The incongruity of a para-military SWAT team invading a middle-class, middle-America home is shocking:
This is your war on drugs, Megan McArdle says:
Have you ever had one of those arguments in a bar that start around eleven and wind up when the bartender kicks you out? It starts off on some perfectly reasonable topic, but as the hours and the drinks mount up, the participants are forced to stake out some clear logical positions, and in doing so, crawl farther and farther out along the limb they are defending… until suddenly you reach a point at which one of the debaters can either abandon their initial commitment, or endorse the slaughter of 30,000 Guatamalan orphans. And there’s this long pause, and then he says, “Look, it’s not like I want to kill those orphans… ”
This is our nation’s drug enforcement in a nutshell. We started out by banning the things. And people kept taking them. So we made the punishments more draconian. But people kept selling them. So we pushed the markets deep into black market territory, and got the predictable violence… and then we upped our game, turning drug squads into quasi-paramilitary raiders. Somewhere along the way, we got so focused on enforcing the law that we lost sight of the purpose of the law, which is to make life in America better.
I don’t know how anyone can watch that video, and think to themselves, “Yes, this is definitely worth it to rid the world of the scourge of excess pizza consumption and dopey, giggly conversations about cartoons.” Short of multiple homicide, I’m having trouble coming up with anything that justifies that kind of police action. And you know, I doubt the police could either. But they weren’t busy trying to figure out if they were maximizing the welfare of their larger society. They were, in that most terrifying of phrases, just doing their jobs.
And in the end, that is our shame, not theirs.
An occasional drinking buddy of mine writes at Blackfive.net — Uncle Jimbo. He posted on that video, and got some angry mail.
Radly Balko talks about this sort of thing all the time, and has noted that the police blogs and police commenters on news stories related to this have what seems to me absolutely crazy attitudes.
I do agree with one argument from the folks defending the police: it is far too easy to play Monday-morning quarterback after a raid or violent encounter. Split-second decisions made with limited information tend to look bad later.
My initial response to this video was “Wow. This video will instantly make a Libertarian out of anyone who watches it.” I can’t conceive of many things that would justify such a raid; perhaps if the guy was thought to be a terrorist building a bomb. Possessing weed with intent to sell does not qualify in my mind.