There Is No [Stan] Hope

Yesterday I posted a retelling of a chapter from Nano’s End by Stan Hopes: a dystopia where police shoot a 92 year old woman and plant illegal nanobots on her to justify their raid. These officers are caught and punished but as a result of the uproar their anti-nanobot department is expanded from 8 to 30.

My retelling of it was purposely silly and I expected the explanation would be obvious. There is no novel called Nano’s End. None of this is in a future sci-fi dystopia, just the grim reality of today’s drug war, especially in the USA. The events describe are about the Kathryn Johnston shooting, which I invite you to read about. I did not change any major details or numbers, just replaced the idea of drugs with silly nanobots and guns with silly particle beam discombobulators.

Of course most drug raids of homes do not end in death. However there are plenty of stories — see this map by the Cato Institute. The frightening thing is that there are probably over 200 paramilitary-style drug raids in the USA every day.

Here is one video of a recent raid that has gotten a lot of coverage (hat tip Dispatches From The Culture Wars).

Here’s the YouTube link

If you don’t have the stomach to watch, I quote from Balko’s description: “SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on. They found a ‘small amount’ of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.” The nature of the charge given how they busted shooting into a room with the same child is particularly Orwellian.

Perhaps you have some doubts about how insane and dystopian the drug war has gotten. I therefore leave you with an an email to Balko which came was sent as a reaction to the above SWAT raid.

I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.

For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they’re after is present at the location, and that it’s too dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be pretty tough to convince, too. (I’m a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call “cordon and knock”: they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to surrender. In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn’t happen until after the sun comes up.

Oh, and all of the bad guys we’re going after are closely tied to killing and maiming people.

What might be amazing to American cops is that the vast majority of our targets surrender when called out.

I don’t have a clear picture of the resources available to most police departments, but even so, I don’t see any reason why they can’t use similar methods.

Because whilst protecting “the populace” from drugs might have been the intended aim of the drug war, it’s kind of gotten beyond that. In a fairly out of control way if I may add.