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Reed’s last words were, “Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book.”
By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the Sentinel that police asked them where they were hiding illegal drugs and weapons. But in the end, thirty-four of the thirty-seven arrests were for “barbering without a license,” a misdemeanor for which only three people have ever served jail time in Florida.
In 2012 a California police officer shot and killed a boxer puppy and pregnant chihuahua, claiming the boxer had threatened him. The chihuahua, he said, got caught in the crossfire. Police officers have also recently shot dogs that were chained, tied, or leashed, going so far as to kill pets while merely questioning neighbors about a crime in the area, cutting across private property while in pursuit of a suspect, and after responding to false burglar alarms.
The fact that the Postal Service offers such training and most police departments don’t lends some credence to the theory that dog shootings are part of the larger problem of a battlefield mentality that lets police use lethal force in response to the slightest threat—usually with few consequences.
Partisan reaction to aggressive police actions against opponents tends to fall somewhere between indifference and schadenfreude.
When the couple told the deputies that the address on the warrant was two doors down, the police refused to leave. They continued to look around the couple’s house for another forty-five minutes. Then two shots rang out from the backyard. A deputy had gone into the backyard and shot the couple’s five-year-old boxer, Pearl. He claimed that he feared for his life. Pam Myers told a local news station, “I said, ‘You just shot my dog.’ I just wanted to go out and hold her a bit. They wouldn’t even let me go out.”
Armed with these incidents, Calvo went to the Maryland legislature to push for reform. The bill he proposed was modest. It required every police agency in Maryland with a SWAT team to issue a quarterly report—later amended to twice yearly—on how many times the team was deployed, for what purpose, and whether any shots were fired during the raid. It was a simple transparency bill. It put no limits or restrictions on how often or under what circumstances SWAT teams could be used. Yet it was the only bill of its kind in the country.
the amount of force the government uses to enforce a given law should be based on a reasonable assessment of the threat posed by the person suspected of committing the crime, not by what sort of message the government wants to send about how seriously it takes whatever crime it happens to be enforcing.
if the drug war is being waged to protect the public, the public should be able to see exactly how the war is being waged.
Getting cops in shape is a confidence builder, and it gets people away from relying too much on the weapons they have on their belt.”
Good ideas for accountability policies include civilian review boards, but only if they have subpoena power, are granted the authority to impose discipline, and can’t be overruled by arbitrators.
I have my own army in the NYPD—the seventh largest army in the world. —NEW YORK CITY MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
Police officers today are a protected class, one no politician wants to oppose. Law enforcement interests may occasionally come up short on budgetary issues, but legislatures rarely if ever pass new laws to hold police more accountable, to restrict their powers, or to make them more transparent. In short, police today embody all of the threats the Founders feared were posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn’t have anticipated.
we have passed laws and policies that have elevated police officers above the people they serve. As Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute has written, you could make a good argument that police should be held to a higher standard than regular citizens. And you could make a good argument they should be held to the same standard. But it’s hard to conceive of a convincing argument that they should be held to a lower one. But that’s exactly what we’ve done.
