note the outrage from the taxi drivers as Tucker is hauled off in handcuffs. The vast, vast majority of D.C. taxi drivers are immigrants, most from east Africa and the Middle East. And yet they seem to have a far better grasp of free expression and the need for transparency in government than the federal and city employees working in America’s capital city.

A few more articles from the Reason “Criminal Injustice” issue are now available online:

• Clay Conrad looks at problems with the public defender system.
• Harvey Silverglate on the perils of vaguely-written criminal statutes.
• Lovisa Stannow asks why the government isn’t doing more to prevent prison rape.
• Julie Stewart praises efforts to reform mandatory minimum sentencing laws.
• Tim Cavanaugh on how the California prison guards union became so powerful.

The Tampa Bay Rays will wear throwback jerseys next month to commemorate a minor league team that played in the city in the 1950s. The team’s nickname: the Smokers. As you can see, the old jerseys included the name, with an image of a lit cigar under the emblem.

But in a nod to anti-smoking activists, the throwback jerseys will not include the cigar. You know, because of the children and stuff. But they will keep the name “Smokers” in bright red letters across the chest. Which would lead one to conclude that not only are Tampa’s children comically precious and vulnerable to suggestion, they also apparently can’t read.

Thanks to Russ Chibe for the link.

It’s a bit of a last minute thing, but I’ll be in L.A. this weekend.

If you’re in the area and could do a meetup Saturday night (that’s the only night I can do), let me know in the comments. If there’s a good response, I’ll come up with a place and time.

I’m staying in Mar Vista, so the meetup would be at a bar/restaurant in that area. I don’t really know L.A. at all, but I’m told Venice, Culver City, and Marina del Rey are nearby.

• Dumb senator says dumb things.
• The revolving door at DOJ.
• I think my friend Tim Lee has the best response to the Jose Antonio Vargas story.
• Two journalists, including one from Reason.tv, were arrested yesterday while trying to cover a meeting of the Washington, D.C. Taxicab Commission.
• Hands down, the dumbest thing you’ll read today.
• It’s pretty sad that an editorial like this one would even need to be written.
• Llama fetuses!

He directed this commercial . . .

I guess this one ended rather well, considering what we’ve seen in similar stories.

A Midwest City woman has accused Oklahoma City police officers of raiding and ransacking her home in what appears to be a case of mistaken identity.

And it all happened while her 12-year-old son was home alone.

The Oklahoma City Police Department was conducting a gang sweep Thursday, June 16, and looking for known gang members. U.S. Marshals were along to assist.

Christina Jack was at work when officers showed up at her door. Her son, Devon, was the only one home when the officers walked into the house and told him they were looking for a man named Jason. Jason is the name of Christina’s boyfriend.

Devon says the officers, with guns drawn, began searching the house.

“My heart was beating fast. I had a whole bunch of thoughts in my mind,” Devon said.

When officers came up empty-handed, Devon told them he knew where Jason might be. He says that’s when officers put him in a car so he could show them where to go.

During that ride, police discovered they had the wrong Jason.

Can the police actually do this? They entered a private residence, took a minor out of his home, put him in a squad car, then took him along on a search for a suspected gang member—all, according to the article, without notifying his parent. The article implies that the kid went along voluntarily. But he’s 12. And he just had a bunch of guns pointed at him. Even if they’d had the right “Jason”, there are often some pretty awful consequences to snitching on a gang member.

I’m not asking a rhetorical question here. I’m genuinely curious about this. Because if what they did is legal, that’s a whole separate bit of scariness all by itself.

The second part in my series for The Huffington Post is now online.

Police in Hampton, Virginia say they found three bottles of prescription pain medication in William Cooper’s home, two of which were empty. Cooper was killed over the weekend during a police drug raid on his home. (Prior post on the Cooper raid here.) But they won’t say if the bottles were in Cooper’s name. If, as his friends are saying, the guy suffered from knee and back pain, one full and two empty bottles of prescription pain meds hardly seems like the stash of a hardened drug dealer.

The informant also claimed Cooper was selling methadone. The police found no methadone. This is smelling more and more like the sort of rotten deal an informant cuts with the cops to get out from under his own criminal charges. Police also say they also found a number of guns in Cooper’s home, but haven’t yet said if any of them were illegal to own.

Also, about that softball field:

Price said police found no evidence that a stray bullet from the shootout made its way to a baseball field that runs 150 to 200 feet behind Clifton Street — separated by a creek and dense brush.

Rita Roby, a coach of a girls softball team playing at the field, said Tuesday that there were about 100 people at the field at the time of the shooting, including ball players, spectators and coaches.

Roby said that she was huddling with her team at the edge of the field when they heard about five bullets.

One of her players, she said, felt something whiz past her shirt. Roby said she can’t believe police engaged in a shootout so close to a ball field where children were playing ball.

“It really makes me angry,” she said. “It’s really sloppy.”

Price said a bullet did go through the back of Cooper’s home, but police have not recovered it.

“We checked the field with metal detectors, and interviewed people there,” he said. “We found no evidence that a bullet went into the ball field,” or that it had whizzed past the girl’s shirt.

Price noted that the field is not visible from Cooper’s home because of the dense brush.

Well, then. We can hardly blame the Hampton police department for carrying out a volatile home invasion raid on an old guy suspected of selling painkillers that ended in a rash of gunfire just 200 feet in front of a softball field filled with kids and spectators . . . if there was “thick brush” in the way. I mean, how could they possibly have known? By the way, one officer accidentally fired through Cooper’s front door. His bullet lodged in the house of a woman who lives across the street.

This article interviews a neighbor who says she heard the gunshots but no knock or announcement. It also says police found “20 different prescription drugs”, which sounds like a lot until you discover in the other article that only three of them were controlled. I’m a healthy, 36-year-old guy. I just did a quick check of my medicine cabinet. I found six different prescription drugs I’ve accumulated over the years. From the prior linked article:

The list of confiscated items includes 16 other pill bottles — for drugs used to treat symptoms ranging from arthritis to diabetes to seizures to heart disease . . .

Other seized items included Cooper’s wallet, $903 in cash, his 2000 Lexus automobile — allegedly connected to the drug sales — as well as a vehicle title and “financial documents.”

Of course, even if this guy was selling prescription drugs, it doesn’t justify forcibly entering his home with guns drawn and spraying the neighborhood with bullets. Nor does it necessarily mean he knew the men breaking into his home were cops.

• Headline of the day.
• Man gets three years for shooting SWAT cop during a drug raid.
• Rat nation.
• Rochester, New York, woman arrested for videotaping police from her front yard.
• Another sign that we’re “winning” the drug war.
• Glitch in Obamacare would allow “several million middle-class people get nearly-free insurance.” Remember the whole “let’s pass the bill and then see what’s in it” fiasco? If a major mistake like this can slip through the bill, how much faith should we put in all the predictions the administration made about cost and coverage?
• Once again, the feds knock legitimate websites offline in the course of a criminal investigation.

This time in Indiana:

Nearly one of every three cocaine tests conducted for criminal cases by the Indiana Department of Toxicology from 2007-2009 were bad, according to audit results released today by Indiana University.

The findings follow the release in April of audit results that revealed a 10 percent error rate in marijuana tests during the same period.

The lab has been operated by Indiana University since 1957, but will become a standalone state agency later this year. The move comes as a result of legislation passed this year by the General Assembly in the wake of growing concerns about problems at the lab, including long waits for results and questions about the accuracy of results . . .

MacIntyre said the bulk of the bad tests results were from 2007 and 2008, with “most of the problems resolved in 2009.” That would coincide with the arrival of a new lab director, Michael Wagner, who was the first forensic toxicologist to head the lab in more than a decade. Wagner resigned — under pressure, he contends, from IU officials — as concerns about the lab mounted.

The audit will now move to alcohol tests results from 2007-2009, which MacIntyre said will include the largest number of tests to be reviewed.

But the Indianapolis Star reported last month that the problems go back even further:

The Indianapolis Star reported Tuesday that about 2,000 emails it obtained from the lab show the agency was beset by incorrect test results from 2004 to 2006. A current audit of the lab’s work is covering only 2007 to 2009.

The lab tests blood and urine samples for evidence in criminal cases. The emails obtained by The Star show inadequate staffing and funding produced an environment in the lab ripe for errors, including the kind that could lead to people being denied justice, or escaping it.

The emails are correspondence to and from Peter Method, who served as the acting director of the department from 2003 to 2008. They suggest benign neglect on the part of the Indiana University School of Medicine, which did not authorize an audit of test results until 2008, at least four years after the first testing errors were reported by email.

One of the most telling notes was written by the lab’s supervisor in November 2006 to Method and Method’s supervisor, Michael Vasko, chair of the medical school’s Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology.

“I never had this (happen), error after error. … I guess if this is acceptable to you and the department, then I don’t have to worry. If an error occurs again in the future, I won’t bother you anymore,” the supervisor wrote.

The audit has already shown the lab sent out, on average, a flawed marijuana result every 3.28 days and a false positive marijuana result once every 18 days.

Among the more important revelations from the email correspondence are IU allowed the lab to languish under Method from 2003 to 2008, even though he acknowledged he was underqualified for the job.

They also show that while Method reported to Vasko, IU said Vasko’s job was merely broad “administrative oversight” — leaving the lab to Method as problems mounted.

Based on the emails alone, The Star found documentation of 26 bad test results from 2004 to 2006 that were reported to law enforcement.

Of those, 12 were false positives — findings that might have compromised the rights of Indiana residents. The other 14 were false negatives that might have prevented law enforcement from charging guilty people.

The error rates were seeing in these stories are jaw-dropping, especially when you consider the potential consequences of those errors. These stories ought to be a huge national scandal.

Note that this particular lab was affiliated with a university; it didn’t fall under the auspices of a law enforcement agency. The latter is especially problematic, but you don’t correct these problems simply by giving a lab more independence. The underlying problem is that we’re producing evidence that’s presented in court as “science” under conditions that fall well short of that definition.

This is also another data point in the case for a system of rivalrous redundancy. I think it’s safe to say that you’re considerably less likely to fall into a rut of “benign neglect” if you know your results will be regularly double-checked by another lab.

Another week, another man shot dead during a drug raid. William Cooper, 69, of Hampton, Virginia, was killed over the weekend after an informant told local police that he was selling prescription painkillers. Cooper apparently fired at the police as they came into his home.

There’s nothing in the articles linked above, or this one, indicating that police found anything incriminating in Cooper’s home. Maybe that information will come out later. But generally speaking, when police do find evidence of criminal activity after a raid, that information is quickly handed over to the press, particularly in raids that end in violence.

Instead, we get to read about the service records of the cops who killed Cooper, how this example of police killing a man is just more proof of the dangers of police work, how thankful the Hampton Police department is “that the officers are OK and safe and were not injured,” and how sorry we should feel for the officers who killed Cooper because “their lives will never be the same.”

From an interview with a neighbor:

Jesse Pittman, was working on the air conditioning unit on the roof of the Living Water Tabernacle Baptist Church at 1612 Kecoughtan Road, about three properties away from the house that was raided, on Saturday morning when he saw a large white, unmarked van pull up in Clifton Street.

He said about five or six police officers got out of the van and kicked in the door of a house. “I just heard shots. I can’t say how many,” he said.

“Just heard shots.” That would seem to indicate that he did not hear an announcement. This article indicates that Cooper’s neighbors saw no evidence of drug activity at his home. From an interview with a friend of Cooper’s:

A friend of the Hampton man shot and killed during a police raid at his house Saturday said he thinks the 69-year-old man opened fire on officers because he was startled and thought they were criminal intruders . . .

Both of those factors, Zacharias said, might have caused him not to recognize the police conducting the 10 a.m. search.

“People around here sleep with a gun beside their bed because of all the home invasions we’ve had,” Zacharias said. “The guy was a nice guy. The guy was a good guy.”

Once again, we also get the absurd-on-its-face argument from the police that these tactics are both absolutely necessary to preserve “the element of surprise” and that there’s simply no way Cooper couldn’t have known that the men breaking into his home were cops:

Price declined to say whether the officers forced entry into the home. But the neighbor’s report of a forced entry was backed by the fact that the left side of the front door, near the door jam, was severely broken.

A common practice in executing a warrant is for police to announce their presence with loud knocks on the front door and words such as, “Police!” or “Police search warrant!”

After a few moments of warning, the door is typically broken, often with a battering ram or other device.

The element of surprise is considered important in many such cases to not allow time for the suspect to hide or dispose of the drugs, such as by flushing them down the toilet.

Price said that even after officers are inside a home, they continue to call out, “Police! Police! Police!” in loud tones. He also said that officers conducting such searches wear clothing marked on both front and back with large letters saying, “POLICE.”

“It’s very obvious that we’re the police,” he said.

Well, sure. “Very obvious.” Clearly this dead, 69-year-old-man-with-cataracts, William Cooper, was just an idiot, then. Carry on.

It’s only been a few days since the shooting, but Hampton Police Chief Charles Jordan can already say he “feels confident” that his officers’ actions “were justified.” But not to worry. Just because Chief Jordan is already confident he knows the outcome of his department’s investigation doesn’t mean the investigation itself won’t be impartial.

So I guess it’s settled, then. Clearly this 69-year-old man who at worst was selling prescription painkillers (and again, we don’t yet have any evidence of that, other than an alleged tip from an informant, who will likely never be identified) knowingly, intentionally took on a team of raiding cops while armed only with a handgun. No need to question the tactics, here. No need to ask if it was really the smartest idea for armed cops to force their way into the home of a sick elderly man with poor vision to serve a search warrant for evidence of nonviolent crimes. No need to ask any further questions at all, really. Just put your faith in Chief Jordan and the integrity of his department’s not-at-all-predetermined investigation.

No, the only lesson we ought to draw from this police killing of a 69-year-old man in his own home . . . is that police work is dangerous.

MORE: From the comments:

A friend of mine was there. More specifically he was at his daughter’s softball game, 200ft away from the shooting. There were reports of stray rounds buzzing around. The game was call off due to everyone hitting the deck and generally freaking out. Haven’t seen anything in the articles about the fact that there were a couple dozen 10 year old kids playing just a stone’s throw away from the raid.

• Note to CNN: When you vastly increase the supply of buyers of a service with government subsidies, sellers of that service can pretty much set their price.
• Georgia lawmakers show their contempt for illegal immigrants, cripple the state’s agriculture sector in the process. Enjoy your “day without a Mexican”, Georgia.
• U.K. soldier killed in Afghanistan leaves $160K for his pals to party in Las Vegas.
• Massachusetts man sets himself aflame, dies in front of a county courthouse. William Grigg has the story of Thomas Ball, who Grigg says was “broken by the state”.
• John Whitehead on the new powers the FBI has granted itself. It’s good to see conservatives up in arms over this stuff.
• Nebraska prisons now at 140 percent of capacity.
• Study: Wrongful convictions have cost Illinois taxpayers $214 million.

My column from the Reason criminal injustice issue is now online. It looks at a number of theories that attempt to explain the 20-year drop in crime in America, and concludes that the most likely explanation has little to do with crime at all.

I’ll be doing a three-part series on the theme for Huffington Post this week.

Here’s part one.

Rovinj, Croatia.

• Neighbor’s mistaken tip about a murder in progress leads to police breaking into home, police dog attack on innocent man.
• Travel writer Rick Steves on why we should decriminalize marijuana.
• Five SWAT cops cleared in the Jose Guerena shooting.
• Indoctrinate early!
• The Onion wants a Pulitzer. Should have won for its first post-9/11 issue. I think that’s the first time I can remember genuinely laughing after the attacks. Of the millions of words of commentary written since September 11, 2001, the words in that issue are still the most trenchant.
• Photo of the day.
• Here’s a follow-up on that ICE SWAT raid in Davis, California.
• This is also excellent advice for book publishers, bartenders, and attractive women.

• Obama ignored advice from most senior legal aides that continuing the war in Libya without Congressional approval would be illegal. Instead, he went with recommendations from lower-ranking lawyers in his administration. I think the lesson here is to staff your administration with enough lawyers that at least one of them will give you plausible deniability to do whatever the hell you want.
• Along the same lines, “It’s different when we do it . . . “
• Oh, and Obama continues to break his campaign promises on transparency, too.
• Volcano porn, South America edition.
• The rare kickass quote from a politician. Reader John Jenkins found the audio.
• Michigan lawmaker wants to pass a SWAT transparency bill like the one passed in Maryland in response to the Cheye Calvo raid. Would love to see more of this.
• Pretentious art theme generator.
• Strangely, he seems unconcerned about the lesbians.
• Slate interviews the great Louis C.K.

In summers past, we’ve come up with a theme for Five-Star Friday selections. This year, I think we’ll do an Agitator Playlist. Please note: I am not suggesting that any of these artists are Hayek-reading, Friedman-loving libertarians. Only that the songs themselves echo themes that will be familiar to readers of this site. Actually, some of the songs will be familiar, too. I’ve posted many of them before. Feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments.

We’ll start with the great, guitar-driven Los Lobos tune, “Road to Gila Bend”, a sympathetic look at an illegal immigrant’s harrowing journey across the border.

If you’re interested, I interviewed Los Lobos’ Louie Perez about this song and the album its from for Reason a few years ago. Here’s the original, sans video:

Here’s a cool acoustic version of the same song:

A few militarization stories that have been collecting in my inbox . . .

Here’s the latest addition to the Roanoke, Virginia, police force, thanks to a DHS grant:

Here’s photo of the police APV making appearances around Lancaster County, Pennsylvania this month. The city bought the vehicle in 2009 thanks to a quarter million dollar grant, also from DHS. I always wonder about the cammo. Why do so many SWAT teams wear camouflage? Are they really serving many warrants in the woods? I’ve been reporting on and researching this issue for more than five years now. I can’t recall a single story in which a SWAT team needed to sneak up on a drug dealer, fugitive, or hostage taker who was hiding in the trees.

Here’s one of a number of military-style pieces of equipment the Sun-Sentinel recently reported have been acquired by Florida police departments through DHS grants or the Pentagon’s surplus program. (Screen cap from a video you can watch at the link.)

Here’s an article about similar vehicles DHS has funded to fight the terrorism threat in terrorist hotspots like Garfield County, Colorado. And here’s a local news commentary about the city of Portland, Maine’s acquisition of a Sherman tank in 2009. (Actually, it’s a modified M-113 APC.)

Note the easy conflation of cops and soldiers in this article, headlined, “Area officers hone combat skills.”

And finally, for the kids . . .

The last time Chris Jones was at the Simi Valley police station, the matter was somewhat serious: She was filing a report for her stolen GPS.

But on Saturday, she and her family visited just for fun.

Her 4-year-old son, Brandon, had already checked out the SWAT team’s armored vehicle, but suddenly he was sprinting toward it again. He climbed in the side door and within seconds was popping his head in and out of the top hatch, a big grin on his face.

Hope they also handed out pellet guns and stuffed dogs for target practice. Here’s one more:

Michael Haecker and his 4-year-old son went to see the firetruck and the police department’s armored personnel carrier first, but then visited the Board of Health table and learned about brushing their teeth.

There’s something appropriate about juxtaposing the APC to an activity mundane as teeth-brushing. These sorts of images have become about that common.

Working with the feds, the Anne Arundel County, Maryland, Police Department set up a fraudulent payment processing business for online poker players. They then took the players’ money, under false pretenses, and deposited it in the federal government’s asset forfeiture fund. Complaining players, none of whom were ever charged with a crime, were told they’d have to try to recoup their losses from the poker sites, which of course have now had their assets seized in a separate federal investigation, and which never actually saw the money from these particular players, anyway.

Under federal “adoption” policy, any local police department working with the federal government in a criminal investigation gets to keep up to 80 percent of the property it seizes in that investigation. And once the feds get involved, the whole thing officially becomes a federal investigation, which allows local police departments to skirt state laws aimed at protecting citizens from forfeiture abuse.

In this case, the Anne Arundel Police Department bagged $30 million seized stolen from online poker players. They celebrated with a press conference and oversized novelty check. They’ll use the money to buy some cool new police equipment. Let’s hope it’s for more SWAT gear, so they can feel a bit safer the 150 times each year Anne Arundel County SWAT teams are deployed, most of the time to serve search warrants that result in misdemeanor charges.

I love the line from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore: “The government is not going to give the money to gamblers.” Except for the working stiff who finally wins $100 after spending $500/month on the state lottery for 10 years. Then the government will gladly give money to gamblers. Because they know they’ll get it right back.

(Via Amy Alkon)

• Good Dahlia Lithwick piece on the role of empathy in Supreme Court decisions.
• Why is this woman facing criminal charges? (MORE: Looks like they’ve decided not to press charges, and the story is more complicated than the prior linked article conveys.)
• Noted without comment.
• Former spy says Bush administration tried to dig up personal dirt on critic Juan Cole.
• “Ghost Ships of the Mothball Fleet”
• Interesting discussion of libertarianism and parental rights.
• It isn’t officially summer until the first petty bureaucrat shuts down a kids’ lemonade stand.
• Jimmy Carter: Call off the global drug war. Hey, this is the man we can thank for good beer.