No, I’m not exaggerating.

Kenneth Wright does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 a.m. on Tuesday.

“I look out of my window and I see 15 police officers,” Wright said.

Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as a S.W.A.T team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn.

“He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there,” Wright said.

According to Wright, officers also woke his three young children ages 3, 7, and 11 and put them in a Stockton police patrol car with him. Officers then searched his house.

As it turned out, the person law enforcement was looking for was not there – Wright’s estranged wife.

“They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids,” Wright said.

Wright said he later went to the mayor and Stockton Police Department, but the City of Stockton had nothing to do with Wright’s search warrant.

The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in the S.W.A.T for his wife’s defaulted student loans.

UPDATE: The Dept. of Education says the raid was not for loan collection but part of a criminal investigation into some sort of white collar crime (they didn’t offer much detail beyond that). As Matt Welch points out at the link, that still isn’t an appropriate use for a SWAT team, and still leaves a hell of a lot of unanswered questions.

Cavtat, Croatia.

• Hilarious list of kiss-off letters from journalists to their former bosses.
• Cop to photographer: “If you take my picture again, I’m going to break your fucking face.”
• More police loathing of the Second Amendment.
• Man arrested, charged with disorderly conduct for paying a medical bill in pennies.
• That Miami Beach incident is looking worse and worse for the police. Turns out they confiscated a TV crew’s camera as well.
• More debunking of Nicholas Kristof’s silly Pakistan column.
• Canadian police try to shoot at dog during a drug raid, shoot a human instead.

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Matt Welch’s editor’s note introducing the Reason special issue on the criminal justice system is now available online.

Excerpt:

America has one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. More than 7 million people are under correctional supervision in this country. These staggering statistics—no other country comes close in percentage terms, let alone raw numbers—have serious consequences. For one thing, there is the fiscal cost: The corrections system lags only Medicaid in government spending growth on the state level. Yet most prisons are overcrowded, underserviced, and exponentially more dangerous than any decent society should tolerate.

Worse are the cascading social effects, some of which you might not initially expect. Although prison is overwhelmingly the province of men, black women in America’s inner cities have some of the highest HIV infection rates in the developed world. Why? Because their male partners contracted the virus behind bars, via consensual sex or rape, often going undiagnosed while serving out their terms.

Very few in our political and media classes are familiar with the communities most ravaged by crime and punishment. No politician ever lost an election by alienating the ex-con vote (in no small part because in a dozen states, ex-felons who have completed parole are still permanently barred from voting). It is no accident that the people most likely to languish behind bars—poor minorities, sex offenders, illegal immigrants—tend to be among the most reviled groups in American society.

To the extent that we even think about our prison population bomb, we have allowed ourselves to believe it’s an acceptable price to pay for the recent reduction in crime. But the rates of incarceration and crime aren’t so easily correlated, let alone quantified in terms of cause and effect. And the notion that we are keeping dangerous predators off the streets is belied by the fact that an estimated 1 million prisoners in the U.S. are serving time for nonviolent offenses, predominantly related to drugs.

The drug war is a leading supplier to the prison industry and the biggest inspiration for new ways to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. More than 800,000 people are still arrested each year for marijuana alone, despite the widespread misconception that pot has been largely decriminalized, and despite the fact that close to half of all Americans by now have smoked it, and more than half, by some surveys, favor legalizing it. We can thank the drug war for “stop-and-frisk” harassment of young New Yorkers, for the transfer of military equipment and tactics to local police departments, for wrong-door SWAT raids that kill innocents, for an entire shadow economy of dubious jailhouse snitching and back-room sentence reductions. Vanishingly few public officials even pretend anymore that the drug war can somehow be “won.”

Meanwhile, government at every level continues to run out of money. So conditions are becoming increasingly ripe for a Johnsonian cost-benefit analysis to conclude that drug prohibition needs to go the way of alcohol prohibition. It remains my hope, even my conviction, that these hardheaded arguments will reverse this evil policy during the next decade or two.

Carlos Miller has the details.

Miami Beach police did their best to destroy a citizen video that shows them shooting a man to death in a hail of bullets Memorial Day.

First, police pointed their guns at the man who shot the video, according to a Miami Herald interview with the videographer.

Then they ordered the man and his girlfriend out the car and threw them down to the ground, yelling “you want to be fucking paparazzi?”

Then they snatched the cell phone from his hand and slammed it to the ground before stomping on it. Then they placed the smashed phone in the videographer’s back pocket as he was laying down on the ground.

And finally, they took him to a mobile command center where they snapped his photo and demanded the phone again, then took him to police headquarters where they conducted a recorded interview with him before releasing him.

But what they didn’t know was that Narces Benoit had removed the SIM card and hid it in his mouth, which means the video survived.

Good for Benoit. Hiding the SIM card in his mouth was a ballsy move. More here from the Miami Herald.

Budapest.

Think there’s any way we can get Sheriff Taylor to give the sheriff here in Davidson County, Tennessee a lecture on the finer points of due process?

Of the 141 countries ranked in the most recent Economic Freedom of the World report, Pakistan clocks in at 118.

But never mind, like, data and stuff. Today, NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof helpfully informs us that “the long trajectory of history has been for governments to take on more responsibilities, and for citizens to pay more taxes” and that if we dare interfere with that trajectory, we may soon find ourselves in a “a low-tax laissez-faire Eden . . . like Pakistan[.]“

• Now there’s an Obama wiener pick.
• Firemen, police officers watch a man drown in cold water, claim they were bound by budget constraints, department policy from trying to save him. Bystander eventually jumps in to salvage the body.
• Your quirky contrarianism has finally gone too far, Slate.
• More absurdity with that planned Whole Foods in Boston.
• Here’s a great example of how public health fanaticism will almost certainly cause more people to die.
• Arrested for attempting to feed the homeless.
• Mass dance protest party shuts down the Jefferson Memorial. I’m pretty sure TJ would have gotten a kick out of this. And yes. The small stuff is worth fighting for, too.

….doing good without prior government approval? That’ll be a $275 fine.

And let it be a lesson to you.

(Via Ted S. in the comments.)

An NIJ report on Tasers gives us the ol’ “Nothing to see, here”.  Nut graph:

“There is no conclusive medical evidence in the current body of research literature that indicates a high risk of serious injury or death to humans from the direct or indirect cardiovascular or metabolic effects of short-term CED exposure in healthy, normal, nonstressed, nonintoxicated persons,” the report concludes.

And we all know that Tasers are never, ever used on people who are unhealthy, or who are intoxicated, or who are under some sort of duress. So the debate is settled!

• Obama administration: Crappy as ever on FOIA.
• Here’s a Kickstarter campaign for a film about recording police.
• I am the abusive boyfriend of lefty comment threads.
• Fakeconcretealligatorcide
• The ACLU launches a campaign to mark the 40-year anniversary of Nixon’s war on drugs.
• The U.S. Supreme Court unloads on the Fourth Amendment. Again.
• Your latest TSA molestation. Bonus points for threatening the woman’s son for recording it all.

Regulation gone wild in Canada:

Canadian bureaucrats have added insult to injury for a corn farmer south of Montreal whose fields have been damaged by near-record flooding. Martin Reid of Sabrevois, Quebec, says he’s been forced to buy a fishing licence to remove carp that are swimming in a metre of water on his flooded-out fields.

He says he bought the permit to avoid the problems he faced the last time he was forced to remove fish from his flooded farmland. In 1993, Reid was fined $1,000 for illegal fishing. “My father and I … were charged by Fisheries and Oceans Canada,” Reid recalled. “We were jointly responsible for having caused the death of fish for reasons other than sport fishing.”

Reid says the fine will jump to $100,000 if he’s cited a second time. He’s under strict orders to safeguard the lives of the carp once he begins to expel them.”We have to collect all of them, and we have to fish both sexes, that’s what (the permit) says,” Reid explained. “I have to transport them so as not to damage them, by containers with water inside. If some of them die, I have to bury them.”

You know you’re losing the PR battle when you’re arresting priests.

Father James Manship released video footage Thursday that contradicts an East Haven police report justifying his arrest.

Manship was arrested on Feb. 19 on misdemeanor charges while videotaping police officers in My Country Store, an East Haven business run by Ecuadorian immigrants. Manship pleaded not guilty to the charges, claiming that he was recording an incident of police harassment, part of an alleged campaign of systematic intimidation and racial profiling perpetrated by East Haven police against Latinos. Manship’s attorneys recently secured the footage from the East Haven Police Department, which confiscated his video camera at the time of the arrest . . .

The footage appears to contradict a claim made by the East Haven police department in a police report that was withheld until 13 days after the incident. The police report, David Cari, one of two arresting officers, states that he didn’t know what the New Haven priest was holding. He wrote that he saw an “unknown shiny silver object” that Manship had “cupped” in his hands, and was afraid for his safety. Read the police report here . . .

The police report alleges that Father Manship concealed the fact that he was videotaping the officers, by cupping his hands over “a silver object.”

“Not knowing if Manship was holding a camera or a possible weapon this officer asked Manship to show me what was in his hands,” Cari’s report reads.

In direct contradiction of Cari’s claim, the video from Manship’s camera shows Officer Cari twice verbally identifying the “silver object” as a camera.

“Sir what are you doing? Is there a reason that you have a camera on me?” says Officer Cari, in the video.

“I’m taking a video of what’s going on here,” Manship replies.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, what I’m going to do with that camera,” Officer Cari says, as he walks around a shelving unit to approach the priest.

Father Manship’s responses to the officers were calm and non-threatening, Fernandez-Chavero argued as he showed the footage.

The last few paragraphs are perfect.

Asked to respond to the allegations that police harassment has increased, [East Haven Police Department Attorney] Keefe said, “I have a very simple question: when was the last time anyone filed a complaint with any town official in East Haven” regarding police harassment of Latinos?

“None. Ever. No. None,” said Keefe, answering his own question.

“It’s one thing to have Father Manship slander the people of East Haven… It’s another to produce evidence of that,” Keefe said.

Manship has said that he was in the process of compiling evidence of police harassment before he was arrested by the police.

In better news, Connecticut public defender and blogger “Gideon’s Trumpet” reports that the state senate has passed the bill making it explicitly legal for citizens to record on-duty cops, and providing a cause of action against cops who violate that right.

A Terre Haute station interviews Michael Allison, the Illinois man facing up to 75 years in prison for making audio recordings of on-duty police officers and other public officials. Allison was the main subject of my January Reason feature, “The War on Cameras”.

The report gets a few things wrong, most notably the assertion recording cops is “illegal in a dozen states”.  A dozen states require all parties to consent before you can record a conversation, but all except Illinois and Massachusetts have an “expectation of privacy” provision that the courts to this point have ruled does not apply to on-duty police officers (or anyone in a public setting). That hasn’t stopped police from arresting people in those states (and others) anyway. But the charges don’t hold up in court.

This isn’t a distinction without a difference. When a media outlet reports that recording cops is “illegal” in these states (and the Terre Haute station is not the first to do so), it adds to the public perception that doing so is, in fact, illegal. This makes it more difficult to hold police officers accountable when they disregard the law. In order to overcome a police officer’s qualified immunity in a lawsuit for wrongful arrest, you have to show that a reasonable person (not a reasonable police officer) should have known that the arrest was in violation of clearly established law. When media outlets continue to incorrectly report that recording cops is illegal in these states, they contribute to public confusion about the law—and thus make it more difficult for people who have been wrongly arrested to argue in court that a reasonable person should have known that the arrest was illegal.

The reporter’s characterization of his amusing confrontation with a deputy in the courthouse is also incorrect. The reporter says they were advised by attorneys not to air the audio of the conversation because of the same law under which Allison is being prosecuted. But if they did make a recording of their interaction with the deputy, they’d be subject to prosecution regardless of whether or not they actually aired the audio.

Still, points for effort. This is a seven-and-a-half minute report from a local news station about an important issue that takes a skeptical view of law enforcement. That’s pretty rare.

I’ll have more about recent developments in the Illinois eavesdropping law in a forthcoming piece for Huffington Post.

• Gene Healy wraps up a three part-series on Obama’s imperial presidency.
• The latest front in the occupational licensing battle: clowns.
• Maryland transit cops illegally arrest photographer, cite PATRIOT Act.
• Rand Paul: You really need to walk this back.
• Up to 6,000 felony cases under review in San Francisco after cops caught on tape taking items from a hotel room that they never reported.

I mentioned yesterday that the story about the ACLU suing for prisoners in South Carolina to receive pornography sounded suspicious. With good reason. Here’s the actual lawsuit:

The American Civil Liberties Union today asked a federal judge to immediately block enforcement of a policy at a South Carolina jail that effectively bans many books, magazines and newspapers from being sent to prisoners.

In a motion seeking an order enjoining the ban, the ACLU charges that officials at the Berkeley County Detention Center in Moncks Corner, S.C. are unconstitutionally refusing to allow prisoners to receive any materials that contain staples or pictures of any level of nudity, including beachwear or underwear.

“This is nothing more than an excuse by jail officials to ban books and magazines for no good reason,” said David Shapiro, staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project. “There is no justification for denying detainees access to periodicals and in the process cutting them off from the outside world.”

After the ACLU filed a lawsuit last year challenging an unconstitutional policy at the jail barring all books, magazines and newspapers – except for the Bible – from being sent to prisoners, jail officials responded by claiming they only banned materials containing staples and any degree of nudity. But as the ACLU points out in its motion, jail officials were selling detainees legal pads with staples in them at the jail commissary even as they were claiming to ban publications with staples as a supposed security risk.

“Jail officials are looking for any excuse they can come up with to obscure the fact that they are unconstitutionally censoring materials sent to detainees,” said Victoria Middleton, Executive Director of the ACLU of South Carolina. “And in so doing they are failing to serve the detainees and the taxpayers of South Carolina. Helping prisoners rehabilitate themselves and maintain a connection to the outside world by reading books and magazines is a key part of what should be our larger and fiscally prudent objective of reducing the number of people we lock up by lowering recidivism rates.”

KABC, the source of the story, didn’t quote anyone from the ACLU in its article, only a jail official, who spun it as a story about porn. That’s when it was picked up by Drudge, at which point it spread out over the web.

Here’s more, from the NY Daily News:

“The latest thing they have come up with in response for preliminary injunction was the notion that we are trying to allow pornography into the jail. Absolutely nothing could be further for the truth,” ACLU spokesman Will Matthews told the Daily News.

Matthews said the jail’s policy was simply too broad. He pointed to a mail room clerk at the jail who told the organization that prisoners were previously banned from receiving a publication with a Venus de Milo sculpture and a copy of the Washington Post because it contained an ad with women in lingerie.

“None of this is to suggest that jails must permit pornography,” the injunction states. “Merely that a jail cannot constitutionally ban all publications that sometimes show men and women wearing underwear or dressed for the beach.”

The special issue of Reason on the criminal justice system that Jacob Sullum and I co-edited officially hits newsstands today.

Go pick it up!

• This story smells dubious to me. Or at least incomplete. If it’s accurate, it’s unfortunate. Seems like there are better things the ACLU could be spending its money on than a “porn for prisoners” campaign. Just feeds into right-wing stereotypes of the organization.
• Another overly aggressive SWAT raid for child porn with what appears to be some really sloppy police work.
• Your creepy surveillance state story of the day.
• FDR’s solicitor general lied to the U.S. Supreme Court during the infamous Japanese internment case.
• Some big international names call for decriminalizing drugs.
• Scott Greenfield on the rape acquittal of two cops in New York: “For those who balk at the fact that the system always seems to work better when it’s a cop in the dock, another unfortunate reality, the answer isn’t to be unfair to cops, but to be more fair to all.” I agree, though there’s ample reason to at least make sure these particular cops never wear a badge again.
• Guy uses software to spy on the man who stole his computer. Then sets up a blog about it.
• America’s poor better off than Indian’s wealthiest. This is a great way of looking at the issue of income inequality. Where the lowest part of that U.S. line lies is a hell of a lot more important than its slope.

Why did these people camp out overnight? To what big event are they scrambling to be at the head of the line to see?

First, take a guess. Then click here for the story. Then quietly weep for humanity.

We can now add sage to the list of substances that have turned out false positives on the field tests cops use when they think they’ve found marijuana. The list also includes chocolate chip cookies; deoderant; billiards chalk; Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap; patchouli, spearmint, and eucalyptus; and breath mints.

Why, it’s almost as if these field tests say whatever the cops want them to say. They’re like the drug-detecting dogs of . . . um . . . drug detection. Okay. So that metaphor doesn’t work.

This particular story begins with the poor lady out doing some birdwatching.

Sheriff’s Deputy Dominic Raimondi, 51, mistook Brown’s sage for marijuana, then searched her car and found more. His field kit said the sage — purchased at an airport gift shop in Albuquerque, N.M. — tested positive for marijuana.

He did not arrest her that day in March 2009, but sent the 50 grams of “contraband” to the crime lab for a more definitive test.

Assistant State Attorney Mark Horn ordered Brown’s arrest without having the sage tested, court records show.

Three months later, Raimondi showed up at the Massage Envy in Weston where Brown works and took her away in handcuffs.

“They arrested me in front of my customers, my boss, my co-workers,” Brown said. She later was subjected to a body cavity search, a strip search and an overnight stay in jail.

A month later, Brown’s attorney discovered that the sage had never been tested at the Broward Sheriff’s Office crime lab.

“When I found out they didn’t do a lab test, I was outraged,” said her Miami attorney, Bill Ullman. “I raised hell about that.”

On July 23, 2009, Ullman demanded that the sage be tested.

The lab test concluded that the dried sage was not marijuana at all. The criminal charges were dropped.

So the prosecutor swore in a statement that the woman was in possession of marijuana, despite the fact that the sage had never been tested in a lab. And they had three months to test it. This led to Brown’s wrongful arrest in front of customers and colleagues, a strip search, and her detention.

A  judge then tossed Brown’s negligence and malicious prosecution lawsuit because of . . . you guessed it . . . absolute prosecutorial immunity.