The Daily Outrage

Radley's got the SWAT team outrage of the day and it's a two-fer. Two families with young children, were awakened in early hour raids by NYPD SWAT warriors. The police broke down their doors, slashed their furniture, trashed the children's rooms, dumped their dry goods all over the kitchen and punched holes in the walls. They didn't clean it up afterwards.

Total haul? One half a marijuana joint in an ashtray. No drugs whatsoever from the other apartment. This is what your billions of tax dollars are going for folks. Does the NYPD really need to break down doors and rip sleeping children from their beds to make a bust for less than a gram of pot? Worse yet, there have been 300 complaints this year made about mistaken searches, most often caused by a bad informant or sloppily executed warrants. Only 15 have been found improper by internal investigations.

Radley explains why they get off and why they continue to get away with this level of overkill in the war on some drugs. Read his post and then remember, if we legalized drugs, these raids wouldn't be necessary either. And maybe a few more kids would grow up to believe the police are their friends, instead of agents of terror.

And if you're not outraged enough by that, check out the woman who was "accidentally" killed after she bought a couple of pain pills from a nursing home resident. You have to ask why they need to draw guns in a case like this. Don't you think a simple, "ma'am you're under arrest," would have sufficed?