Conservatives and Police
Radley Balko is having a back and forth with a guest blogger at Patterico over the drug war and violent crime. Balko is always worth checking out, because while many of us bloggers may call ourselves the new media, we are mostly just a bunch of op-ed pages. Balko is one of the few major bloggers out there doing real reporting.
One part of the discussion caught my attention:
Second, JRM leaves out the rest of my discussion of police militarization in the piece, which includes the very real, not-made-up statistic based on police department surveys done by Peter Kraska showing the number of SWAT deployments in the U.S. jumping from a few hundred per year in the 1970s to 50,000 or more per year today. Most of these SWAT deployments are to serve drug warrants. JRM can disagree, but my point is that even if these raids don't produce a single gun shot (though we know that's far from the case), that's a disturbing trend. The image of state agents dressed in black, kicking down doors, and wresting people out of bed at gunpoint in order to police nonviolent crimes just isn't one I associated with a free society (oddly enough, some prominent conservatives agree, at least when other countries do it).
Perhaps because I read this as my inbox is filled with Minuteman missives (I don't know how they got the impression I was somehow sympathetic to their cause) asking me to send a valentine to agents Compean and Ramos, but I sometimes really wonder about conservatives.
Conservatives distrust government and government bureaucrats. Many understand public choice theory. Many understand how faulty incentives within government can turn even good, smart people into stupid bad actors.
So I am left to wonder why conservatives feel ever so much better about the situation when the government employee is given a gun, and the unique authority to use it on the citizenry?