Radley Balko is an investigative reporter who appears in four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, once as a featured guest and three times through clips or references to his published work. Bob Zadek introduces him in 2013 as a senior writer and investigative reporter for the Huffington Post, cited in two US Supreme Court cases for his investigative journalism, a writer for Reason magazine, and a former policy analyst at Cato Posse Comitatus – Repealed but Not Gone (2013). Across the excerpts his reporting serves as a recurring reference point for two of the program’s central topics: civil asset forfeiture and the militarization of domestic policing.
Civil asset forfeiture
Balko first appears in the 2011 episode on civil asset forfeiture, in which Bob Zadek and Mike Riggs of Reason magazine discuss laws that allow law enforcement to seize property from innocent citizens without criminal charges Cops Are No Better Than Criminals (2011). Zadek introduces Balko as a colleague of Riggs who has summarized the issue, and plays a clip in which Balko describes what police do with forfeiture money. Balko recounts that a district attorney’s office in Texas used forfeiture money to buy an office margarita machine that won first place at a county fair margarita competition, and that another Texas district attorney used forfeiture money to take a junket to Hawaii for a conference on asset forfeiture. Asked how he could do this, the district attorney responded that a judge had signed off on it; Balko adds that the judge who signed off went with him on the junket.
Zadek uses the clip to illustrate the “law enforcement purposes” loophole, noting that the US Supreme Court has said forfeited assets may be used for law enforcement purposes without going into detail, so that a margarita machine that increased police department morale fell comfortably within that purpose. Riggs generalizes the point: if an activity is legal in the private sector, some police chief or district attorney somewhere is trying to figure out how to do it. Riggs also describes the Motel Caswell case in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, a family-owned motel valued around a million dollars that the Department of Justice sought to take through civil asset forfeiture because about half a percent of its guests over 20 years were caught using drugs — guests the Caswell family itself had called police about. Riggs notes that roughly 80% of civil asset forfeiture cases never result in the person being taken to court, much less convicted.
Balko’s forfeiture reporting recurs in the 2018 episode with Joel Engel on Scorched Worth. Zadek, in a monologue, reminds listeners that civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to confiscate private property if they suspect it is being used in connection with or is the fruit of a crime, and that a federal statute encourages states to take such action. He notes that police departments may retain a portion of what they confiscate and spend it on police business — Mercedes police cars, coffee makers, cappuccino machines — and says that Radley Balko wrote a book about License to Steal, that police are stealing people’s property [[episodes/joel_engel_on__scorched_worth__a_true_story_of_des|Joel Engel on Scorched Worth: A True Story of Destruction, Deceit, and Government Corruption, 6/3 (2018)]]. Zadek frames Engel’s account of an off-the-books Cal Fire fund as another version of the same scenario, in which the government operates as a kleptomaniac bringing actions to enrich itself. Engel describes the “WiFiter fund,” an acronym he does not unpack, discovered during discovery in the Sierra Pacific lawsuit: an illegal off-the-books fund used for the benefit of Cal Fire’s employees, dispersed at the power of a single man in the department, and eradicated as a result of the lawsuit.
Police militarization
Balko is the featured guest in the 2013 episode on the Posse Comitatus Act, discussing his book The Rise of the Warrior Cop, subtitled The Militarization of America’s Police Forces Posse Comitatus – Repealed but Not Gone (2013). Zadek opens by describing the founding principle that police power vested in the states and communities, the post-Civil War assignment of federal troops to the Southern states, and the 1878 enactment of the Posse Comitatus Act, which he says ended forever the use of the US military to enforce state laws — before asking whether Americans now live in a society with, in effect, a federal police force, in which local police look like the military, act like the military, and carry out missions dictated by Washington.
Balko agrees that while the US has mostly kept the military out of domestic law enforcement, the country now has domestic police officers who look and act and are armed like soldiers. He lists the transfers: the weapons of soldiers, equipment such as tanks and armored personnel carriers and helicopters, uniforms — many departments switching from police blues to battle dress uniforms, or BDUs — and training in military tactics with SWAT raids and military lingo. He argues that police are regularly told they are fighting wars on drugs, crime or terrorism, and that if cops are treated as soldiers, the distinction blurs: cops begin to see themselves as soldiers, the neighborhoods they patrol as battlefields, and the people they serve as potential enemies or threats. Zadek observes that for most of his life he did not view the policeman as someone to be feared, and that the core relationship between protector and protected has changed. Balko cautions against romanticizing a time that may never have existed, conceding that there probably was a time when people like Zadek did not fear the police.
The militarization theme carries into the 2014 episode with Alice Goffman on On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. Goffman says Republicans and Democrats alike got behind the tough-on-crime turn in American criminal justice for 40 years, and that under Clinton billions of federal dollars poured into urban police departments, creating a militarization of the police and special task forces in neighborhoods like the one she writes about Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City (2014). Zadek interjects to mention that he had Balko on the show a couple of months earlier to discuss his book on the militarization of the police force, describing police forces as becoming paramilitary units with army equipment; Goffman responds, “Right, right, his work, yeah.” Zadek also notes Clinton’s famous proposal to put 100,000 more police on the street and a bill whose acronym he recalls as COPS but whose full name he does not remember.
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development in Balko’s treatment across episodes: in 2011 he is a clip source on forfeiture, in 2013 the featured guest on militarization, and in 2014 and 2018 a cited authority invoked by Bob Zadek and acknowledged by Alice Goffman. The topics recur — forfeiture in 2011 and 2018, militarization in 2013 and 2014 — but the later mentions add no new argument from Balko himself.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Balko’s date or place of birth, his education, or the full arc of his career beyond the 2013 introduction. They do not give the title, publication date, or contents of the book Zadek calls License to Steal, nor do they identify the two Supreme Court cases in which Balko’s journalism is said to have been cited. The excerpts also do not report Balko’s own responses to the 2014 and 2018 references to his work, since he does not appear in those episodes.
Episodes
1 appearance, 2013–2013.
- Posse Comitatus – Repealed but Not Gone (2013) — The Militarization of American Police Forces. Investigative reporter and author