{"id":9652,"date":"2013-10-24T09:33:07","date_gmt":"2013-10-24T09:29:14","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-24T09:29:14","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=9652","title":{"rendered":"HuffPo: How A Drug Raid Gone Wrong Sparked A Call For Change In The Unlikeliest State In The Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"

HuffPo: How A Drug Raid Gone Wrong Sparked A Call For Change In The Unlikeliest State In The Nation<\/a> by Radley Balko:<\/p>\n

This article is the first in a six-part series about the drug war and police reform.
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OGDEN, UTAH — It’s late summer, and the house at 3268 Jackson Avenue has been boarded up for months. The front door, riddled with bullet holes, is pasted over with police tape and a “No Trespassing” sign. As Erna Stewart pries open the door, shards of glass from the edges of its already shattered window fall to the ground.<\/p>\n

The air inside is stale and hard to breathe. Belongings are strewn about. There’s a dusty television, an answering machine, a computer printer still in its box, some video games stacked on bookshelves. The police have ripped up sections of floor that had been soaked with blood, leaving a scar in the bathroom and another in the kitchen.<\/p>\n

More bullet holes call out from all sides: the walls, the doors, the ceiling, the floor, the windows, the molding, the kitchen cabinets. Two of the bullets hit the brick siding of a neighbor’s house. One pierced a bedroom window. The trail of damage leads out to the pock-marked backyard and the shed where Erna’s brother-in-law, Matthew, attempted to take refuge.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

That Utah, one of the most conservative states in the country, would become a hotbed for police reform, is surprising. But these reformers have carefully crafted their approach, honed a message that seems to be resonating with the community, and won over some early converts. As botched raids and excessive SWAT-style tactics have gained increasing notoriety around the country, other communities may soon be looking to Utah as a model for less aggressive but more effective approaches to public safety.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}