The Waco disaster represented just one of many ways in which the federal government and some state or local law enforcement agencies have been curtailing American rights and liberties in the name of “wars” against crime, drugs, and terrorism. Thus, when we wrote about Waco in 1997, our concluding chapter and first appendix were geared toward having “no more Wacos.” The reforms we proposed were based on numerous other law-enforcement abuses noted by us and others during the final decades of the twentieth century. So, in addition to looking at what may have been learned about Waco in the past twenty years, and whether law enforcement has changed, it is important to see whether law enforcement—for that matter, the U.S. Congress, the President, and his advisors—learned anything about how to fight crime without undermining the U.S. Constitution and killing innocent people.

So in this article, we first summarize information that was learned after the 1997 publication of our book. We then analyze how law enforcement, especially federal law enforcement, has or has not changed since Waco.