Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

Full and edited versions of our podcasts are available on our website at

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The last 25 years have seen a dramatic rise in paramilitary-style police raids

where SWAT teams storm in unannounced and without knocking.

Most often used to serve drug warrants, no-OC raids needlessly subject non-violent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted

suspects to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping.

Policy analyst Radley Balco documents this disturbing trend in his new white paper,

Overkill, the rise of paramilitary police raids in America.

In conjunction with the policy forum on no-knock raids at the Cato Institute this afternoon,

today's podcast is a re-release of a previously recorded interview with Radley.

Radley, why did this topic peak your interest?

Obviously as a Libertarian I've always been concerned about the drug war and it's obviously part of my

beat as a policy analyst here Koe cover civil. And one thing I noticed while just sort of, you know,

reading articles about the drug war was this,

there seemed to be this continuing problem

of police on drug grades hitting the wrong home and rousing people from their sleep,

breaking down doors at two or three o'clock in the morning, dragging kids out of bed at

gunpoint and handcuffing them and then realizing they had the wrong house.

And it was happening over and over again and of course you obviously don't conclude that police are intentionally

rating the wrong house.

And so I started looking into it a little more

...