This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 15th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown. The Fruitless Raid in July on the home of Shai Calvo, the Mayor of

Berwyn Heights, Maryland underscores just how poorly

informed and gung-ho police can be when they get the authority to execute a no-knock raid.

For Calvo, was the police killing his two dogs and other devastation to his home and family?

So what must police believe in order to decide that an ill-conceived raid like the one on Mayor Calvo can be executed without apology and without restitution.

Radley Balco, a senior editor at Reason magazine, has chronicled hundreds of botched raids

in his 2006 Cato Institute report overkill.

The rise of paramilitary police raids in America

he spoke at a Cato policy forum on no-knock raids held last week.

You can hear the full event at Cato.org.

When these raids take place, there's a mandatory, well when raids don't turn up what they're supposed to turn up or, you know, people are clearly innocent of any wrongdoing, have these rates executed in their homes, multiple

levels of government have to fail in order to make that happen. I think that, well I think you're right that multiple levels of

government have to fail but I also think that it's not it's not something we should

be surprised about. I think that the very nature of drug policing

lends itself to mistakes because obviously in drug policing you don't have a victim and so you're relying you're getting your

information from drug informants you're getting your information from other drug dealers

you're getting information from undercover cops, and that information is,

well let's say that's not all that reliable and so you're you're conducting these

very violent confrontational raids, dangerous raids, based on, you know,

information that we know isn't particularly reliable. And so you combine that then with you know the statistics oriented

nature of drug policing where you know police get promoted based on how many

...