Being "professional" means never having to say you're sorry

In yet another case in the long list of examples of Americans losing their civil liberties and Fourth Amendment rights due to the failed War on Drugs, Annapolis, Maryland police raided an apartment with a "no-knock" warrant for drugs last Wednesday, setting off flash-bang grenades and kicking one of the occupants in the groin, before realizing one thing:

They had the wrong address.

Oops.

Of course, to save face, the department could only muster up the following pathetic statement:

"Dalton said they were supposed to have raided a different apartment and said the incident was regrettable."

No apology needed, I guess. The department screws up royally, terrorizing innocent people due to ignoring the most basic fact of a warrant search, finding the right address, and they can't even say "We're sorry". Their only real "regret" was that their fundamental investigational error made the news, I'd wager.

I hope that they "regret" the large amount of money they're going to have to pay this couple, as well.

As Radley Balko regularly points out in his excellent blog The Agitator, "no-knock" raids are used routinely today in even the most minor of warrant executions, and mistakes are frequently made, sometimes with fatal consequences for both parties. The most famous example of this would be the ATF and their PR event at Waco, Texas in 1992 that literally blew up in their faces.

These types of raids should only be used in the most extreme of circumstances, when there is a measurable, demonstratable need, not just the old saw of "officer safety". Warrant searches are dangerous, yes, but that doesn't justify treating every single one as a DEFCON 1 situation. In my view, there's only a vanishingly small set of cases that justify having armed, jackbooted stormtroopers destroy property and terrorize citizens, and garden-variety pot busts don't make the cut. The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect citizens from events like this, and I don't see a "drug war" exemption in the Constitution.