Collateral damage

Radley Balko from Reason Magazine gives some background on recent victims of paramilitary police raids:

Three drug war deaths in recent headlines show that the Verdun mentality continues to thrive in America's century-old effort to protect its citizens from themselves. Today, actual war weaponry, armor, and tactics are as much a part of the war on drugs as Reagan's rhetoric implied back when the drug war was young. And law enforcement officials shrug off the deaths of innocents as if they were the same sort of collateral damage you'd find on a battlefield.

Go read.

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