Knock, knock...

Last year's hurricanes briefly brought the Posse Comitatus Act into public discussion once again. Passed after the Civil War and a decade of military occupation of the South, the act is intended to prevent the use of the armed forces for general law enforcement. The Founders saw a standing military as one of the gravest threats to a nation's liberty, and their descendents "four score and seven years" later, after personal experience with the potential abuses of such a force, agreed.

But does Posse Comitatus really mean anything when your local police now bear more resemblence to a Special Forces outfit than to the neighborhood "Officer Friendly" many of us met in Elementary School?

Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers.

It's worth noting the Department of Homeland Security once posted a paper, written in 2000, detailing the erosion of the Posse Comitatus Act since it was passed in 1878. The title: "The Myth of Posse Comitatus." The page is no longer on the DHS website, but is cached here.