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Longview SWAT team raids wrong home

Radley Balko called it "another isolated incident": In Longview, a SWAT team broke down the door of the wrong home last week in an apparent no-knock raid. The News Journal reported that "officers apparently were distracted by 'known suspects' in front of a home." The real targets were next door - alleged drug dealers who were arrested later the same evening without incident, so clearly in this case SWAT wasn't necessary to capture the actual suspects. In an editorial yesterday, the local paper declared that "local officials could do themselves ? and taxpayers ? a favor by inviting an outside, totally unbiased agency to come in and do their own investigation."As Balko wrote in the executive summary to a white paper for the CATO Institute on the subject in 2006:These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on October 28, 2010 (boomark / email).