Item 1: One of the things bouncing around the libertarian blogosphere is Radley Balko’s recent whitepaper for the Cato Institute called Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. It’s about the absurd creation of SWAT-style teams for seemingly even the smallest towns. These teams often create violent confrontations where they appear not to have been necessary, often raid the wrong house, and occasionally kill innocent people.
Item 2: The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia has created a series of CounterAttack TV anti-drunk-driving ads, each of which ends with the death of the spokesperson in a violent collision, presumably caused by a drunk driver.
Does anybody else besides me think that the Cato Institute (or some other libertarian think tank) should be producing anti-paramilitary-police ads in which the spokesperson is killed in a botched SWAT-style raid?
Update: I’ve changed “SWAT” to “SWAT-style” because a lot of these teams aren’t really in the mold of the original SWAT concept of a highly-trained specialized team.
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