Excellent Radley Balko interview.

Five questions for Radley Balko | The Economist:

"RADLEY BALKO is an award-winning investigative reporter who focuses on civil liberties and criminal justice. He is a senior editor at Reason magazine, where he writes a monthly column. He also writes a weekly column for Reason's website and blogs at Hit & Run and The Agitator, his personal blog, which is a must read for anyone with a healthy scepticism of the government's activities...

DIA: You've written about the creeping militarisation of law enforcement in America. How has this trend manifested itself and what are the consequences for the quality of policing?

Mr Balko: The most obvious way it has manifested itself is in the explosion in the use of SWAT teams and similar paramilitary police units over the last 25 years. The criminologist Peter Kraska has surveyed their use over that time. He's found that the total number of SWAT-team deployments in the 1970s was a few hundred times per year, over the entire country. By the 1980s, it was a few thousand times per year. And by around 2005, Mr Kraska estimates around 50,000 times per year. The surge has been driven entirely by the drug war, with the vast majority of SWAT deployments being used to serve drug-related search warrants.

This has led to a militaristic mindset among America's police departments, beyond just SWAT teams. Driven by "war on crime" and "war on drugs" rhetoric set by political leaders, police officers have increasingly taken on the psyche of soldiers. There's a pervasive and troubling "us versus them" attitude in policing today. Policing has become more reactionary, more aggressive, and it's poisoning the relationship between the police and the communities they serve.

I should add that I don't think police officers themselves are to blame for this, nor, obviously, are all police officers guilty of it. These are problems spawned by 35 years or so of bad policies set by politicians. That's really where any reform would need to start.

DIA: Another criminal justice issue you often deal with is the use of forensic evidence. How is forensic evidence being abused in the courtroom, and what can be done to improve the way we use science in criminal proceedings?

Mr Balko: The main problem with forensic evidence is that it isn't science but it's usually presented to juries as if it were. Forensic evidence—think fingerprint matching, hair and fiber analysis, ballistics, etc—has been largely invented by and developed by police and police organisations. But when its presented in court, it's often presented with the gloss of science. It's telling that the one type of forensic evidence that actually was developed in the scientific community—DNA testing—is really the only type that's relatively certain (provided the evidence is handled properly). And it's showing us just how flawed and overstated other areas of forensics really are...

DIA: Beyond the two discussed above, what are the most critical flaws in America's criminal justice system?

Mr Balko: Incentives. At every step in the process, the incentive is toward putting people in jail. And there's almost no penalty at all for state actors who overstep their authority. Police departments, for example, get federal anti-drug grants based in large part on how many people they arrest on drug charges. After the botched drug raid in Atlanta a few years ago in which a raiding police team shot and killed an innocent 92-year-old woman, we learned in subsequent investigations that officers had monthly quotas for drug arrests and drug seizures. Ed Burns, the former Baltimore cop and co-creator of the magnificent HBO show "The Wire", talks about this quite a bit.

...the incentive problems are most apparent with prosecutors. Prosecutors get no credit for cases they decide not to bring, either because of a lack of evidence or because pressing charges wouldn't be in the interest of justice. They're only rewarded for winning convictions. That's what gets them promoted, or re-elected, or gives them the elevated profile to run for higher office. Every incentive points toward winning convictions. And particularly with prosecutors, there's really no penalty at all for going too far to get a guilty verdict...

George Orwell wrote of government power, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." He may still be right, but there's now a decent chance someone will be there with a cell-phone camera to post it on YouTube. And exposing abuse of power is half the battle."