Radley Balko waxes eloquently and succintly on problems in modern day law enforcement.

More at the links.

Law and Order: Interview with Radley Balko Part I - Ideas Special Report:

"Q. In your work, you've frequently reported on police abuses and the appropriate role of law enforcement in a free society. Though you're often writing in regard to specific controversies, I wonder if you have any general criticisms of the American criminal justice system. What's wrong about where we're at? What are the most urgent improvements you would recommend?

I think the main problem is too much attention to numbers and statistics, which I think has been largely driven by the 40 years of "get tough on crime" rhetoric and slogan-based crime policy we've been getting from politicians. Everyone wants to boast about declines in crime statistics. But the focus on raw numbers has created some perverse incentives, from beat cops through mayors and police chiefs.

Ed Burns, the former Baltimore narcotics cop and co-creator of the HBO series The Wire talks about this often. Drug cops are evaluated based on how many people they arrest, and what quantity of drugs they seize.

Take what was saw in Atlanta after the Katherine Johnston case--the 92-year-old woman who was killed in a botched drug raid. Drug cops in Atlanta had quotas of drug arrests and seizures they had to meet each month. So there was a rush to meet the quota...

Prosecutors get re-elected or move on to higher office when they put lots of people in prison. They rarely get credit for choosing not to prosecute someone in the interest of justice. That's not to say it doesn't happen. But there's rarely any professional reward for doing so. In fact, they usually get flack for it, particularly in high-profile cases. Prosecutors are also rarely sanctioned for bending or breaking the rules. They're virtually immune from lawsuits, even if they convict the wrong person, and even if prosecutorial misconduct was a major factor in the conviction. So you have all this pressure on winning convictions, with little sanction for going too far..."

Law and Order: Interview with Radley Balko Part II - Ideas Special Report:

"Q: You've criticized the militarization of law enforcement. It's a topic The Atlantic covered in the aftermath of the Columbine shooting, when police departments all over America began encouraging a SWAT team mentality among regular officers. Why is this war mentality a bad thing? Aren't there heavily armed bad guys who are literally causing war-like casualties in urban neighborhoods?

The military is trained to kill people and break things -- to annihilate a foreign enemy. The police are charged with protecting our rights while securing the peace. Those are two very different missions, and it's dangerous to conflate them. But that seems to be what's happening.

...We're dressing police officers in military attire, giving them military-grade weaponry, training them in military tactics, then sending them into American cities and neighborhoods and telling them they're fighting a war--be it the war on drugs, or a more generic war on crime. That's not a healthy development for a free society. People who live in high-crime areas are still American citizens with rights. They aren't the foreign residents of an enemy nation..."