“Police today embody all of the threats the Founders feared were posed by standing armies,” investigative reporter Radley Balko charges in his important new book, “Rise of the Warrior Cop.” In it, he lays out how that shift happened and how it might be reversed.

Where Special Weapons and Tactics raids occurred only a few hundred times a year nationwide in the 1970s, they’d risen to over 50,000 annually by the mid-2000s, the bulk served “to enforce laws against consensual crimes.”

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