Calendar of Events

YAL@VU will be hosting its next dinner discussion with Radley Balko. The topic of the discussion will be the "The Militarization of Main Street."

The Department of Education has a SWAT team. So does NASA. Your town probably has one, too. Once reserved for emergency situations in which lives were in immediate danger, SWAT teams today are used to bust pot smokers, poker games, even to perform regulatory inspections. Radley Balko looks at the rise of SWAT teams and America's increasingly reactionary, militaristic approach to policing.

Speaker Biography:
Radley Balko is an American libertarian journalist, blogger, and speaker. He earned a B.A. in journalism and political science in 1997 from Indiana University. Balko is senior writer and investigative reporter for The Huffington Post. Previously, he was a senior editor at Reason magazine, and a policy analyst for the Cato Institute, specializing in vice and civil liberties issues. He writes on drug policy, police misconduct, obesity, alcohol and tobacco, and civil liberties. He also writes on trade and globalization issues and more generally on politics and culture.