The Aurora City Council’s 7-3 vote last week to prohibit “no knock” raids by police — part of a national frenzy to roll back police powers — may have felt good for members of the council majority. But it was a mistake.

The raids — carried out under court warrants allowing law officers to enter a property by force without identifying themselves in advance — certainly pose some risks to those on either side of the door. And some no-knock raids have backfired in headline-making incidents around the country. Yet, police point out there are circumstances in which surprise entry is the only way to apprehend dangerous criminal suspects.

As Aurora Police spokeswoman Faith Goodrich put it in a Gazette news report:

“It was … done in cases if there was a suspect who was dealing drugs, or committed a murder and we have information that they have access to weapons, or made statements about (how) they’d never go back to prison and rather shoot it out…. The idea of a ‘no-knock’ is to get there so fast that they don’t have the time to arm themselves, and get them into custody safely.”

The raids are seldom used, Goodrich says. Judges have issued only 10 to Aurora police since 2018, and half weren’t used after police found other means. At times, though, they are essential in protecting the public. 

So, what was the Aurora council’s justification?

At-large Councilwoman Angela Lawson, the ban’s author, told The Gazette she felt prompted to act by the death of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky earlier this year. Taylor was shot to death by police in Louisville, Kentucky, during a no-knock police raid. The incident has become a cause celebre.

“Although there is debate on the warrant issues surrounding Breonna Taylor’s death, I was moved to take action to prevent a tragedy like this from happening in our community.”

In the wake of last summer’s violent unrest that morphed out of peaceful protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, almost any shift in police policy, no matter how radical, has become acceptable in some cities. Some proposals for change have been both reckless and pointless — most notably, the “defund the police” wave that already appears to be ebbing.

Last week’s decision in Aurora was arguably aimed at a valid concern in theory — that no-knock raids can go terribly wrong — but it was overkill. An across-the-board ban not only deprives police of a tactic they may need in a crucial moment when there is no other way to make an arrest, but it also is bad public policy in a broader sense: It is micromanagement at its worst in local government.

City Councils are supposed to set broad, strategic direction not dive deeply into the mechanics of every city operation. And here, they are attempting to fix what isn’t broken.

Kudos to Aurora Councilman Dave Gruber, who voted with the minority and offered some perspective: “The pendulum has swung so far to one side that crime is going up and arrests are going down.”