Radley Balko

Radley Balko

Radley Balko (Radley Prescott Balko) was born on April 19th, 1975 and is currently 50 years old. Radley Balko was born in Greenfield, Indiana, USA. Balko attended Indiana University Bloomington where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and political science.

Radley Balko is an author, blogger, journalist, and speaker that writes about the drug war, criminal justice, and civil liberties.

In 2022, he started publishing his work on Substack after The Washington Post let him go, where he was working as an opinion columnist for 9 years.

Radley has also worked as an opinion writer for The Huffington Post, a policy analyst for the Cato Institute, and a senior editor at Reason magazine, specializing in civil liberties and vice issues. Radley writes on other topics like tobacco, obesity, police misconduct, drug policy, and alcohol. Robert was a biweekly columnist for Fox News from 2002 until 2009.

Radley’s work has appeared in Time, Playboy, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Worth, Slate, Canada’s National Post, and the Chicago Tribune. He’s appeared on CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and National Public Radio.

Radley’s work about “no-knock” drug raids got profiled in The New York Times, and was then cited by US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in his dissent in Hudson v. Michigan. Radley has been credited with reporting and breaking the Cory Maye case; and his work on the case was also cited by the Mississippi Supreme Court. He’s also written extensively about the raid on Cheye Calvo’s home and about the Ryan Frederick case.

Rise of the Warrior Cop is the history of how police forces have become militarized, both in mindset and equipment, and what this means for American democracy.

The final days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring nothing but tyranny and conflict. And as a result, our country has generally worked on keeping the military out of law enforcement. However according to Radley, over the previous decades, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. Consequences of which have been dire: the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, the home’s no longer a place of sanctuary, and cops today have been conditioned to see citizens they serve as an other, an enemy.

Armored up cops of today are a far cry from the constables from the state of the country decades ago. The unrest of the 1960s brought about the SWAT unit, which led to military tactics making their debut in the ranks of police officers. Reagan’s War on Poverty, Nixon’s War on Drugs, Clinton’s COPS program, the post 9/11 security state under Bush and Obama. By degrees each one of these innovations empowered the police force, always at civil liberties’ expense. Under Trump, these got expanded in horrifying new ways, evidenced by the tanks and overwhelming force which met the Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.

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Radley Balko: F.A.Q