Aaron Malin on Trying to Get Records From a Shady Drug Task Force in Rural Missouri
Missouri's multi-jurisdictional drug task forces embody the very worst of the war on drugs. They're misguided, reckless, and they operate with basically no oversight. The state currently has 25 of these task forces, and over the past year Aaron Malin succeeded in obtaining basic operational records from all but one of them as part of routine research using Missouri's Sunshine Law. The Northwest Missouri Interagency Team Response Operation (NITRO) has gone to extreme lengths to avoid disclosing any information about their operations, denying it is subject to state transparency laws.