I'm not normally a fan of litigation, but in this case they should sue the police department into the ground. If this behaviour was way too expensive to sustain because of liabilities, they'd have to curtail it.
Complaints are something they just ignore. Settlements hurt.
If this was some national security incident where the nephew was about to activate a nuclear weapon this sort of force might be justified. That it was for drugs is the most disturbing part. How does that help anyone in any capacity?
Sadly this doesn't seem to work. There is little to no correlation between settlements and the divisions within an organization that they are supposed to punish, especially for large jurisdictions.
Atlanta, small for a "big" city and with a terribly low budget relative to its size set its 2014 budget at 550M. A few million dollar wrongful death/abuse settlements each year don't even get noticed.
I'm not so sure. Atlanta made tons of changes after the Kathryn Johnson incident and the Atlanta Eagle raid. They totally disbanded the red dog unit, and have been much more sensitive to public perception after those events. I think more importantly this shows that these small county (Habersham, ~40k total county pop) police forces have no business having "SWAT" teams, much less doing no-knock drug raids.
I can't argue with that, just felt the need to defend APD a bit, as a lot of people are confusing them with the redneck swat team who threw the flashbang into a crib. APD has changed a ton for the better after Turner became chief. Before that, Pennington from New Orleans PD was clearly a mistake for the city, and led to many of the largest APD scandals in recent history.
> That it was for drugs is the most disturbing part. How does that help anyone in any capacity?
It helps police departments keep their budgets and continues their access to militarization programs (where the DoD gives them surplus equipment after combat operations).
Yes they hurt the taxpayers, which means the taxpayers should be concerned that their police department is acting so flagrantly and apply more pressure to get that fixed.
Sometimes the only way to get change is to make it painful to not change.
One incident will not be enough, but if this becomes epidemic and they're spending $50M a year on lawsuits...
I agree, but settlements don't hurt enough - ultimately they come out of the taxpayer's pocket,a nd unless a mayor or police chief is held personally responsible, all that happens is a game of bureaucratic musical chairs. This also needs civil suits against the officers, and jail terms. At least the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is treating it as a criminal incident, so it's possible that one or more of these police may do time.
However, the problem is systemic. I don't see a change without major adjustments to the law which would be highly unpopular, eg mandatory life sentences for crimes committed by police officers or similarly draconian measures.
We don't need draconian measures; we need substantive and reliably enforced measures. People respond much more strongly to certainty of punishment than severity.
I hew to the economic view that they respond to the combination of the two, in contrast to this position paper: http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/deterrence%20briefing%2... which I think begs the question. The problem is that certainty of punishment is difficult to achieve, especially where co-offenders have a strong incentive to back each other up - in this case, groups of police officers :-(
We should (for some value of "should") respond to the expected value plus something like the Kelly criterion. In practice, my understanding is that the research consistently shows that we are systematically less sensitive to severity than certainty. Of course the severity needs to be sufficient that it can't just be written off as a cost of doing business, but that is true long before we hit "draconian". You can insist that, in spite of the research, we're all perfect little economic calculators acting rationally, but know that you run significant chance of being wrong.
But sure, let's run with your assumption.
"The problem is that certainty of punishment is difficult to achieve"
"X is hard, therefore Y," without establishing that Y is worthwhile, is a piece of reasoning responsible for many ills. Yes, it's a cost-benefit thing, but bear the following points in mind:
When you have (X * Y) in general, and X >> Y, you can make a much bigger difference with a small change to Y than a big change to X (unless it's an exceptionally big change to X).
Costs of long term imprisonment scales with the medical needs of the people we're imprisoning, which is much faster than linear.
Draconian sentencing means we're doing harm to the those we falsely convict (which will inevitably be above zero); this means increasing the risk to innocent officers, which lowers the quality of officers we can recruit.
"especially where co-offenders have a strong incentive to back each other up - in this case, groups of police officers :-("
This is a tremendous issue, for sure, but it is one that needs to be resolved for a whole host of reasons, of which this is only one.
Note that a more draconian sentence reinforces this - if I think there's a chance my innocent buddy is getting sent up for life, I'm more concerned (and therefore, presumably, more willing to stretch the truth) than if I think there's a chance my innocent buddy is getting a slap on the wrist - so if I'm mistaken about my buddy's innocence, raising X might actually decrease Y. (Actually, that holds even if I think my buddy is guilty of something that doesn't deserve so stiff a penalty...)
Absolutely. This is the unfortunate effect of the militarisation of the police force and how ridiculous the War on Drugs has become! They were looking for drugs ...
Unfortunately South Africa's police force has also learned from the USA, as have others I see. Granted a Swat team is necessary sometimes, but overall the Police force is just becoming more indimidatory and inhumane. It's a bad trend, and a real threat to civil society.
In Western Europe and much of Asia, almost nil (countries like South Korea, Japan ...) In many countries, I'm afraid it's quite common, abuse of police power is nothing strange here. I've had it happen to me.
South Africa (Pretoria). And by, I've had that happen to me, I mean Police intimidation, not a flashbang in my chest. For that sort of thing see Palestine, Iraq etc However we see abuse of Police power very often here.
You can see police intimidation everywhere. Even in Slovenia and other EU countries, I believe. But there is a difference between "go home, you're drunk" (even though you have a legal right to be there) and "BANG! BANG!".
The increasing militarization of police in the USA has seemingly had a significant (and hopefully unintended) side-effect: Police tend to treat suspects (and those around them) not as law-breaking citizens, but as enemy combatants.
Is this enough to be able to challenge the constitutionality out of SWAT team usage and no-knock warrants, based on the principle that we are innocent until proven guilty. For example, in this case, the police were looking for one individual and found a family inside. Shouldn't the police treat them all as innocent instead of enemy combatants until they've positively identified the suspect?
If we have to err between the safety of the public and the safety of police officers, that's an easy decision to make since hazards are part of the job they have chosen to perform. Using SWAT teams externalizes the risk and danger of the job.
IMHO, it should be a high bar to meet to justify the use of SWAT teams in any situation. A judge should have to sign off on the use based on extraordinary evidence justifying why such excessive force is need. Once a warrant is acquired, do police have carte blanche to exercise it as they see fit?
This is an interesting point, and depending on the jurisdiction, some judges are elected officials.
It should come back on the judge that he or she authorized this abuse of power. Unfortunately, the feedback loop between the (hypothetical) judicial backstop on the system and the enforcers of the law tends to be left open by ignorance.
It would be good for local political activists in Atlanta to make sure that the judge who authorized this warrant has a significantly curtailed career.
OK, but the judge can only go by the evidence s/he is presented with. This judge might have been rubber-stamping SWAT raid applications, or might have been given sufficient evidence to think there was a serious risk of a firefight.
Are judges required to make a statement on each warrant justifying their decision to grant a warrant given the information presented, or is it basically just a signature.
I would hope that signing off on a warrant requires more rigor than a mere signature.
How adversarial is the warrant granting process. Is it common for warrants asked for to be granted by default, or is there an adversarial process in place that forces the police/detectives to go back and do more investigative work if they don't provide enough substantive evidence to justify a warrant being granted.
Furthermore, is warrant-granting by judges a matter of the public record. i.e. Can I go somewhere to lookup how many warrants a particular judge has granted, how many they have denied, and how many that were denied were eventually granted and the average number of resubmissions required to get those that were initially denied approved?
Sure, but elected positions do not work that way. ;)
Sometimes you make a bad choice based on circumstances that were partially outside of your control. An elected judge being overthrown for that reason may make their successor either more willing to question or less willing to take the police's evidence as sufficient.
>If we have to err between the safety of the public and the safety of police officers, that's an easy decision to make
You're right -it was appallingly easy for them to decide that they can do as they please.
Given the prison/police/military industrial complex fueling our massive, unprecedented in world history, Third Estate and the utter lack of any meaningful political opposition to it, things will get worse before they get better.
Hate to be so basic but when you've decided to be a hammer, everything eventually looks like a nail.
All of this military surplus gear thats been avalanching into local PDs nationwide isn't going to just collect dust. The good ol' boys in blue will eventually find a reason to use their toys, whether its on you, me, or the family in the OP.
Since 'Protect and Serve' has been officially declared false by our wonderful Supreme Court, everyone in this country should disabuse themselves of the notion that the police are here to help us and keep the peace.
The problem is most people think/thought the police are there to "protect and serve" them (the people/individuals) when they are not. The police are there to protect and serve the government.
ADD: The government is SUPPOSE to protect and serve the people.
>Police tend to treat suspects (and those around them) not as law-breaking citizens, but as enemy combatants. //
Isn't that at least partly because they arm themselves as if they were enemy combatants and treat the police as such. As in this case where apparently there was an AK47 in the house.
> Isn't that at least partly because they arm themselves as if they were enemy combatants and treat the police as such.
That certainly happens. According to http://www.odmp.org/search/year, 30 American police officers were killed by gunfire (not-accidental) in 2013. However, like most things, what's more important is how often it occurs. It turns out that there's somewhere between 750,000-800,000 police officers in the USA, so on the high end, that's 4 gunfire-related deaths per 100,000 officers.
Compare that to jobs like fishing (127 per 100,000), roofing (34 per 100,000), and farming (26 per 100,000) (source: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/personal-finance/10-most-dan...), being shot to death as a police officer doesn't seem especially likely. (Admittedly, gunfire-related deaths don't represent a majority of officer deaths in a given year, it seems, but gunfire is the main justification behind police militarization)
Edit: To put it another way, being a police officer is 2.5 times safer (gunfire-wise, at least), than driving a car.
There's nothing especially odd about it, there are lots of non-violent reasons to have an automatic assault rifle in an urban environment. /s
The point is that trying to arrest a drug dealer who has an assault rifle provides more potential for being shot than trying to arrest one that does not. To mitigate the chance of being seriously injured the police tool up in order that they might, if not strike before they are hurt, respond with appropriate force to a violent attempt to evade arrest.
These stories seem fake to me. I know they are real but I have trouble believing that people, human beings would actually act like this. Why do we have people acting as police that wouldn't let a mother comfort her crying, very injured child. They weren't after her, she wasn't the criminal.
The way the psychology works is that police regard everyone as a potential threat and a criminal, which makes them essentially not human in their eyes. When dealing in a "tactical phase" or whatever the hell they call it, they take command of a situation and have a very paranoid view of everything.
I think what he's trying to say is that all those things seem so surreal. We believe them, but reading the stories feels like you're reading something out of a movie. For people living in normal circumstances it's hard to imagine that some people are so cruel.
Exactly. I always read these stories and think... Is this the onion? Am I reading comedy?
For example, there was a story where a school aged child was suspended for using his hand as a gun and aiming it at other children. I just couldn't comprehend the idea that a principal would think that action justified suspending a child. Perhaps a detention and a stern warning, maybe.
I want to believe that journalists will leave out part of the stories that explains the harsh actions, that makes you say "Ok, I can understand why the principal did that", but when more and more of these stories are published, it becomes harder to believe.
Until recently America had child labor and would lynch black people. A FEDERAL judge in my hometown of New Orleans is famous for saying "We like to try our niggers before we hang them".
Human nature is human nature.
We live in a 'veneer' of civilization.
Underneath are still the same old animal instincts honed over millions of years of evolution.
Don't ever forget that. Or forget it at your peril.
A society like the one you describe should not have nuclear weapons. Now I'm afraid that if it weren't for the MAD (mutual assured destruction) US would have been much more genocidal.
Oh, we probably would have invaded/nuked the Soviet Union. It's not like MAD stopped us from sowing destruction and chaos around the globe, either. It just made us fight proxy wars instead of real ones with other nuclear powers.
It's become very popular to compare the United States to undeveloped countries and countries in civil war, then declare everything is fine because, comparatively, it looks OK.
It's a very, very sad state of affairs when you have to compare a developed country to undeveloped ones.
You are providing examples of aggressors, not protectors.
Every police officer on active duty right now begin their career with the idea they are to protect their citizens. This doesn't seem like the case in the original article. To me it sounds like people that have lost the intent of their job.
There is like 30+ years of social-psych research and papers backing up why average people (the swat team members) can become truly the hand of evil as situations demand of them. The most (in)famous of these studies is the Milgram shock experiment which showed average people in general willing to kill innocent people if authority insisted. A less famous study, the Stanford prison experiment, showed that people were more than willing to objectify others when they were in positions of power.
Granted, there is a chance this one incident might be fake (who knows with the internet), but incidents like this are definitely real. The fact of the matter is, people are not evil, but the organization of people tend to be. What can you do about it? Probably the best thing is stop strengthening centralized organizations, live/work in a small tightly knit communities, and don't lump others into a group. If that's not possible, your next best alternative is not be black / hispanic / south-east asian / male.
> I know they are real but I have trouble believing that people, human beings would actually act like this.
These are humans who decided, probably at a young age, that they wanted to do this sort of thing for a living. They then deliberately pursued training for this sort of thing, and got hired to do this sort of thing. Their livelihood likely depends on them continuing to do this sort of thing. It shouldn't be surprising that these people do this sort of thing. What else are they going to do?
Not to be disrespectful to the family but the only thing that comes to mind is " 'Murica". I know a person here in Canada that was a victim of swat drug bust it was in no way as violent. They came during the day and, yes manhandled the suspects however they were quite polite about it.
This is a side-effect of police militarization that doesn't get much attention from its critics: using advanced military equipment should also require advanced military training. Local police agencies that receive all this new military-spec equipment don't always get (or more likely, never get) the funding for necessary training on how to use it. Much less does such training really exist since this stuff was all designed for use in actual war zones. The extant training materials would inherently be oriented around that type of usage.
Even the worst part of the worst city in the USA could not be more different than a war-stricken area of Iraq or any other region where military action is a common occurrence (other than that they probably contain more friendlies than enemies).
Aside: It is truly sickening that they used a flashbang on a residential house where they hoped to apprehend a single, low-value suspect that could not possibly have been that well armed. Again, lack of proper training.
Lack of proper military training is not the problem here. The problem is the militarization in the first place. In war, collateral damage is considered unavoidable and ultimately acceptable in pursuit of victory, which is why drug warriors accept that the occasional baby will be maimed by a flashbang. That sort of approach is unacceptable for domestic law-enforcement. The solution is to roll back the militarization, not double down by giving police more military training.
Hence why I said the lack of training is a side-effect of militarization. In other words, yes, militarization of police is the main problem here. I agree with you; I was just pointing out yet-another-reason why it is even worse in practice than in theory.
Oh, my. What recourse does the family have from all of this. There baby has a hole in his chest and severe burns.....not to mention the unjust nature of not letting a mother tend to her injured kid..
I'm struggling to understand how any of the officers on the SWAT team - or, for that matter, those who formulated the policies to use tools like M-16s and flash grenades in drug raids - could possibly consider their actions to be less serious than someone taking or dealing in drugs.
Maybe there needs to be more publicity about drug gangs and the slaves created by the drug cartels. They exist, and they are heinous.
But so too are these kinds of reactions from the police. Its really as if the public are caught in the middle of two horrific forces, being created on both ends of the playing field. The question is: who profits? The cold hard answer, which nobody wants to admit is this: the dealers of drugs, and the dealers of weapons. Oftentimes, the same damn groups.
Police departments profit as well. They are able to confiscate all kinds of "evidence" like the car a dealer uses when they're selling drugs and then auction those items off. It's an extremely perverse incentive which must be eliminated.
Because of a legal quirk, SWAT raids can be profitable. Rules on civil asset-forfeiture allow the police to seize anything which they can plausibly claim was the proceeds of a crime. Crucially, the property-owner need not be convicted of that crime. If the police find drugs in his house, they can take his cash and possibly the house, too. He must sue to get them back.
Many police departments now depend on forfeiture for a fat chunk of their budgets. In 1986, its first year of operation, the federal Asset Forfeiture Fund held $93.7m. By 2012, that and the related Seized Asset Deposit Fund held nearly $6 billion.
Mr Balko contends that these forfeiture laws are “unfair on a very basic level”. They “disproportionately affect low-income people” and provide a perverse incentive for police to focus on drug-related crimes, which “come with a potential kickback to the police department”, rather than rape and murder investigations, which do not. They also provide an incentive to arrest suspected drug-dealers inside their houses, which can be seized, and to bust stash houses after most of their drugs have been sold, when police can seize the cash.
> Maybe there needs to be more publicity about drug gangs and the slaves created by the drug cartels. They exist, and they are heinous.
This is really my main concern with the "war on drugs". Keeping the drug trade illegal doesn't get rid of it - rather, it just pushes it underground. The result is organised crime, violence, and so many other major problems.
Admittedly, I'm very far removed from the situation, but I find it difficult to imagine that there'd be so much of these problems if you could just walk into a store and buy your drug of choice in the same way that you buy cigarettes or alcohol. You don't see gangs and cartels forming from around the trade of household cleaning supplies or consumer electronics.
Drug cartels and drug slavery are utterly orthogonal to what amounts to misdemeanor possession, which is essentially what many of these cases (including, for all I know, this one) amount to.
Should the SWAT team be able to toss a flashbang into your child's crib because you have a dime bag in the nightstand?
You really can't say it has "nothing to do with it." Just look at the sentencing guidelines between crack and coke. Listen to the original hearings from when pot was made illegal. Look at the proportion of people in prison for pot (hint: It doesn't reflect the racial make-up of users). Yes — in some parts of the country the disparity is based more on class than race. But that's definitely not the whole story.
Race isn't everything, but it's ridiculous to pretend that race hasn't substantially influenced the drug war. Even aside from the highly unbalanced prosecution and conviction of drug offenders depending on race, race colors everything in the drug war: look at the history of marijuana [0], for instance, or crack cocaine sentencing practices.
Just because some meth labs run by white guys get busted, doesn't mean that there isn't a racial element to the drug war. One does not follow from the other. Convictions for possession, for instance, are massively biased compared to the usage by group.
Why the 88, by the way? I hope it isn't to do with that angry Chaplin lookalike. Is just when combined with silver and a comment saying that race has nothing to do with the drug war in the US, I can't help but get suspicious. Apologies for the godwinning if it is just the year you were born, or something.
If your constituents are racists, you have to find policies that support those views by proxy -- the war on drugs, immigration control, abortion rights, and so on. Over time, people end up remembering the propaganda and forget the real reasons these ideas gained so much support in the beginning.
Meth didn't exist when the war on drugs started, it is an after the fact explanation. You've been taught that the war on drugs is equal opportunity. Propaganda is built on lies and dis-information. The individuals crafting policies who actually believe that propaganda eventually craft disaster and failure, like a geneticist who doesn't believe in evolution.
It's more of a money thing. In the US, law enforcement agencies are allowed to keep and liquidate assets seized during drug raids. This generates a lot of money for the agencies, many of which have small budgets otherwise.
As far as I can tell, they care less about pot. With the exception of massive amounts of pot, they care mostly about everything else. Small amounts of pot are virtually decriminalized in much of the US, but not small amounts of other scheduled substances (I knew a [white] guy in college who went to jail during a routine traffic stop for possession of one 10 mg pill of dexmethylphenidate (a.k.a. Foculin) without a prescription -- $1500 bail).
I'm not saying police don't do racial profiling, just that the War on Drugs is not about holding a race war; it's primarily about money.
It became somewhat about money, but that's a fairly recent development in policing in general -- it's not much different from allowing the executive branch to keep all or part of other various fines.
But there's nowhere near as much money coming from seizure as is coming from the government to fund the manpower and equipment used to do the seizing.
The enforcement divisions of the DOJ seize less than 2B annually. (That's FBI/DEA/ATF/etc combined.) Their combined budget is ~27B.
Seizure (and prosecution in general) is more a problem due to perverse incentive schemes: Police are incentivized to seize money not so much to have the money directly, but to have those seizures show up on their performance reviews. Not unlike prosecutors trying to rack up convictions or traffic cops trying to fill ticket quotas.
The majority of your 'white coke' or powder cocaine busts are of Hispanic dealers (that's how it gets into the country and distributed to the big cities). Crack busts on the other hand were almost exclusively Africa-American dealers. They'd make crack out of powder cocaine once it got to their neighborhoods.
You're missing the social context here. First, this is never about using it's about dealing. Police enforcement efforts are almost entirely preoccupied with trafficking. Second, dealers are, by and large, bad people for other reasons. Your suburban pot dealer isn't the target of no-knock raids. The targets are guys with long rap sheets of felony convictions, often for violent crimes.
Drugs are a proxy in a war between police and gangs. Atlanta had 81 murders in 2013, versus 82 for London, which has 20x the population. To an extent the drug trade causes some of this violence, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. Atlanta is in a former slave-holding state and was segregated as recently as the 1970's. It's a city where 27% of residents, and 31% of children, are below the poverty line. Poverty is highly correlated with race: 33% of blacks and hispanics versus only 8% of whites. It's a city where 76% of poor families are led by women with no husband present.
Between the history of oppression and the massive racial disparity in the incidence of poverty, there is zero trust between the black majority and the white minority (which holds a majority of the economic and political power). This lack of trust is at the root of much of the conflict. Black and hispanic communities are unhappy with the crime, but also, arguably for good reasons, don't help the police shut down the gangs. At the same time, wealthier whites support the aggressive enforcement because they are scared and the negative side-effects don't happen in their neighborhoods.
This is not to justify no-knock raids for drug enforcement, but to help illuminate the mindset of the officers involved and how they justify their actions. I am in favor of deescalating the drug war, but that's just the first step in normalizing our cities, which see violence that is without comparison in the developed world.
Atlanta spends over $15,000 per pupil per year on schools, 50% over the OECD average, and about as much as Switzerland (although, adjusted for PPP Atlanta still spends much more than Switzerland).
Spending per pupil is not necessarily the right metric. The net spending accounts for paying for teachers who can't teach, overly priced contracts to the businesses connected to school boards, corruption, etc.
Net educational spending isn't even the right metric.
Unless we want to agree that spending $15,000 per pupil from a family with an income of $30,000 equates to the same education as $15,000 per pupil from a family with an income of $200,000.
> Police enforcement efforts are almost entirely preoccupied with trafficking.
I find that hard to believe. It can't be that hard to actually shut down distribution networks with the amount of resources the government uses. But if you just focus on the parts of the network near to the end user, you can burn a lot more resources and argue that you should be given even more resources. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they actively protect or support the major distribution networks:
And for social context too, this roughness is probably mandatory in a country where it's so easy to buy weapons : they never know what they will face (I'm not defending them either).
While this specific story is staged in Atlanta, this is happening throughout the country, in every state.
We need to stop the demented practice of selling surplus military equipment to local police departments. We're not saving money. Cops don't need armored cars, drones, grenades, etc.
They already sold the equipment to the federal government. The federal government is simply getting rid of stuff they don't want. If anything, this practice hurts them by flooding the market with used goods.
>Second, dealers are, by and large, bad people for other reasons. Your suburban pot dealer isn't the target of no-knock raids. The targets are guys with long rap sheets of felony convictions, often for violent crimes.
This may (or may not) be true in Atlanta, but in South Carolina, it's demonstrably untrue. We had a wave of SWAT raids from 2006-2010 on poker games, culminating in this:
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When a police department forms a swat team, they're going to use it, even for minor offenses.
They also have the opportunity to not enter the house.
There is a reason that burglary is dangerous: it invites a confrontation that doesn't have to exist.
I'm not so starry-eyed as to imagine that the cops never need to enter a house forcefully. But they can make this happen at a time and means of their choosing. They can watch to determine how many people are in the house. They can wait for some suspects to leave and detain them individually.
It's easy for me to second-guess from here. But the time to think through all these things is before you go into the house.
Well sure, but the policy as it stands is to send SWAT into the house in the dead of night. Obviously, we need some sort of policy change.
My comments speculate upon the mindset of those involved in these raids regarding their choice of weapons and gear. They know they are going into a house, that much is given.
I once observed the cops break down a door. They knocked first, several times, loudly, and warned they would enter the house by force, before busting open the door. No grenades or guns were involved. That seems like the right kind of caution when violating a person's home. Yes, sure, in a drug raid that leaves time for flushing things down the toilet, but to me that seems like a reasonable trade-off.
I'd appreciate if you'll find a flaw in the following:
1. Officer wants to return home no matter what.
2. He/she decides to use as much firepower as possible to achieve that - 50 cal guns, military grade armor, armored cards, explosives, grenades, rockets, whatever.
3. I have a risk of getting caught in the situation like this. I live in bad neighborhood, my brother sells weed, I had police encounters in the past, whatever.
4. I want to stay home alive.
5. What should I do to achieve #4 if police decided on the escalation of firepower? Logically I can conclude anything besides having thicker armor and higher caliber weaponry?
If someone declares war on you and not poised to take prisoners and determined to kill, what should you do?
Well if you are in the home of someone who deals drugs, then you are placing yourself at risk. To achieve (4), you must either a) move elsewhere or b) cooperate with police to arrest your brother. I'm assuming you are currently not doing anything overtly illegal yourself.
If you do (5), then the police simply bring that shiny new MRAP they got from the DoD and park it in your yard and turn on some spotlights. Then they get on the loudspeaker and have you come out with your hands up. If you fire up your heavy weaponry to oppose them, then you will surely fail to maintain (4).
Remember, this whole thing got started because the police thought they might face armed resistance. If you have a nice paper trail of armor and high caliber weapons leading to your door, then the police will simply bring the proper amount of firepower to assure their success. So, I disagree that escalation of arms gets you anything in the long run regarding this SWAT business.
That makes sense, thanks. I have an issue with 'police thought' though. I was flying through the US airspace once and the plane made a stop at Seattle. We get off the plane, had a snack (and smoke) and then boarded the plane again. I realized shortly afterwards that somebody confiscated my "Knife" magazine (I bought it at the departure airport and the mag was mostly about some survival bullshit and other "tactical" stuff). As I learned (with the help of the crew and reading stuff online later) DHS searches and confiscates "suspicious" items.
Now, do I have a trail or not? What if that magazine was about automatic weapons? Explosives? Controlled substance chemistry? Nuclear physics? Islam? Christianity? Patriotism? Tea party?..oh, shi...
I think that is the mentality they need. I rather have a dead criminal than a dead police officer. Unfortunately, mistakes will always happen, so this OP piece, while unfortunately, will continue to happen. This time it happened to be a baby, which makes matters a lot more terrible for all involved.
Last year 44 police officers were killed violently[1] in the line of duty, and over 400 innocent people were mistakenly killed by the police. I'm not going to complain much about the police shooting violent criminals, but we're well past the stage of worrying about that.
[1] EDIT: Many more are killed in vehicular accidents.
Background: it's long been known that law enforcement officers (LEOs) are _safer_ on the job than non-LEOs. Only an unfortunate few die in violent encounters with the criminal elements. When LEOs scream about how dangerous their job is, they're almost always asking for a pay raise.
Nonetheless, there was a time in the not-so-remote past when LEOs _consciously__accepted_ the possibility that they might die or be injured on the job. That attitude is fast disappearing.
Once one accepts the analogy that "battling crime" (where any "enemy" is poorly defined; those are civilians out there) is equivalent to warfare (where the enemy is well-defined and no quarter given), then one can almost unconsciously accept a "better him than me" attitude where the civilians' lives are, relative to LEO's, worthless.
The creeping acceptance of warfare's "better him than me" attitude by LEOs and police departments is the root of the problem.
You must live in the comfortable confines of tranquil suburbia americana. Stay there. Don't wake up. Be happy. It's better for you that way. Have another latte.
Like the rest who must escape to reality on a daily basis, I rather have a) My gun with me, and b) A cop by my side.
Making unsupported assumptions about someone usually not only produces incorrect conclusions but is also a poor form of argument. I fail to see how anything you said is relevant to this discussion.
FWIW I live inside a very large US city, am familiar with firearms and have worked in law enforcement for many years.
And now for something supported by the numbers: have you considered the likelihood that the cop by your side shares his/her bed with someone else?
I agree with everything you said. But I'm not following your point of "have you considered the likelihood that the cop by your side shares his/her bed with someone else". What do you mean with that statement?
I read the statement as:
If the dystopian future the gun wielding maniac above is waiting for comes then he must understand that said police officer could potentially have other priorities to protect.
That, exactly. And I simply cannot fathom how the response to a flash-bang grenade in a cot with a child in it can ever be "well, obviously there was no way for us to know there were children, so don't blame us" instead of "OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE WE DONE WE'RE SO SORRY!"
Good grief. SWAT teams in the US are utterly out of control. It's one thing to have resources for the relatively rare armed robbery/hostage/mass shooter situation, to respond to an outbreak of violence; it's quite another to be using them for drug raids and other contexts where they initiate or are the sole cause of violence. This goes hand in hand with the confrontation-obsessed gun culture we have, in which a subset of gun owners dwell constantly on the omnipresent risks of crime and the need for elephant-grade stopping power, despite the clear long-term trend of falling crime.
The Cato institute has worked with journalist Radley Balko (who is the expert in this area) to produce a map of botched SWAT raids: http://www.cato.org/raidmap
I really see no other course for citizens other than to start attending public meetings and speaking up whenever public figures spout truisms about the safety of law enforcement officers being top priority. It's not top priority, that's why they get paid the big bucks - to put the safety of law-abiding citizens above their own.
America is dominated by cults of violence, cults of death. Its military-industrial groups do nothing but produce death and destruction at the press of a button, and yet Americans do nothing about it.
This problem won't go away until the real issue is address: the utter lack of humility in your average public, and dire amounts of arrogance in the ruling elite. It is pure and utter know-best that makes this irreversible. Until people accept the humility for change, it doesn't happen...
The real problem is that the war on drugs if fantastically profitable for everyone involved: drug cartels, police, and for-profit prisons alike. Just look at the original criminalization of marijuana (and indeed the English adoption of the Mexican word used to invoke racist hatred and fear) which was basically spearheaded by Dow so they could sell their inferior synthetic substitutes for hemp.
Legalizing drugs would make all the violence go away over night, and let us spend the money directly on the social problems drugs cause (which obviously haven't been reduced in the least be criminalization).
Also note how many raids are the result of a single informant. I was browsing raids in my area and most of them were from a single informant; in one case even an informant who had a known antagonistic relationship with the subject of the raid.
What's disturbing is how many of them are based on a single informant and also look like not the slightest effort was made to verify that information. Literally picking up a guy off the street for some minor crime, telling him you'll let him go for a bigger fish, getting an address from him, and sending in the goons without another thought. If it's a big enough crime to justify a SWAT raid, then surely it's big enough for just a little bit of investigation.
It seems dangerous in two ways. Both that most of these tips are probably for completely innocent people who may now be subject to extreme levels of violence with no justification, and that once in a while, one of them might be for something much worse than they thought, putting the officers themselves in a lot of unnecessary danger because they didn't do any investigation.
If you are a small(ish) town cop and you get fancy new military gear then you're going to want to use it no matter if you need to or not. People like playing with toys.
> The Cato institute has worked with journalist Radley Balko (who is the expert in this area) to produce a map of botched SWAT raids: http://www.cato.org/raidmap
That's a really bad map. "Botched" is such an arbitrary term and it doesn't capture the way a perfectly executed raid will often damage lives. ("we only terrorized their kids! standard procedure.")
The data is pretty obviously woefully incomplete. Does anyone actually believe that that there have been only 13 "unnecessary raids on doctors or sick people" in the last 30 years? Those are the ones the author knows about. It's an infographic that hides as much as it reveals.
I was at a State Park in California recently and had a friendly talk with a ranger about local places to visit. It was hard not to notice the AR-15 and Shotgun mounted in his truck, as well as the sidearm on his hip. I'd never seen that before in all my years of camping with family.
When I read stuff like this, I'm really happy that I am not living in the US. It sounds so crazy to a European person, I can't really imagine how Americans manage to normally live their lives.
No, this is happening in most parts of the country.
See http://www.cato.org/raidmap (more "neutral" source welcome, if someone has another information source/raw data link).
The past 4 years seem anomalous - compare the previous four years:
2010 - 19
2009 - 12
2008 - 22
2007 - 16
Much as I'd like to think Obama has single-handedly reformed all of the police departments in the US, I think it rather more likely there's something wrong with the data.
I was thinking that "no-knock" raids happened very little around my area (Denver) but this map proved me wrong. While not exactly commonplace, I found several instances of raids in/around Denver based on nothing but a single informant. Some of the news stories were just like the OP--police bust into wrong place and kill someone completely innocent.
In 2014 there have been two. In 2012, none. 2013 isn't even listed as an option. Deaths from cars hitting wildlife happens all around the country but I wouldn't say that's representative of the state of the country, nor do most of the citizens live in fear of this happening.
These raids are a problem, yes, but in a thread with a European commenting that they think this represents America, your link doesn't really support the argument that this is true.
Yeah I got that. But the link doesn't show it's all that common either. Basically none since 2011, and America is a big country. A handful a year across 330 million people is too many, but not nearly as common as the European and my parent are making it out to be.
Just because people don't die very often doesn't mean they're reasonable. Pointing rifles at innocent people practically indiscriminately ("wrong place, wrong time, now STFU citizen"), not letting parents attend to their scared and/or wounded children... there's just no justification for that.
It doesn't make it safer for suspects. It doesn't make it safer for police. It's certainly not safer for bystanders.
I'm not the sort to evoke "our fore-fathers", but I seriously doubt a militarized police force who could raid citizen's homes without notice is something they would approve of.
Are you arguing against my point, or against someone else? Your first sentence could be a reply to me, but you're making a claim that contradicts the evidence that I'm arguing against, and you present no new evidence. Just saying "it's common" doesn't make it so. The rest of your post has nothing to do with anything I've said, so I will assume you meant to reply to someone else.
A college acquaintance was tackled by a SWAT officer, still blinded from looking directly in surprise at the flash bang that had come through his window, bound with a zip tie, then "accidentally" kicked in the face as they tore his entire apartment from floor to ceiling looking for the cocaine being sold. When they didn't find anything in any room, they started tearing open his bedroom walls with an axe, sure he was hiding the pounds of cocaine somewhere.
Turns out they had the address of the apartment correct minus the street. He was at 3033 X, they wanted 3033 Y. They realized this about a half hour into the raid and said "oops, sorry," and simply packed up and left. His story is not in that map. I looked.
Another time, I left my apartment to walk to the convenience store across the street and was immediately met with six Springfield (OR) Police officers with weapons drawn and pointed directly at my center mass. I was ordered to kneel, not move, and provide identification, conflicting orders with which I was afraid to comply due to itchy triggers in my face; they ended up pushing my face into the sidewalk and taking the identification themselves. They thought I was a car thief they had been chasing.
The fun part of the second story is that they found my press credentials in my wallet first (this was when I worked in television) and a lieutenant magically appeared, apologized extensively, and offered me a bottle of water. She also called a bus to come treat the laceration on my forehead, and gave me her card and said if I had any problems, call her first, and we needn't make a big deal out of this, right? Just a misunderstanding, no big deal.
Police get it wrong a lot. Just because it's not near you doesn't mean it's not happening, believe me.
>Another time, I left my apartment to walk to the convenience store across the street once and was immediately met with six Springfield (OR) Police officers with weapons drawn, pointed directly at my center mass. I was ordered to kneel, not move, and provide identification, conflicting orders with which I was afraid to comply due to itchy triggers in my face; they ended up pushing my face into the sidewalk and taking the identification themselves. They thought I was a car thief they had been chasing.
This happens with surprising frequency from what I hear. I know of a couple people with almost the same story.
You know, I was about to type a kind of snarky reply along the lines of "Ukraine is still in Europe, no?" and then I realized I had to pick the country in Europe that is literally in the midst of a civil war to get to a comparable situation. Sigh.
Indeed, I was also contemplating some kind of dismissive reply then I remembered I am reading an excellent book about the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday (which I am old enough to just remember happening) and decided not to make that kind of comment:
[Yes, it was a long time ago, but I don't think anything about our society here in the UK has changed to such an extent that would make this fundamentally impossible.]
Thankfully it didn't take 30 years to admit that killing Jean Charles de Menezes was a mistake.
Actually, on the that subject I'm not particularly worried about a general level of violence by police in the UK. However, I am concerned that we could see something like the Troubles again if we continue to treat immigrant populations as scapegoats for all the ills in our society.
That was dreadful and I feel slightly ashamed for never having heard of it! The response of the policeman who said:
"What happened on 17 October 1961 and in the following days against the peaceful demonstrators, on which no weapons were found, morally forces us to bring our testimony and to alert public opinion... All guilty people must be punished. The punishment must be extended to all of the responsible people, those who give orders, those who feign of letting it happen, whatever their high office may be.."
reminds me of the coroner at the inquest for the Bloody Sunday victims, himself a former Army officer:
"They were shooting innocent people. These people may have been taking part in a march that was banned but that does not justify the troops coming in and firing live rounds indiscriminately. I would say without hesitation that it was sheer, unadulterated murder. It was murder."
Oh, and this isn't much at all compared to what was going on in Algeria at the same time: large-scale torture (on both sides), bombings, summary executions... Fun times. Fortunately, democratic nations can't have "fun" on quite the same scale nowadays, though to be sure, the fellows enjoying US hospitality at Bagram airfield must have gotten their own "fun".
Good enough that it was used as an instruction manual, unfortunately. And several of the torturers would go on to teach various right-wing regimes how to extract information from prisoners.
That was an exceptional episode in a period when NI was basically in a state of civil breakdown. I don't think you can extrapolate from that one datum.
It was an unfortunate coincidence at a point in time of aggressive soldiers, civil disobedience, no-go-areas and the presence of armed PIRA units.
For the next 30 years of 'troubles' there was never an action like that again by regular army forces, despite constant provocation and attacks against them.
The SWAT / armed police raids, on the other hand, are occurring every day in the USA.
I agree, I don't think that they are directly comparable - I was merely commenting on the fact that it is easy for us Europeans to make snide comments about the level of armed violence in the US when we actually have occasional outbursts of extreme levels of violence here, even if the overall level is much lower.
Belarus would probably qualify too, not that "repressive dictatorship" is a whole lot better for the comparison than "civil war".
Anyway, us Americans manage to normally live our lives because stuff like this is rare. Remember: if you see it on the news, it is not common pretty much by definition.
I'm far more worried about being run over by a truck or my house burning down than I am about being shot by the police. That's not to say that it's not a problem. This is a huge problem that needs fixing, like, now. But it doesn't directly affect my ability to live life without fear.
Flash banging children nearly to death is fortunately rare. Unfortunately no-knock warrants are less so: 50,000 in 2005 and rising. In a community that is hugely concerned with virtual privacy rights re: the NSA, we don't seem to spend much time caring about physical privacy rights, re: poor people having their houses broken into by state sponsored armed forces.
The US is a big place (note: I'm not American either). Keep in mind that your comment is similar to a non-European reading about far-right violence and recent EU parliament election success and thinking, "When I read stuff like this, I'm really happy I am not living in Europe. It sounds so crazy to a [Canadian|Australian|etc.] person."
Should we factor in the largest prison population per capita in the world and transfer of surplus military gear to police to nullify the 'big place' factor?
My point was most Americans have no experience with these sorts of events despite their apparent pervasiveness, just as most Europeans have little experience with far-right parties despite their recent successes.
Most financially well off, white Americans have no experience, I suspect that's also the demographic of most people on HN. I have friends who come from a poorer background than me and most of them have either been subject to police abuse themselves, or have friends/family who has been abused or even killed by police.
He's referring to the recent success of fascist parties like Front National in France. Other parties are less openly xenophobic, but as so often it's just hidden behind a thin veneer of nationalism.
"I can't really imagine how Americans manage to normally live their lives."
This is truly awful, but the vast majority of Americans will never be subject to a SWAT raid or anything like it (especially if they're not involved in illegal activity). Or terrorist attacks. Or mass shootings. Or etc etc.
People are notoriously bad at estimating the probability rare but extreme events will happen to them.
Of course, that doesn't make this ok. I personally believe SWAT team usage should be restricted to hostage, active shooter, and similar situations.
>but the vast majority of Americans will never be subject to a SWAT raid or anything like it (especially if they're not involved in illegal activity). Or terrorist attacks. Or mass shootings. Or etc etc.
While that's true, it's somewhat beside the point. US citizens are far more likely to be a on the receiving end of a SWAT raid or a victim of murder than citizens of other countries at a comparable level of development. The fact that it's only a minority of the population doesn't mean there isn't a serious issue.
To put some numbers on it, the US annual murder rate is ~5 people per 100k population. Yes, it's small, but compare that to 1.0 in the UK, 1.1 in Australia, 1.6 in Canada (0.4 in my country), and clearly it's a more dangerous place.
There are estimated to be ~50-80k US SWAT raids per year annually. Of those in Maryland for example:
- half are for non-violent "part-II" crimes
- a third resulted in no arrests
- >1% resulted in an officer's weapon being fired
I didn't know those SWAT stats prior to today and I find them shocking.
Two years ago, the house behind mine was raided by Portland's version of SWAT, SERT. The scary thing for me was the house number matched my house number, but was on the next street.
Given that you read stories about SWAT raiding the wrong residence because they misread the house number, it made worried that the same could happen to me.
I live in the US and have never had to deal with this and live a normal life. I am by no means defending this, in fact I think it's disgusting and awful, but it's not happening on every single street in the county. Yet.
And again, US has the largest per capita number of prisoners in the whole 190 countries. Most of these prisoners are in prison for drug-related charges. Think about that. Yes, SWAT attacks are not happening on every single street, but government destroying lives seems to happen on most streets.
I recently made the mistake of calling the local police when I heard some ongoing disturbance outside of my apartment window around 3am. I told them it's probably nothing, but they may want to look into it. I thought they may send out one car to drive by and see if everything's OK.
I was shocked what I saw next and I was thinking to myself "What have I done?!". I'm in a high-rise and have a good view of the city. It looked like they sent the entire police force. Police vehicles were flying in from every angle, SUVs jumping over curbs, driving through lawns, etc. It looked like a scene from the original Die Hard. I was nervous they would trace down my cell # if it turned out to be nothing.
> I live in the US and have never had to deal with this and live a normal life. I am by no means defending this, in fact I think it's disgusting and awful, but it's not happening on every single street in the county. Yet.
I think that's how they get away with it politically. For the politically powerful and even most of the middle class, it's only something they see on the news occasionally.
It might help you understand why a significant portion of Americans are reluctant to allow the government to place further restrictions on firearm ownership.
America is a weird place. If we collectively felt it was out of control or being abused we would fight back through law or force if it got to that point. We're generally just glad to have those options.
I think this is a topic where the legal fight is ramping up. These stories are becoming too common and though currently "legal" it just reeks of negligence.
I'm of the unfortunate opinion that Americans are too pacified and complacent to actually step up and do anything against the government. I would love to see people reacting with force and violence at a system that is so oppressive and belligerent.
Go onto youtube and search for "german police beating". There are hours of footage of German police kicking the crap out of protesters (punches to the face, etc). The German police are notorious for being very physical.
Punches to the face are better than holes in the chest. If I had to pick from "will get punched in the face with 90% certainty" or "will get a hole in the chest with 0.01% certainty", I'd pick the first one. Heck, I'd punch myself in the face once for good measure, too.
I would as well, but I think my example shows that public tolerance of police behavior varies among countries. German would be horrified with US cops shooting random civilians and Americans are horrified by German police beating suspects for relatively minor infractions.
That's not a good comparison, show me a video of German police raiding a house while using extreme violence. Not that I'm a big fan of the police, but in this case it's comparing apples to oranges.
This was the result of a no-knock warrant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-knock_warrant, which allows police to enter a home without prior warning, on the theory that giving notice will allow people inside to destroy evidence. They are almost uniquely a product of the drug war. One can imagine very few situations outside of drugs were evidence could be so easily destroyed as to justify a no-knock warrant.
Exactly. This story sounds like a violent raid by a gang of thugs. What about all those Americans that own weapons in order to defend themselves and their homes? If you're allowed to shoot a stranger violently entering your home, doesn't that mean it's totally legal to shoot those cops? Don't they have to identify themselves as cops and present that warrant first? How else can you tell the difference between the cops and a well-equipped gang?
Non-violent crimes turn into violent standoffs when the police routinely respond to them with aggressive raids. This is completely a product of escalation between the illegal gangs and the 'legal' gang.
You don't even need to have a cop in the unmarked car. You can have a remotely viewable camera that the desk-duty cop watches from the precinct headquarters.
EDIT to address the troll: you can run these off of a car battery and stream it over the cellphone network. Quality will be rather good even then. If you can park a car, you can set up the camera. PTZ, too.
"don't mind me poor 100% black community im just here from ADT to install this randomly hallarious HD camera and wireless antenna facing this decrepit house"
The typical utility company truck (gas, electricity, water) can be parked outside and someone could install any number of objects that contain cameras/microphones, but don't look like one. Resorting to an obvious strawman does nothing.
That would be dangerous for the utility company employees, because this tactic would quickly become known, and all utility vehicles and employees would then be viewed with hostility and suspicion by criminals and other residents.
Similar to the vaccination blowback after the Bin Laden raid.
Having built them for the ATF, there are concealable cameras that mount to light poles and run off grid power. There are also concealable cameras that look like fire hydrants, high voltage signs, rocks, and cars that are designed to feed the video back wirelessly and be rapidly deployable.
Even easier: wait for the suspect to leave the house, arrest him, then go do a leisurely search without having to worry about the suspect being violent.
- Look outs realize there is an anomalous vehicle staged in the neighborhood & alert the team. How do you not get detected?
- Drug dealers arn't home so they send a child/girlfriend to pickup the stash/cash from the home. Do you arrest and charge the 14 year old son of the dealer?
- Dope boys have children/women runners do the logistical aspects. Arrest the dealer, go in the house and find the stash, the girlfriend claims its hers. Dope boy walks free.
Congrats you have done nothing but charged a 14 year old relative and/or girlfriend of the dealer, alerted the hood that its under surveillance and your target flees to a different zone/state/country.
Huh? If you have evidence for a warrant on a supposedly dangerous dealer you don't need to catch them with drugs. Simply wait them out for when they leave their house and pick them up then.
The original comment mentioned arresting someone. If they want to search the house then wait till it is mostly empty. Presumably to get the warrant they have at least a modicum of surveillance? Maybe made and undercover buy or 2?
There are plenty of ways to avoid violence unless absolutely necessary. Instead police want to raise the level of violence and approach every citizen as an enemy combatant. If a cop wants to play military war fighter, then go join the military.
It would seem that if you have enough probably cause to go into the suspect's family's house with an armed and armored SWAT team tossing grenades, then you would have enough probably cause to simply arrest him and bring him down to the station. It's also much more civilized that way.
Instead, why don't you attack the house where his child and girlfriend/grandma are sleeping? Is that a better solution? Doesn't that turn the town/neighborhood/village against you? Kill someone's kid and they'll never trust anyone that looks like you again; they'll probably try to kill you if they can, and they definitely won't help you with information. Neither will their friends or relatives.
Why would you care if the target flees to another zone/state/country? They're out of your hair and without contacts, they won't be nearly as effective in their objectives.
Since we're talking domestic, they're not nearly as likely to flee to another country or state; people are tied to neighborhoods. Sure, if they're alerted to your surveillance your job gets a lot harder, but that doesn't matter to the innocent.
Crime is down, and police are dangerous. That's the environment we have now. If middle class white people fear the police more than criminals, the police have a problem, and the government has a problem. That prevents them from doing their jobs as well.
ITT: people who have never been in law enforcement or military service.
>drug offenders are perfectly well adjusted people, just politely knock they will let you in every time.
>drug dealers don't flee the state/country when they suspect being watched/followed/pending arrest
>I wonder why it's called a "trap house"
I hope that you live in an upper middle class community in California to justify the logic behind your post.
You just don't do it for the pot dealer down the street. Instead, you wait for him to leave and break in to get what you need. Preferably in a way that isn't visible from the street so you can arrest the guy before/after.
If you're looking for a small amount of drugs on a person who you aren't even sure is present in a single room with a whole pile of occupants including children and you start throwing flashbang grenades then you should be 100% culpable.
Stuff like that has no application in regular policing, definitely not in raids to arrest people on suspicion of some small time crime.
If you go after the hold-out of a nest of armed bankrobbers that have been spotted going into some warehouse then you could make a case for it but even then preferably only after they try to shoot their way out.
This is an absolutely ridiculous level of escalation in a residential area.
I just watched a brief youtube video on flashbang grenade training [0]. Apparently, the grenades aren't even supposed to be thrown into the room, they're only supposed to be thrown into the doorway. And that's in a military context, not even a police context.
So it's bad enough they're using military hardware, but then they're not even using it according to proper training.
Military context is often safer and more humane than police context
The Police get all the "toys" but none of the training, or self control.
Just watch any SWAT raid then compare that to a true military RAID, the Control and restraint used by the military is vastly contrasted by the Uncontrolled and Free Firing of a Police Raid.
Police believe themselves to be at war. Not with one-off groups of armed bank robbers, per se, but with heavily militarized cartels and street gangs like MS-13. If an ordinary police unit knocked on the door of an MS-13 safe house, they'd probably be met with heavily armed resistance.
The problems here are numerous. First, because this was not a cartel safe house, and any degree of diligence sufficient to obtain a no-knock warrant should have made that clear -- which means that either the diligence process is broken, or it was subverted. Second, because very few houses in residential neighborhoods are gang hideouts, and the police are using the theoretical presence of armed gangs as broad, categorical pretext to militarize all of their SOPs, regardless of context, circumstance, degree of escalation, or suspicion of crime. Third, because the level of police militarization in general is growing alarmingly. You'd be hard-pressed to draw a clear distinction, either in armaments or in operational charter, between some of the most heavily armed SWAT teams in this country and small military units.
Stories like this one are not only outrageous; they are horrifying. I don't want to subject myself to recency or memorability bias. But I'd be very curious to see the stats on how many of these incidents are occurring for every SWAT operation that, say, takes down a real bad guy. I'm not in favor of banning SWAT operations altogether, so much as I'm of the strong belief that the "S" in SWAT should always stand for "Special." As in, we've been building a legitimate case for months on this location, and we have extraordinary reason to believe that extraordinary measures are called for.
I don't think that that's quite a reasonable take on things either--I do not believe that officers wake up every day going "Man, I hope I get to shoot some kids today".
Such hyperbole makes it harder to understand their position and hence to effect useful change.
No, but some police do seem to have a mentality where they think they need to be a substitute jury or provide some of the corporal punishment the legal system omits.
Very few police ever fire their gun during their career. But an officer who killed a man by my work 2000, that was his third fatality. All same MO, mentally ill guy with a knife, close the distance under 21 feet and shoot.
TLDR: No knock raid with officer trying to batter down door, guy inside with small amount of weed who had previously been robbed by armed intruders fires through the door and kills officer.
I hate the "war on drugs" and the levels to which the police take it, but the only person who said "a small amount of drugs" was the parent. I can't imagine that a SWAT team would be used for a "small amount of drugs".
I don't think "nonviolent" is a good description of a lot of hard drug rings. They aren't being violent right at the moment, but if they see a cop standing outside the door, they very well might just shoot him.
No-knock warrants are by and large a horrible thing and SWAT teams are drastically overused, but that doesn't make the problem they are meant to address any less real.
You mean like this guy with "an ounce or less of marijuana"?
I think you have no idea what you are talking about. They aren't being used for "hard drugs" they are being used for "any situation where we might be able to link to someone who uses drugs".
This seems so disconnected from my comment that I'm not even sure you responded to the right one. Either you mis-replied or you have mentally transformed me into a bizarre caricature of what people who don't completely agree with you must be like.
> It would be a non-violent crime, probably. Non-violent crimes shouldn't result in swat teams.
Where in here do you see 'hard drug ring'? Or 'hard drugs'?
You:
> I don't think "nonviolent" is a good description of a lot of hard drug rings. They aren't being violent right at the moment, but if they see a cop standing outside the door, they very well might just shoot him. No-knock warrants are by and large a horrible thing and SWAT teams are drastically overused, but that doesn't make the problem they are meant to address any less real.
> This seems so disconnected from my comment that I'm not even sure you responded to the right one. Either you mis-replied or you have mentally transformed me into a bizarre caricature of what people who don't completely agree with you must be like.
Funny, I thought that is what your comment was.
I was talking about no knock warrants on nonviolent crimes and you make the false claim I was talking about armed, hard drug criminal organizations. That somehow them being "overused" makes the problem "less real".
I never claimed the problem wasn't real either. I claimed they shouldn't be used in relation to non-violent crimes/criminals in general.
You asserted that crimes where the police might need to barge in without knocking in order to prevent destruction of evidence are most likely nonviolent crimes. In fact, that kind of situation is almost exclusively drug crime, and the drug world is a violent place.
As I said, the fact that no-knock SWAT teams are sent in indiscriminately is bad, but it doesn't mean that crimes where evidence can be flushed down the toilet are "a non-violent crime, probably."
The problem is not that SWAT raids are victimizing an otherwise "probably non-violent" drug world. The problem is that many law-enforcement officers behave in a cowardly way, where the prioritize their well-being over that of the public, so they treat people who are not hardened drug lords as though they were — just in case. That is the big problem.
> You asserted that crimes where the police might need to barge in without knocking in order to prevent destruction of evidence are most likely nonviolent crimes. In fact, that kind of situation is almost exclusively drug crime, and the drug world is a violent place.
> As I said, the fact that no-knock SWAT teams are sent in indiscriminately is bad, but it doesn't mean that crimes where evidence can be flushed down the toilet are "a non-violent crime, probably."
Alcohol is more dangerous than all drug related crimes combined to LEO. Not just raids. anything.
Please provide statistical evidence that a drug arrest is more violent/dangerous than other arrests. Please also provide evidence that a large percentage of these arrest involve violent offenders.
And nothing you've said precludes what I said should happen [ search the premise when its unoccupied ].
You are demanding data to support the idea that drug rings are associated with violence. That demand does not suggest to me that this will lead to a productive conversation regardless of how I answer. So if you want to believe that associates of Mexican drug lords are all hippie antiwar activists, I guess I am not going to be the one to disabuse you of that notion.
This is true to some degree, though I think legalizing many drugs would still not take away a large portion of the associated criminality. People with bad coke or meth addictions just don't care very much who they hurt.
Marijuana is legalized for recreational use in two states, and for medical use in twenty-three (including those two recreational states). It's also decriminalized in six more. The national government is starting to talk about rescheduling it as well.
There'll still be other drugs to chase after but clearly SOMETHING is changing here.
General optimism, hoping that certain culture wars (the 60s) will age out generationally, some positive evidence from countries with harm reduction focuses (Portugal).
It's a really stupid theory. Destroying evidence is just another charge to throw on and doesn't really suggest any risk of violence. Though sure, if they flush in time maybe the police lose out. But it hardly seems worth it. It ought to be possible to serve warrant without instigating a violent encounter. And it's not like the risk of destruction of evidence is anything new. You could easily destroy evidence well before the US was even founded. Might have been even easier, historically. Burn it, throw it in a river, etc. No-knock aggression should be reserved for situations where there's a very very strong expectation of violent resistance and that's it.
Also in general the severity of the charge is directly proportional to the quantity of drugs. So if the quantity is instantly flushable, how serious of a charge can it have been, and thus how much accidental damage is acceptable in the arrest?
It probably depends on the design of the sewer system, but an ex's father worked for the city sewer system. He was asked by police on one occasion to help out with a bust where they thought evidence was going to be flushed.
From their point of view what is easier throw a flash grenade into a crib or build sewer shut-off valves through-out the city. Control them, repair them. Can you prove that these drugs belonged to this particular house. That this one person flushed them. What if they are 10 people in the house. Are they all drug dealers because they found pot flushed in some sewer trap?
That is their response. It is not coherent, but this is not propositional logic. This is a militarized force that cannot be punished for their abuses, can and does inflict those abuses as will and it attracts saddists and psychopaths that cover each other asses.
You are trying to come up with technical solutions (oh install sewer traps). The problem is not technical. It legal, and regulatory. There is no, 0, nada, zilch repercussion for just throwing a flash grenade in barge in. Why install sewer traps and spends all that money? That is irrational from their point of view.
The floor boards and all that sewer stuff is just noise. All those "problems" are just a list hurdles they will never and or even think about solving, that was the main point.
I appreciate that my thought pattern (asking about sewer traps) sure sounds a lot like a clueless nerd using his technology hammer to fix a social problem he figures must be a nail.
However, I am just gathering facts to figure out what other options are available to police. If certain states, as a citizen I am judged very harshly if I don't exhaust all options before using lethal force, even if it's happening in the heat of the moment. I want the cops to do the same consideration of their other options, at least when it's an operation they get to plan out ahead of time to happen under the time of their choosing.
Wanting the cops to do the same consideration of their other options is the regulatory and legal issue rdtsc was talking about. You want the cops to do that, you have to impose penalties that will actually be enforced on the cops, and the penalties have to be harsh.
The penalties will have to be sufficient that the EV of breaking the rules is negative, but harshness should only be one tool in achieving that. It is more important that the penalties be inforced, and harshness can actually undermine that.
OK, so, to the best of my knowledge, 1 kg of cocaine is worth about $20K. Assuming cocaine has roughly the density of baking soda, this amount ought to be easily disposable in a single flush. So you could flush $100K worth of coke down a toilet in under a minute.
Seems optimistic to me. If you flush in rapid succession the reservoir has to fill again. I guess that a good flush requires, depending on circumstances, 20s of refilling. That would lower the throughput significantly. Also, the suspect has to move the cocaine from hiding to the toilet. Sure, $20K is a lot of money but were not talking Pablo Escobar-like quantities here.
Edit: also clogging, not sure when this happens and not really willing to experiment.
Cocaine is far more water soluble than baking soda. Extremely, extremely water soluble -- about 2 grams of cocaine can dissolve in 1 ml of water (compare to baking soda: About .1 grams per ml of water)
But you also have to get rid of the packaging. I was imagining dumping a package of cocaine, but that's stupid: at least opening the packaging would help with the clogging by letting the cocaine dissolve. Not sure what the packaging would do with the pipes and whether this only packaging holds up as evidence.
You could also just rig an external reservoir (or have a full bucket lying around) to rapidly refill the back tank. Though that would of course be fairly incriminating.
Imagine pushing 5kg worth of cocaine down a toilet while, most likely, incredibly strung out on said cocaine, with the SWAT team beating on your door. Couple that with the fact that they likely aren't stored in easy to open bags designed for pouring and what you're looking at is a bathroom full cocaine and a seriously clogged toilet. You've got to get rid of the plastic too, remember.
Maybe they bust you with less, but they'll still bust you.
If I am required to maintain documents in a civil case, and I destroy them, generally the other side is allowed to assume they were as bad as possible.
Does this apply in criminal trials? If there's evidence I was flushing drugs down the toilet (and such evidence would be there), can the state be allowed to assume I had a lot more of the drug than I really did? What are the policy implications?
I think the problem is that it's really hard to police recreational quantities of chemicals. Physical evidence related to crimes is usually either bulkier objects which you can't just put down the toilet, or documents which do take some time to destroy and often exist in multiple places.
A sane person would probably argue that you don't get to run roughshod over people's freedoms just because a particular law is hard to enforce otherwise. But I think that's where it's coming from. You get a pervasive environment where the guys at the top are trying to be tough on drugs and the guys at the bottom keep having to let criminals go because they flushed the evidence, and it's only natural that they'll start to push for more draconian measures.
It's technically possible, but in practice that's never how it works. The entire purpose behind no-knock is to take them by surprise before they can even think about resisting. They use immediately overwhelming "non-lethal" force so that they never have to escalate to a "lethal" level. Obviously the definitions of these terms are imprecise at best.
Believe it or not, this is the safest way to do "no-knock" for everyone involved. Think about it- if a law-abiding gun owner was woken up to the sound of unknown men breaking down his door and had time to access her weapon, the situation would be much worse for everyone. There have been many instances of this exact thing happening, often resulting in the death of the raid victims and/or police officers. That is why stun grenades are always the first thing that goes into the building during a no-knock raid.
What if, you know, they did knock, then the law-abiding gun owner would come and open the door, like in most of the civilized world. Or take them when they are out, wait for them to get home, etc. There are numerous ways to make an arrest without going all commando.
Parent said this is the safest way to do no-knock. Everyone in this thread agrees that no-knock is a bad idea most of the time (at least), and clearly in this case. Up thread, there was question of the particular tactics in conducting the no-knock entry.
I said safest, not safe. I'm not trying to defend no-knock raids; I believe them to be immoral, dangerous, and unconstitutional. I was merely trying to explain why these tactics are used.
Unfortunately there are several stories floating around where the law abiding gun owner was at the far end of the house and had enough time to get a gun out and fire through the door at the calamity coming forth. Which has frequently lead to the death and/or life time conviction of said law abiding gun owner. This might be ok if it weren't for the frequency with which these law abiding gun owners had their homes mistakenly raided.
So, a bunch of armed men breaching a door and rushing into a house is less likely to provoke such a response? No knock entry is dangerous, period. It should only be used where threat of violent opposition is well established. Once you're going in no-knock, the notion that flashbangs is the safest way sounds plausible.
Yes, it is true that the most efficient way to oppress people is to do it with maximum available force and brutality, such that they are utterly unable to resist.
Wouldn't it be reasonable to observe the house for a while before a raid? That's where you pick up on clues as to who lives there. "Hmmm, seems to be a lot of small children here and not too many gang style criminals. Ok, team, we go in fast, but force probably won't be necessary." Oh, wait. This type of thinking would probably prevent the no-knock raid to begin with.
Not to mention you'd have to be a pretty low-level drug offender to be able to destroy enough/all of the evidence in the time "not knocking" saves the police.
(ie. You can't exactly flush a kilogram of cocaine and a triple-beam down the average toilet in a matter of minutes)
>> You can't exactly flush a kilogram of cocaine down the average toilet in a matter of minutes
I would think you could - that's the 'brick' size you see in the movies, I would guess you could flush that down in 2-3 flushes as long as it didn't clump up too bad.
I posted this above as well, but cocaine is extremely water soluble -- 2 grams per ml of water will dissolve, or a little over 20 times the solubility of baking soda. Even with a low-flow modern 1.28 gallon toilet, it certainly wouldn't "clump up" -- more like instantly disintegrate.
You could easily flush a couple of kilos of cocaine. Owning a couple kilos of coke makes you a fairly successful mid-level dealer who must know people higher up on the food chain.
P.S. I'm not defending the cops here, just saying, you don't need truck fulls of drugs to be considered "big-time", and they usually get to the bigger fish via the smaller ones.
I edited my example to make it a little better. Point being: If you are a big enough dealer to be useful to the police in a larger investigation (or to warrant SWAT team "no-knocking" at your door), you probably have quite a bit of related evidence that would not fit down a toilet.
Except that simply not true. Do you know how much a kilo of coke costs? We're talking ~20k USD. You could easily flush that, and low level street guys don't have kilos lying around, not even close. If you have access to that kind of quantity you know people who are pretty high up.
Not to mention the fact that the penalty for such an amount is on the order of 10 years in prison (of course, that depends on a lot of factors like where you live, how good your lawyer is, etc., but it's quite a large amount of cocaine.)
Sorry, I think you're missing my point that is even if somehow they could flush the entire amount of the illicit substance in time, they probably have other items on hand that would be just as good from an evidence perspective.
For example, you can't flush a scale down the toilet.
If we're talking low-level or mid-level dealers, chances are they have a quantity of pre-packaged amounts of their product on hand and maybe even a firearm or two. Unless they can quickly melt-down and/or liquify all of that stuff, it isn't going down any toilet pipe while the homeowner argues with the cops at the door about the status of a warrant.
A scale with a bit of powder on it does not demand 10+ years in prison. A gun, if registered (and it's not like all dealers have illegal guns) carries no penalty in and of itself.
They (the cops) need something to barter with. You're much more likely to get useful information from someone facing 10+ years than someone facing 1 year (6 months with good behavior) or probation. They want to find everything.
Now you're onto something! Your first point is true. If the suspect manages to dispose of even some of the substance, that could hurt the case. Or it may not. There's lots of factors, I was just giving the simplest example I could think of (trying to flush a sufficiently large amount of cocaine).
To elaborate on your own example though, pretty sure that even if a firearm is legally registered you can still get in trouble for having it around, especially loaded, in the context of selling illicit substances.
That is almost beside the point, though. How many dealers do you think are using registered firearms to protect their trade? Of that group, how many are registered to the dealer using it and not some random family-member or whatever?
You'rd right; I can't speak intelligently on the number of dealers using illegal firearms. It's about not leaving it up to chance though. They may know, to a relatively high degree of confidence, that the drugs are there, but they may know little else. You don't want to raid a home and come up empty handed.
I can't imagine a scenario in which finding a small percentage of the drugs wouldn't hurt the case though. If you can't find it then you can't charge them with possessing it.
In most of the US, and I suspect for most of the population, there is no such thing as registering guns (that would be akin to registering laser printers, especially those high capacity ones).
Interesting choice of example, as it happens there is in fact a "printer registry", where documents can be traced back to the device that produced them: https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
(it's just that the average consumer doesn't know about it)
To the extent there's any tracking of printers, it would at most tell you which store it was sold from, there isn't any required serial number recording done at checkout (well, as of when I last bought a color printer in 2006).
What you're referring to would be akin to comparing a bullet found at the scene of a crime with one fired from a seized weapon, albeit easier; a comparison system. Much less of a privacy concern, without any required "registration" involved.
Really? So you could cut open whatever's holding it, throw all the powder in the toilet (1 kg will be more than 1 flush also), dispose of the bag, clean the knife/scissors and there be no trace?
I'm sceptical. The police don't need to find 1 kg of cocaine, to find a bag with powder in and powder around the toilet should be sufficient.
How is it sufficient? Sufficient for what? Do you think that their end goal is to get a charge, any charge, on this mid level dealer? Of course not; they want information on someone even more high level.
The penalty for 1 oz and destroying evidence (if they can prove that) is nothing compared to the penalty for 1 kg.
This may sound silly, but it seems like there could be a MythBusters episode specifically on this to prove or disprove how likely these no-knock raids are needed to prevent an effective coverup of evidence.
They could actually make some actionable data for public good.
Well, anecdotally, I've been in a house full of drugs when the cops showed up, and those drugs were gone before the cops stepped foot in the house. Yes, I had a not-so-optimal childhood.
We had a small party (only about eight people or so) and a couple of us got loud in the backyard. The neighbors called the cops and, where I lived, they were coming in, warrant or no warrant. We knew that, so down the toilet it went.
Fairly hard actually - you've got to stakeout the house without being detected and tail the guy when he leaves. Plus you may not know how many folks were in the house in the first place (and thus how many are still there when the main guy leaves) - you could wind up raiding a house full of awake and semi-alert criminals with guns and have a bloodbath on your hands.
Additionally, the idea of this sort of raid is to arrest anyone who might be involved when they're found to be in a drug house. If you raid an empty house and find drugs, the owner of said house is gonna go underground if he sees his place crawling with cops, and everyone else is gonna steer clear of it.
Finally, there's a time-sensitivity component - the entire premise of drug dealing is that the drugs are in more or less constant motion, so your chances of success go down the longer there is between tipoff and raid.
I'm not saying that I like no-knock warrants or that they're a good idea, I just wanted to offer some reasons when trying to hit the house when nobody's home might be less safe or less effective.
you've got to stakeout the house without being detected and tail the guy when he leaves
Hmm ... so, you know, do actual police work? Carefully investigate, all that crap? Nah ... easier to move in with both surprise and massively overwhelming force. And if somebody sneezes and a few of the officers' guns go off in response, well, nothing to see here folks, move along.
They lost my vote with the lie about the toddler "losing a tooth".
The paramilitary home invasions authorized by U.S. injustice system is a small part of the increased militarization of the police who use military tactics and decommissioned military hardware stemming from the over decade long military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Also "middle America", European descendant U.S. citizens have little altruism for homeless, undocumented and oppressed nation peoples (New African, Chicano, Native American). Since the late 60s, middle america have had a knee jerk reaction toward more policing, more prisons, harsher criminal sentencing like "three strikes", and reactionary laws like Florida's "stand your ground". Marginalized U.S. inhabitants have little say in how their communities are policed and face police state conditions and a country with the highest per capita prison population.
I'm easily a member of the "European descendant US citizens", and I don't exactly have a lot of say in it either.
I also find it odd that you included "stand your ground" laws in there. Those laws would actually protect a homeowner using deadly force in opposition to this type of raid in many cases.
I spend a large part of my free time engaged in the online firearms enthusiast community, and I can assure you that no group is more outspokenly opposed to these tactics as we are. The "militarization of police" is such a well-known thing that we have a few memes built around it. "Tacticool" is what we'd probably call these people, and it's something of a running joke that an police officer's professionalism is inversely proportional to the number of cargo pockets the have on their pants.
Jose Guerena was armed and a Marine vet protecting his family but Tuscon SWAT still killed him(1). But it can go the other way as police have been shot and killed in paramilitary raids. I brought up "stand your ground" laws as indicative of middle America's mindset for more lethal response to the perceived criminal threat in their communities. That mindset has also included support for harsher sentencing and more police, even as the "police industrial complex" grows more into a police state and military occupation.
"stand your ground" laws, are, I suppose, "more lethal" in the sense they don't require you to retreat if theoretically possible as viewed in the calm of a criminal trial, but I think you're otherwise vastly overstating what the "indicate". Using the loaded term "reactionary" strikes me as entirely out of place.
WRT to Jose Guerena, with the exception of Massachusetts at certain points in the '70s-80s, I don't know of any state that requires or required you to retreat from your own residence. It's unthinkable Arizona would have ever required that.
Finally, I don't see how it helps anything to paint people like us as racists, especially, as LyndsySimon points out, we've been the biggest group fighting for the longest time the tactics that are being discussed here.
The militarization of the police predates Iraq 2 by at least a decade, it was happening under the Clinton administration, who authorized letting national guard equipment be loaned to police for any activity that could be plausibly connected to drugs.
I knew about it because my dad was a member of the NRA. The big, bad NRA used to write about police militarization and criminal abuses of force by federal agencies every single month in their member publication, they seemed presciently worried about the encroaching police state two decades before most people. Instead of reporting the same stories of government abuse the NRA aggregated from regional media, the national media painted them as anti-government for calling BATF agents "jack-booted thugs" (because they were) and for saying "in Clinton's administration, if you have a badge, you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens." (because they did, and still do today under two successive administrations.)
BTW, it was liberal except for some things like gun control Democratic Michigan Congressman John Dingell who first referred to the BATF as "jack-booted" "fascists" (he routinely used that word), as early as 1981. Although at the time he probably was a member of the NRA's 76 member Board of Directors.
SWAT excesses in the "War on Drugs" started in the '70s, there was some back and forth, first encouragement of that, then a reaction to the excesses.
It was Waco, started by the BATF as a "rice bowl raid", that is, a big publicity event prior to asking for more money in the next Federal fiscal year, that really brought this to a head with Dingell, the NRA, gun owners, and other concerned citizens.
Knocking down the door, okay fine. But did they really need to throw in a flashbang? Maybe they could have used some kind of thermal vision to see through the wall for children.
Yeah, who needs attack dogs or weapons to secure your illegal operation? Just scatter some toys in the front yard and park a mini van with stick figure family in front. Done. No police will ever barge in on your operation as clearly "kids live there"
The risk of some evidence being destroyed versus potentially killing a kid (and in this case 'luckily' only wounding that kid) seems to be an easy choice. To protect and serve and all that.
Not exactly minor wounds. Life threatening and life changing injuries. Even if he survives, his parents are going to spend the rest of their lives dealing with the aftermath.
The issue really is the proliferation of paramilitary in western society expanded under whatever pretext was valid at the time: war on drugs, war on terror, etc.
> They are almost uniquely a product of the drug war.
I see no evidence of this.
In addition to preserving evidence, they are also issue when it's believe there could be an issue of officer safety. (E.g., someone armed & dangerous.)
If stories like this are new to anyone reading this, there is a great book worth checking out. "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" by Radley Balko, ISBN-13: 9781610392112
I came here to post a link to that exact book - the one thing I will say is that the book is basically divided into two sections. The first section is a history of the militarization of US police that is fascinating, well-researched, and full of 50 years of context that I was totally unaware of. The book is worth reading for that alone.
The second section, really the last 1/3rd of the book, is a series of essays and articles, more op-ed than factual history. This is where Radley Balko's libertarian streak comes out full-bore, and it moves from semi-scholarly work to libertarian polemic. It's fine, of course, it's his book and he's entitled to write what he likes, but there's a lot of anti-government rhetoric and anti-social policy language in there that I found offputting.
In addition, throughout the book, the police are described in aggressive terms, they're always "threatening" or "menacing" or "assaulting" - while the people being arrested are "cowering", "hiding", "pleading".
It seems like it would be hard to know exactly in many cases what everyone was doing, and instead Balko is putting his emotional slant on what was happening. Then, in the second section of the book, he freely admits that he started tracking and writing about when dogs were killed during SWAT raids because it got a much more impassioned response from readers.
None of this removes the value of the book, which as I said was excellent. But I think I would have appreciated a little more nuance in some of the tone.
Atlanta continues to amaze me. On one hand, I see reports every week from the police department at my school (downtown atlanta)about robberies/ mugging (armed) with usually no police officers around to help. The response times are usually >20 minutes (usually because they are way understaffed). And on the other, I see militarized police brutality. I wish there is a way to funnel my tax dollars to those departments that are going to help people rather than hurt them.
There are some countries where police typically don't even typically carry around projectile weapons. The UK, for instance.
I think making sure police have some skin in the game, instead of pursuing the illusory chase of perfect security for them, is the answer. It's supposed to be public service, after all.
America is a scary country to live in. I am not sure if it is just the fact that this sort of thing gets reported more often of late ...only for America, or just that I've been paying more attention of late.
The number of places and the absurdity of the manner in which you can get killed, hurt, jailed, or have your entire life irrecoverably change is just frightening.
Now, I don't intend to be Anti-American, I already accepted that there is a possibility that this sort of thing gets reported more for the US. Also, I know that one can claim that I am generalizing and this doesn't happen all the time, all over the place.
However, I've read so many news reports[1] of simple things like frivolous lawsuits that completely damage a persons life to completely avoidable instances of serious life altering events like this news story which makes me wonder why would a professional making a decent living (like say a software engineer) would want to move to America. I personally, am not too inclined.
[1] I have often thought about creating a site that aggregates such horror stories to serve as a warning -- a mirror, lets say ...or if you really want me to spell it out -- a reminder, that, 'No, American is not the greatest country in the world'. Before you decide to downvote and retort, read the article (again) and empathize with me, if you can, how this sort of thing would invoke such a reaction.
This is so terrible. I hope this story gets shared everywhere, because this shouldn't be happening. They sent a SWAT team to a house before confirming that the person that they looked for was there? They threw a disabling weapon inside without noticing that there was a family with children in there? And like others have said, all that for a drug bust?
It's sad that someone would give that order in the first place, and that there are people in our police forces who carry it out.
And yet if you suggest that police are anything less than complete heroes in every way your neighbors and relatives will shun you. Defending yourself against a corrupt, ignorant, and vindictive police force is one of the best uses I can think of for the second amendment.
The thing that always amazes me about this is the unbelievable incompetence of our administrators. They keep doing things that don't work and expect them to work.
The unofficial motto: "If violence isn't doing the job, you're not using enough."
> Jose Guerena was a U.S. Marine veteran who served in the Iraq War and was killed in his Tucson, Arizona home, on May 5, 2011, by officers of the Pima County SWAT team, while they were executing a warrant to search his home in relation to an ongoing investigation into drug smuggling.
Maybe flashbang grenades are too dangerous to throw around without warning?!
There was a story I saw yesterday about police shooting a 95yr old WW2 veteran in his own home because he didn't want to leave and was brandishing a knife. They were bean bag rounds but they shot him 6 times from close range and he died.
Is there any information about the actual incidence of this kind of thing? Best thing I can find is from the ACLU report, which suggests 5 non-suicide fatalities and 46 injuries -- but that's clearly from their limited subset.
God is perfectly just. Either you deserved it or they will be punished. I told the CIA that God was perfectly just. Wise-ass nigger Obama runs a news story on a black 3-year old killed in a ghetto. God did a story of a young black kid about 6, getting a fat angelic-looking white cop to tie his shoe. Search for "cop tying shoe" on google. The CIA has condescendinly pigeonholed me as a criminal hating law enforcement. No, I'm with God. You are evil, as you well know and news that the world is perfectly just will not sit well with you.
You think you are law and power and can condescendingly dismiss me in your mind as a criminal. No, I'm with God. Fear yourself and your sins, nigger.
1. This happened in rural Georgia, far away from Atlanta.
2. The suspect was later arrested for dealing meth. This isn't a little dime bag situation as the clearly biased writer would have you believe.
3. This isn't the suspect's first arrest, he was arrested before for distribution. Police found an AK-47 in his house.
Here are things that could have been done to prevent this situation.
1. The homeowner could have not dealt meth.
2. The parents could have not moved in with their AK-47 owning, meth dealing nephew.
Here are some likely other outcomes even if the SWAT raid didn't occur:
1. One of homeowner's guns could have accidentally discharged and killed the child.
2. Criminals could have robbed the house (a higher likelihood when you are running a drug ring out of your house) and killed the child.
That poor child's situation is a direct product of irresponsible parenting. There was a reason the police were at this house. Their tactics and the damage they did would have not been remotely possible if this guy wasn't armed with illegal weaponry and dealing drugs.
This isn't reddit. America is not out to get you. Don't be a criminal and don't associate with criminals and this doesn't happen to you.
It's entirely legal to own a semi-automatic AK47 (although not if you use and/or possess drugs...but my point stands, as the gun itself would have been perfectly legal).
Signs point to this guy not storing the rifle in a safe fashion, however.
1. The suspect is the nephew.
2. The nephew is not the home owner.
3. The home owner wasn't the one dealing meth.
4. The nephew/suspect wasn't present at the home at the time.
It was obvious from reading the story that there was more to it. The hurt and pain caused is of course awful but leaving out this sort of information is disingenuous and makes this piece essentially propaganda when it didn't need to be.
That said, your comment is off. The suspect is not the father of the child as it appears they were visiting the suspects house.
I'm pretty sure the poor child's situation is a direct result of a flash bang 'distractionary device' being thrown into his crib by law enforcement. The suspect was NOT in the house, and they found NO DRUGS in the house. As for having a semi-auto firearm, um every other single house in Habersham county probably has one or more semi-autos, big deal. This was a poor family in a bad situation, that the poorly trained sheriff's office "swat team" made worse.
It must be nice to never associate with criminals. For many poor families, this is not an option as the only uncle who will let you stay for free with him after your house burns down, just happens to sell some meth on the side. Is one grenaded baby worth finding even 100lbs of meth? Not to me. It's certainly not worth mauling a baby to find no drugs.
Does it matter if your death will moderately increase the happiness of a room full of bunnies? The group-ethics model has some pretty obvious limits, which I think you've violated in your example.
100lb (~45kg) at 50mg is about 900,000 doses of meth. I suspect the death rate per 900,000 doses is quite high and the expected outcome probably includes the death of at least one child.
In my question I'm asking if a simplistic comparative harm analysis would perhaps weigh in favour of non-terminal injury to an infant. It's a very difficult question, of course, and a true analysis couldn't be so simplistic (what proportion of those 900k doses would get replaced by alternate supplies for example). But raising the question seems valid.
The police threw a grenade into an innocent child's crib. Nothing you've said ends in '...and that's why they clearly had to burn a hole two year old'.
> Don't be a criminal and don't associate with criminals and this doesn't happen to you.
Ok, but how far does this 'association' go? Where is your line where the excessive police response isn't justified. We can already see that your line is past throwing grenades at children. What's next? SWAT team mows down a preschool with gunfire because a drug dealer was picking up their kid at the time?
Thank you for this. It's true that associating with criminals makes it more likely that things like this will happen to you, but that doesn't justify it. A child getting hospitalized is excessive collateral damage for something indirectly related to the family.
I gave up hope after the same local cops who have long been notorious for shooting everybody [1](2001) got off scot-free for contriving a raid of a local mayor, intimidating his mother in-law, shooting his dogs and unapologetically quipping about it [2](2008).
"By any measure, Prince George's County police have shot and killed people at rates that exceed those of nearly any other large police force in the nation."
"The event gained national and international media attention. While the Calvos were cleared of wrongdoing, the police were accused by the Calvos and civil rights groups of lacking a proper search warrant, excessive force, and failure to conduct a proper background investigation of the home being raided. Despite the criticisms, no action has been taken against the officers or their respective police departments. In August 2010, Sheriff Jackson stated that "we'd do it again. Tonight."[1]"
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadComplaints are something they just ignore. Settlements hurt.
If this was some national security incident where the nephew was about to activate a nuclear weapon this sort of force might be justified. That it was for drugs is the most disturbing part. How does that help anyone in any capacity?
Atlanta, small for a "big" city and with a terribly low budget relative to its size set its 2014 budget at 550M. A few million dollar wrongful death/abuse settlements each year don't even get noticed.
It helps police departments keep their budgets and continues their access to militarization programs (where the DoD gives them surplus equipment after combat operations).
There is no excuse whatsoever for what happened.
...the taxpayers. But probably just a few dollars per individual per year, so not enough to cause enough outrage to change things.
Sometimes the only way to get change is to make it painful to not change.
One incident will not be enough, but if this becomes epidemic and they're spending $50M a year on lawsuits...
However, the problem is systemic. I don't see a change without major adjustments to the law which would be highly unpopular, eg mandatory life sentences for crimes committed by police officers or similarly draconian measures.
But sure, let's run with your assumption.
"The problem is that certainty of punishment is difficult to achieve"
"X is hard, therefore Y," without establishing that Y is worthwhile, is a piece of reasoning responsible for many ills. Yes, it's a cost-benefit thing, but bear the following points in mind:
When you have (X * Y) in general, and X >> Y, you can make a much bigger difference with a small change to Y than a big change to X (unless it's an exceptionally big change to X).
Costs of long term imprisonment scales with the medical needs of the people we're imprisoning, which is much faster than linear.
Draconian sentencing means we're doing harm to the those we falsely convict (which will inevitably be above zero); this means increasing the risk to innocent officers, which lowers the quality of officers we can recruit.
"especially where co-offenders have a strong incentive to back each other up - in this case, groups of police officers :-("
This is a tremendous issue, for sure, but it is one that needs to be resolved for a whole host of reasons, of which this is only one.
Note that a more draconian sentence reinforces this - if I think there's a chance my innocent buddy is getting sent up for life, I'm more concerned (and therefore, presumably, more willing to stretch the truth) than if I think there's a chance my innocent buddy is getting a slap on the wrist - so if I'm mistaken about my buddy's innocence, raising X might actually decrease Y. (Actually, that holds even if I think my buddy is guilty of something that doesn't deserve so stiff a penalty...)
Unfortunately South Africa's police force has also learned from the USA, as have others I see. Granted a Swat team is necessary sometimes, but overall the Police force is just becoming more indimidatory and inhumane. It's a bad trend, and a real threat to civil society.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938911
What's the incidence of things like this in the rest of the world?
If we have to err between the safety of the public and the safety of police officers, that's an easy decision to make since hazards are part of the job they have chosen to perform. Using SWAT teams externalizes the risk and danger of the job.
IMHO, it should be a high bar to meet to justify the use of SWAT teams in any situation. A judge should have to sign off on the use based on extraordinary evidence justifying why such excessive force is need. Once a warrant is acquired, do police have carte blanche to exercise it as they see fit?
It should come back on the judge that he or she authorized this abuse of power. Unfortunately, the feedback loop between the (hypothetical) judicial backstop on the system and the enforcers of the law tends to be left open by ignorance.
It would be good for local political activists in Atlanta to make sure that the judge who authorized this warrant has a significantly curtailed career.
I would hope that signing off on a warrant requires more rigor than a mere signature.
How adversarial is the warrant granting process. Is it common for warrants asked for to be granted by default, or is there an adversarial process in place that forces the police/detectives to go back and do more investigative work if they don't provide enough substantive evidence to justify a warrant being granted.
Furthermore, is warrant-granting by judges a matter of the public record. i.e. Can I go somewhere to lookup how many warrants a particular judge has granted, how many they have denied, and how many that were denied were eventually granted and the average number of resubmissions required to get those that were initially denied approved?
Sometimes you make a bad choice based on circumstances that were partially outside of your control. An elected judge being overthrown for that reason may make their successor either more willing to question or less willing to take the police's evidence as sufficient.
You're right -it was appallingly easy for them to decide that they can do as they please.
Given the prison/police/military industrial complex fueling our massive, unprecedented in world history, Third Estate and the utter lack of any meaningful political opposition to it, things will get worse before they get better.
All of this military surplus gear thats been avalanching into local PDs nationwide isn't going to just collect dust. The good ol' boys in blue will eventually find a reason to use their toys, whether its on you, me, or the family in the OP.
Since 'Protect and Serve' has been officially declared false by our wonderful Supreme Court, everyone in this country should disabuse themselves of the notion that the police are here to help us and keep the peace.
BRB blasting NWA
ADD: The government is SUPPOSE to protect and serve the people.
Isn't that at least partly because they arm themselves as if they were enemy combatants and treat the police as such. As in this case where apparently there was an AK47 in the house.
That certainly happens. According to http://www.odmp.org/search/year, 30 American police officers were killed by gunfire (not-accidental) in 2013. However, like most things, what's more important is how often it occurs. It turns out that there's somewhere between 750,000-800,000 police officers in the USA, so on the high end, that's 4 gunfire-related deaths per 100,000 officers.
Compare that to jobs like fishing (127 per 100,000), roofing (34 per 100,000), and farming (26 per 100,000) (source: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/personal-finance/10-most-dan...), being shot to death as a police officer doesn't seem especially likely. (Admittedly, gunfire-related deaths don't represent a majority of officer deaths in a given year, it seems, but gunfire is the main justification behind police militarization)
Edit: To put it another way, being a police officer is 2.5 times safer (gunfire-wise, at least), than driving a car.
The point is that trying to arrest a drug dealer who has an assault rifle provides more potential for being shot than trying to arrest one that does not. To mitigate the chance of being seriously injured the police tool up in order that they might, if not strike before they are hurt, respond with appropriate force to a violent attempt to evade arrest.
http://alibertarianfuture.com/big-government/police-state/th...
In Mexico the narco terrorists pulled innocent people off of a bus and made them pit fight to the death for their amusement.
http://www.chron.com/news/nation-world/article/Mexican-crook...
In the middle ages they would impale you on a spike so that you died slowly over days.
In Rwanda one tribe butchered 5 million people of another tribe with machetes.
An that's just examples I can think of off the top of my head.
And you have trouble believing that a few cops wouldn't let a mother comfort her child?
For example, there was a story where a school aged child was suspended for using his hand as a gun and aiming it at other children. I just couldn't comprehend the idea that a principal would think that action justified suspending a child. Perhaps a detention and a stern warning, maybe.
I want to believe that journalists will leave out part of the stories that explains the harsh actions, that makes you say "Ok, I can understand why the principal did that", but when more and more of these stories are published, it becomes harder to believe.
Until recently America had child labor and would lynch black people. A FEDERAL judge in my hometown of New Orleans is famous for saying "We like to try our niggers before we hang them".
Human nature is human nature.
We live in a 'veneer' of civilization.
Underneath are still the same old animal instincts honed over millions of years of evolution.
Don't ever forget that. Or forget it at your peril.
Yes, they are all members of the same species. "Humanity" is a thin veneer over the top of a very selfish, very violent animal.
United States law enforcement included, as described in the article.
It's a very, very sad state of affairs when you have to compare a developed country to undeveloped ones.
Every police officer on active duty right now begin their career with the idea they are to protect their citizens. This doesn't seem like the case in the original article. To me it sounds like people that have lost the intent of their job.
Granted, there is a chance this one incident might be fake (who knows with the internet), but incidents like this are definitely real. The fact of the matter is, people are not evil, but the organization of people tend to be. What can you do about it? Probably the best thing is stop strengthening centralized organizations, live/work in a small tightly knit communities, and don't lump others into a group. If that's not possible, your next best alternative is not be black / hispanic / south-east asian / male.
These are humans who decided, probably at a young age, that they wanted to do this sort of thing for a living. They then deliberately pursued training for this sort of thing, and got hired to do this sort of thing. Their livelihood likely depends on them continuing to do this sort of thing. It shouldn't be surprising that these people do this sort of thing. What else are they going to do?
Even the worst part of the worst city in the USA could not be more different than a war-stricken area of Iraq or any other region where military action is a common occurrence (other than that they probably contain more friendlies than enemies).
Aside: It is truly sickening that they used a flashbang on a residential house where they hoped to apprehend a single, low-value suspect that could not possibly have been that well armed. Again, lack of proper training.
But so too are these kinds of reactions from the police. Its really as if the public are caught in the middle of two horrific forces, being created on both ends of the playing field. The question is: who profits? The cold hard answer, which nobody wants to admit is this: the dealers of drugs, and the dealers of weapons. Oftentimes, the same damn groups.
Cops profit. Lawyers profit. DAs profit. Tough-on-crime politicians profit. Religions profit. Government profits. Political parties profit.
Basically, the whole establishment profits from maintaining status quo in the drug war.
More info: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599349-america...
Well, here's the most relevant quote, anyways:
"""
Because of a legal quirk, SWAT raids can be profitable. Rules on civil asset-forfeiture allow the police to seize anything which they can plausibly claim was the proceeds of a crime. Crucially, the property-owner need not be convicted of that crime. If the police find drugs in his house, they can take his cash and possibly the house, too. He must sue to get them back.
Many police departments now depend on forfeiture for a fat chunk of their budgets. In 1986, its first year of operation, the federal Asset Forfeiture Fund held $93.7m. By 2012, that and the related Seized Asset Deposit Fund held nearly $6 billion.
Mr Balko contends that these forfeiture laws are “unfair on a very basic level”. They “disproportionately affect low-income people” and provide a perverse incentive for police to focus on drug-related crimes, which “come with a potential kickback to the police department”, rather than rape and murder investigations, which do not. They also provide an incentive to arrest suspected drug-dealers inside their houses, which can be seized, and to bust stash houses after most of their drugs have been sold, when police can seize the cash.
"""
This is really my main concern with the "war on drugs". Keeping the drug trade illegal doesn't get rid of it - rather, it just pushes it underground. The result is organised crime, violence, and so many other major problems.
Admittedly, I'm very far removed from the situation, but I find it difficult to imagine that there'd be so much of these problems if you could just walk into a store and buy your drug of choice in the same way that you buy cigarettes or alcohol. You don't see gangs and cartels forming from around the trade of household cleaning supplies or consumer electronics.
However, they are starting to get into the trade of fake food.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/fake-food-c...
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21599028-organised-gan...
https://reportingproject.net/occrp/index.php/en/cc-blog/1758...
Should the SWAT team be able to toss a flashbang into your child's crib because you have a dime bag in the nightstand?
[1] http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/crime09.htm
I have a pretty good understanding of race and the 'war on drugs.'
[0] http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/07/14/201981025/the...
Why the 88, by the way? I hope it isn't to do with that angry Chaplin lookalike. Is just when combined with silver and a comment saying that race has nothing to do with the drug war in the US, I can't help but get suspicious. Apologies for the godwinning if it is just the year you were born, or something.
Meth didn't exist when the war on drugs started, it is an after the fact explanation. You've been taught that the war on drugs is equal opportunity. Propaganda is built on lies and dis-information. The individuals crafting policies who actually believe that propaganda eventually craft disaster and failure, like a geneticist who doesn't believe in evolution.
As far as I can tell, they care less about pot. With the exception of massive amounts of pot, they care mostly about everything else. Small amounts of pot are virtually decriminalized in much of the US, but not small amounts of other scheduled substances (I knew a [white] guy in college who went to jail during a routine traffic stop for possession of one 10 mg pill of dexmethylphenidate (a.k.a. Foculin) without a prescription -- $1500 bail).
I'm not saying police don't do racial profiling, just that the War on Drugs is not about holding a race war; it's primarily about money.
But there's nowhere near as much money coming from seizure as is coming from the government to fund the manpower and equipment used to do the seizing.
The enforcement divisions of the DOJ seize less than 2B annually. (That's FBI/DEA/ATF/etc combined.) Their combined budget is ~27B.
Seizure (and prosecution in general) is more a problem due to perverse incentive schemes: Police are incentivized to seize money not so much to have the money directly, but to have those seizures show up on their performance reviews. Not unlike prosecutors trying to rack up convictions or traffic cops trying to fill ticket quotas.
The Drug War is much more about race.
Drugs are a proxy in a war between police and gangs. Atlanta had 81 murders in 2013, versus 82 for London, which has 20x the population. To an extent the drug trade causes some of this violence, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. Atlanta is in a former slave-holding state and was segregated as recently as the 1970's. It's a city where 27% of residents, and 31% of children, are below the poverty line. Poverty is highly correlated with race: 33% of blacks and hispanics versus only 8% of whites. It's a city where 76% of poor families are led by women with no husband present.
Between the history of oppression and the massive racial disparity in the incidence of poverty, there is zero trust between the black majority and the white minority (which holds a majority of the economic and political power). This lack of trust is at the root of much of the conflict. Black and hispanic communities are unhappy with the crime, but also, arguably for good reasons, don't help the police shut down the gangs. At the same time, wealthier whites support the aggressive enforcement because they are scared and the negative side-effects don't happen in their neighborhoods.
This is not to justify no-knock raids for drug enforcement, but to help illuminate the mindset of the officers involved and how they justify their actions. I am in favor of deescalating the drug war, but that's just the first step in normalizing our cities, which see violence that is without comparison in the developed world.
It's not Switzerland, so you can't compare.
Unless we want to agree that spending $15,000 per pupil from a family with an income of $30,000 equates to the same education as $15,000 per pupil from a family with an income of $200,000.
I find that hard to believe. It can't be that hard to actually shut down distribution networks with the amount of resources the government uses. But if you just focus on the parts of the network near to the end user, you can burn a lot more resources and argue that you should be given even more resources. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they actively protect or support the major distribution networks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffic...
We need to stop the demented practice of selling surplus military equipment to local police departments. We're not saving money. Cops don't need armored cars, drones, grenades, etc.
They already sold the equipment to the federal government. The federal government is simply getting rid of stuff they don't want. If anything, this practice hurts them by flooding the market with used goods.
The thing is, we're prohibited by law from buying them at the moment.
This may (or may not) be true in Atlanta, but in South Carolina, it's demonstrably untrue. We had a wave of SWAT raids from 2006-2010 on poker games, culminating in this:
http://pokerati.com/2010/11/poker-raid-in-south-carolina-1-p...
None of these poker game players were "guys with long raps sheets". In fact, most of them had no prior criminal record.
I know of numerous other SWAT raids for other white collar crimes like campaign finance violations but I don't have time to dig them all up now.
Finally, SWAT raids are routinely carried out on "suburban pot dealers". Here's one from a few months ago:
http://marlborough.patch.com/groups/police-and-fire/p/swat-t...
Just Google "pot dealer" and SWAT and you'll find tons of other examples.
http://www.scnow.com/news/local/article_3506ee8e-1bce-11e3-b...
Well, it's also about violent dancing and parking.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/08/swat-t...
When SWAT raids are SOP, violent dancers and babies are going to get hurt. But at least the cops are winning.
Given the opportunity to wear body armor and carry a rifle when confronting a perceived threat, many will take it.
There is a reason that burglary is dangerous: it invites a confrontation that doesn't have to exist.
I'm not so starry-eyed as to imagine that the cops never need to enter a house forcefully. But they can make this happen at a time and means of their choosing. They can watch to determine how many people are in the house. They can wait for some suspects to leave and detain them individually.
It's easy for me to second-guess from here. But the time to think through all these things is before you go into the house.
My comments speculate upon the mindset of those involved in these raids regarding their choice of weapons and gear. They know they are going into a house, that much is given.
1. Officer wants to return home no matter what. 2. He/she decides to use as much firepower as possible to achieve that - 50 cal guns, military grade armor, armored cards, explosives, grenades, rockets, whatever. 3. I have a risk of getting caught in the situation like this. I live in bad neighborhood, my brother sells weed, I had police encounters in the past, whatever. 4. I want to stay home alive. 5. What should I do to achieve #4 if police decided on the escalation of firepower? Logically I can conclude anything besides having thicker armor and higher caliber weaponry?
If someone declares war on you and not poised to take prisoners and determined to kill, what should you do?
If you do (5), then the police simply bring that shiny new MRAP they got from the DoD and park it in your yard and turn on some spotlights. Then they get on the loudspeaker and have you come out with your hands up. If you fire up your heavy weaponry to oppose them, then you will surely fail to maintain (4).
Remember, this whole thing got started because the police thought they might face armed resistance. If you have a nice paper trail of armor and high caliber weapons leading to your door, then the police will simply bring the proper amount of firepower to assure their success. So, I disagree that escalation of arms gets you anything in the long run regarding this SWAT business.
But they're serving a warrant, and we still have due process (or at least some shred of it), so these SWAT teams are going after suspects.
[1] EDIT: Many more are killed in vehicular accidents.
Background: it's long been known that law enforcement officers (LEOs) are _safer_ on the job than non-LEOs. Only an unfortunate few die in violent encounters with the criminal elements. When LEOs scream about how dangerous their job is, they're almost always asking for a pay raise.
Nonetheless, there was a time in the not-so-remote past when LEOs _consciously__accepted_ the possibility that they might die or be injured on the job. That attitude is fast disappearing.
Once one accepts the analogy that "battling crime" (where any "enemy" is poorly defined; those are civilians out there) is equivalent to warfare (where the enemy is well-defined and no quarter given), then one can almost unconsciously accept a "better him than me" attitude where the civilians' lives are, relative to LEO's, worthless.
The creeping acceptance of warfare's "better him than me" attitude by LEOs and police departments is the root of the problem.
Like the rest who must escape to reality on a daily basis, I rather have a) My gun with me, and b) A cop by my side.
FWIW I live inside a very large US city, am familiar with firearms and have worked in law enforcement for many years.
And now for something supported by the numbers: have you considered the likelihood that the cop by your side shares his/her bed with someone else?
The Cato institute has worked with journalist Radley Balko (who is the expert in this area) to produce a map of botched SWAT raids: http://www.cato.org/raidmap
I really see no other course for citizens other than to start attending public meetings and speaking up whenever public figures spout truisms about the safety of law enforcement officers being top priority. It's not top priority, that's why they get paid the big bucks - to put the safety of law-abiding citizens above their own.
ftfy
America is dominated by cults of violence, cults of death. Its military-industrial groups do nothing but produce death and destruction at the press of a button, and yet Americans do nothing about it.
This problem won't go away until the real issue is address: the utter lack of humility in your average public, and dire amounts of arrogance in the ruling elite. It is pure and utter know-best that makes this irreversible. Until people accept the humility for change, it doesn't happen...
Legalizing drugs would make all the violence go away over night, and let us spend the money directly on the social problems drugs cause (which obviously haven't been reduced in the least be criminalization).
What that suggests is that the raids are the results of authories in some areas not knowing what they're doing while authorities in other areas do.
It seems dangerous in two ways. Both that most of these tips are probably for completely innocent people who may now be subject to extreme levels of violence with no justification, and that once in a while, one of them might be for something much worse than they thought, putting the officers themselves in a lot of unnecessary danger because they didn't do any investigation.
That's a really bad map. "Botched" is such an arbitrary term and it doesn't capture the way a perfectly executed raid will often damage lives. ("we only terrorized their kids! standard procedure.")
The data is pretty obviously woefully incomplete. Does anyone actually believe that that there have been only 13 "unnecessary raids on doctors or sick people" in the last 30 years? Those are the ones the author knows about. It's an infographic that hides as much as it reveals.
The past 4 years seem anomalous - compare the previous four years:
2010 - 19 2009 - 12 2008 - 22 2007 - 16
Much as I'd like to think Obama has single-handedly reformed all of the police departments in the US, I think it rather more likely there's something wrong with the data.
These raids are a problem, yes, but in a thread with a European commenting that they think this represents America, your link doesn't really support the argument that this is true.
The previous comment was referring to the raids in general (at least how I read it). And those are actually not all that uncommon.
Just because people don't die very often doesn't mean they're reasonable. Pointing rifles at innocent people practically indiscriminately ("wrong place, wrong time, now STFU citizen"), not letting parents attend to their scared and/or wounded children... there's just no justification for that.
It doesn't make it safer for suspects. It doesn't make it safer for police. It's certainly not safer for bystanders.
I'm not the sort to evoke "our fore-fathers", but I seriously doubt a militarized police force who could raid citizen's homes without notice is something they would approve of.
Turns out they had the address of the apartment correct minus the street. He was at 3033 X, they wanted 3033 Y. They realized this about a half hour into the raid and said "oops, sorry," and simply packed up and left. His story is not in that map. I looked.
Another time, I left my apartment to walk to the convenience store across the street and was immediately met with six Springfield (OR) Police officers with weapons drawn and pointed directly at my center mass. I was ordered to kneel, not move, and provide identification, conflicting orders with which I was afraid to comply due to itchy triggers in my face; they ended up pushing my face into the sidewalk and taking the identification themselves. They thought I was a car thief they had been chasing.
The fun part of the second story is that they found my press credentials in my wallet first (this was when I worked in television) and a lieutenant magically appeared, apologized extensively, and offered me a bottle of water. She also called a bus to come treat the laceration on my forehead, and gave me her card and said if I had any problems, call her first, and we needn't make a big deal out of this, right? Just a misunderstanding, no big deal.
Police get it wrong a lot. Just because it's not near you doesn't mean it's not happening, believe me.
This happens with surprising frequency from what I hear. I know of a couple people with almost the same story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_%281972%29
[Yes, it was a long time ago, but I don't think anything about our society here in the UK has changed to such an extent that would make this fundamentally impossible.]
Actually, on the that subject I'm not particularly worried about a general level of violence by police in the UK. However, I am concerned that we could see something like the Troubles again if we continue to treat immigrant populations as scapegoats for all the ills in our society.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961
"What happened on 17 October 1961 and in the following days against the peaceful demonstrators, on which no weapons were found, morally forces us to bring our testimony and to alert public opinion... All guilty people must be punished. The punishment must be extended to all of the responsible people, those who give orders, those who feign of letting it happen, whatever their high office may be.."
reminds me of the coroner at the inquest for the Bloody Sunday victims, himself a former Army officer:
"They were shooting innocent people. These people may have been taking part in a march that was banned but that does not justify the troops coming in and firing live rounds indiscriminately. I would say without hesitation that it was sheer, unadulterated murder. It was murder."
It was an unfortunate coincidence at a point in time of aggressive soldiers, civil disobedience, no-go-areas and the presence of armed PIRA units.
For the next 30 years of 'troubles' there was never an action like that again by regular army forces, despite constant provocation and attacks against them.
The SWAT / armed police raids, on the other hand, are occurring every day in the USA.
Anyway, us Americans manage to normally live our lives because stuff like this is rare. Remember: if you see it on the news, it is not common pretty much by definition.
I'm far more worried about being run over by a truck or my house burning down than I am about being shot by the police. That's not to say that it's not a problem. This is a huge problem that needs fixing, like, now. But it doesn't directly affect my ability to live life without fear.
Re: Europe — http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/25/world/europe/eu-elections/ etc.
[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elinadav-heymann/sudden-rise-o...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEKr_sDUPTE&list=UUZaT_X_mc0...
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1MYMVfyHi0&list=UUZaT_X_mc0...
This is truly awful, but the vast majority of Americans will never be subject to a SWAT raid or anything like it (especially if they're not involved in illegal activity). Or terrorist attacks. Or mass shootings. Or etc etc.
People are notoriously bad at estimating the probability rare but extreme events will happen to them.
Of course, that doesn't make this ok. I personally believe SWAT team usage should be restricted to hostage, active shooter, and similar situations.
While that's true, it's somewhat beside the point. US citizens are far more likely to be a on the receiving end of a SWAT raid or a victim of murder than citizens of other countries at a comparable level of development. The fact that it's only a minority of the population doesn't mean there isn't a serious issue.
To put some numbers on it, the US annual murder rate is ~5 people per 100k population. Yes, it's small, but compare that to 1.0 in the UK, 1.1 in Australia, 1.6 in Canada (0.4 in my country), and clearly it's a more dangerous place.
There are estimated to be ~50-80k US SWAT raids per year annually. Of those in Maryland for example:
- half are for non-violent "part-II" crimes
- a third resulted in no arrests
- >1% resulted in an officer's weapon being fired
I didn't know those SWAT stats prior to today and I find them shocking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/02/17/s...
Yes, people are known to underestimate the likelihood of such events happening to them relative to others.
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias
Given that you read stories about SWAT raiding the wrong residence because they misread the house number, it made worried that the same could happen to me.
Picture proof: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/AqKIhXOCIAEaG9D.jpg:large
I was shocked what I saw next and I was thinking to myself "What have I done?!". I'm in a high-rise and have a good view of the city. It looked like they sent the entire police force. Police vehicles were flying in from every angle, SUVs jumping over curbs, driving through lawns, etc. It looked like a scene from the original Die Hard. I was nervous they would trace down my cell # if it turned out to be nothing.
I think that's how they get away with it politically. For the politically powerful and even most of the middle class, it's only something they see on the news occasionally.
I think this is a topic where the legal fight is ramping up. These stories are becoming too common and though currently "legal" it just reeks of negligence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carabinieri http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Gendarmerie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rijkswacht (until 2001) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardia_Civil
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/01/30/robbery-ring-disguis...
It's not like they're feeding a body into a wood-chipper or anything.
Observe the location in an unmarked police car and wait for the suspect to leave, then enter to acquire the evidence.
No confrontation required.
There is no real urgency that justifies a raid when no one is in any danger of violent harm.
EDIT to address the troll: you can run these off of a car battery and stream it over the cellphone network. Quality will be rather good even then. If you can park a car, you can set up the camera. PTZ, too.
king of non-suspicious behavior
Similar to the vaccination blowback after the Bin Laden raid.
How about real life happens in your story:
- Look outs realize there is an anomalous vehicle staged in the neighborhood & alert the team. How do you not get detected?
- Drug dealers arn't home so they send a child/girlfriend to pickup the stash/cash from the home. Do you arrest and charge the 14 year old son of the dealer?
- Dope boys have children/women runners do the logistical aspects. Arrest the dealer, go in the house and find the stash, the girlfriend claims its hers. Dope boy walks free.
Congrats you have done nothing but charged a 14 year old relative and/or girlfriend of the dealer, alerted the hood that its under surveillance and your target flees to a different zone/state/country.
There are plenty of ways to avoid violence unless absolutely necessary. Instead police want to raise the level of violence and approach every citizen as an enemy combatant. If a cop wants to play military war fighter, then go join the military.
Why would you care if the target flees to another zone/state/country? They're out of your hair and without contacts, they won't be nearly as effective in their objectives.
Since we're talking domestic, they're not nearly as likely to flee to another country or state; people are tied to neighborhoods. Sure, if they're alerted to your surveillance your job gets a lot harder, but that doesn't matter to the innocent.
Crime is down, and police are dangerous. That's the environment we have now. If middle class white people fear the police more than criminals, the police have a problem, and the government has a problem. That prevents them from doing their jobs as well.
>drug offenders are perfectly well adjusted people, just politely knock they will let you in every time. >drug dealers don't flee the state/country when they suspect being watched/followed/pending arrest >I wonder why it's called a "trap house"
I hope that you live in an upper middle class community in California to justify the logic behind your post.
You just don't do it for the pot dealer down the street. Instead, you wait for him to leave and break in to get what you need. Preferably in a way that isn't visible from the street so you can arrest the guy before/after.
If you're looking for a small amount of drugs on a person who you aren't even sure is present in a single room with a whole pile of occupants including children and you start throwing flashbang grenades then you should be 100% culpable.
Stuff like that has no application in regular policing, definitely not in raids to arrest people on suspicion of some small time crime.
If you go after the hold-out of a nest of armed bankrobbers that have been spotted going into some warehouse then you could make a case for it but even then preferably only after they try to shoot their way out.
This is an absolutely ridiculous level of escalation in a residential area.
So it's bad enough they're using military hardware, but then they're not even using it according to proper training.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGhfyQXZOwg
That is your logic.
The Police get all the "toys" but none of the training, or self control.
Just watch any SWAT raid then compare that to a true military RAID, the Control and restraint used by the military is vastly contrasted by the Uncontrolled and Free Firing of a Police Raid.
The police are very dangerous
Police believe themselves to be at war. Not with one-off groups of armed bank robbers, per se, but with heavily militarized cartels and street gangs like MS-13. If an ordinary police unit knocked on the door of an MS-13 safe house, they'd probably be met with heavily armed resistance.
The problems here are numerous. First, because this was not a cartel safe house, and any degree of diligence sufficient to obtain a no-knock warrant should have made that clear -- which means that either the diligence process is broken, or it was subverted. Second, because very few houses in residential neighborhoods are gang hideouts, and the police are using the theoretical presence of armed gangs as broad, categorical pretext to militarize all of their SOPs, regardless of context, circumstance, degree of escalation, or suspicion of crime. Third, because the level of police militarization in general is growing alarmingly. You'd be hard-pressed to draw a clear distinction, either in armaments or in operational charter, between some of the most heavily armed SWAT teams in this country and small military units.
Stories like this one are not only outrageous; they are horrifying. I don't want to subject myself to recency or memorability bias. But I'd be very curious to see the stats on how many of these incidents are occurring for every SWAT operation that, say, takes down a real bad guy. I'm not in favor of banning SWAT operations altogether, so much as I'm of the strong belief that the "S" in SWAT should always stand for "Special." As in, we've been building a legitimate case for months on this location, and we have extraordinary reason to believe that extraordinary measures are called for.
Such hyperbole makes it harder to understand their position and hence to effect useful change.
That's my suspicion.
Check out this case, which happened in my buddy's neighborhood:
http://hamptonroads.com/2010/01/ryan-frederick-loses-appeal-...
TLDR: No knock raid with officer trying to batter down door, guy inside with small amount of weed who had previously been robbed by armed intruders fires through the door and kills officer.
No-knock warrants are by and large a horrible thing and SWAT teams are drastically overused, but that doesn't make the problem they are meant to address any less real.
2) You think the people in this article were "hard drug ring members"?
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/lawsuit-clayton-swat-grenade-ba...
You mean like this guy with "an ounce or less of marijuana"?
I think you have no idea what you are talking about. They aren't being used for "hard drugs" they are being used for "any situation where we might be able to link to someone who uses drugs".
> It would be a non-violent crime, probably. Non-violent crimes shouldn't result in swat teams.
Where in here do you see 'hard drug ring'? Or 'hard drugs'?
You:
> I don't think "nonviolent" is a good description of a lot of hard drug rings. They aren't being violent right at the moment, but if they see a cop standing outside the door, they very well might just shoot him. No-knock warrants are by and large a horrible thing and SWAT teams are drastically overused, but that doesn't make the problem they are meant to address any less real.
> This seems so disconnected from my comment that I'm not even sure you responded to the right one. Either you mis-replied or you have mentally transformed me into a bizarre caricature of what people who don't completely agree with you must be like.
Funny, I thought that is what your comment was.
I was talking about no knock warrants on nonviolent crimes and you make the false claim I was talking about armed, hard drug criminal organizations. That somehow them being "overused" makes the problem "less real".
I never claimed the problem wasn't real either. I claimed they shouldn't be used in relation to non-violent crimes/criminals in general.
As I said, the fact that no-knock SWAT teams are sent in indiscriminately is bad, but it doesn't mean that crimes where evidence can be flushed down the toilet are "a non-violent crime, probably."
The problem is not that SWAT raids are victimizing an otherwise "probably non-violent" drug world. The problem is that many law-enforcement officers behave in a cowardly way, where the prioritize their well-being over that of the public, so they treat people who are not hardened drug lords as though they were — just in case. That is the big problem.
> As I said, the fact that no-knock SWAT teams are sent in indiscriminately is bad, but it doesn't mean that crimes where evidence can be flushed down the toilet are "a non-violent crime, probably."
http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/causes.h...
Alcohol is more dangerous than all drug related crimes combined to LEO. Not just raids. anything.
Please provide statistical evidence that a drug arrest is more violent/dangerous than other arrests. Please also provide evidence that a large percentage of these arrest involve violent offenders.
And nothing you've said precludes what I said should happen [ search the premise when its unoccupied ].
I'm not sure how that wasn't clear when I explicitly stated it.
Instead of doing this, you continue to make up ridiculous misrepresentations of what I've said.
1. The act being prohibited is nonviolent; injecting heroin, for example, involves zero violence.
2. The prohibition itself creates the violent black market organizations; if heroin were legal, the black market organizations wouldn't exist.
3. Thus yes, nonviolent laws.
There'll still be other drugs to chase after but clearly SOMETHING is changing here.
How is that worse than "they found pot under the floorboards"?
Worst case they get time off with pay while and internal investigation by their friends determine that procedures are followed.
You are trying to come up with technical solutions (oh install sewer traps). The problem is not technical. It legal, and regulatory. There is no, 0, nada, zilch repercussion for just throwing a flash grenade in barge in. Why install sewer traps and spends all that money? That is irrational from their point of view.
The floor boards and all that sewer stuff is just noise. All those "problems" are just a list hurdles they will never and or even think about solving, that was the main point.
However, I am just gathering facts to figure out what other options are available to police. If certain states, as a citizen I am judged very harshly if I don't exhaust all options before using lethal force, even if it's happening in the heat of the moment. I want the cops to do the same consideration of their other options, at least when it's an operation they get to plan out ahead of time to happen under the time of their choosing.
Edit: also clogging, not sure when this happens and not really willing to experiment.
That would be an interesting use for all those seized drugs. I wonder if they do this.
You can't clog a toilet by flushing cocaine.
At least, you can't afford to.
You could also just rig an external reservoir (or have a full bucket lying around) to rapidly refill the back tank. Though that would of course be fairly incriminating.
Maybe they bust you with less, but they'll still bust you.
Does this apply in criminal trials? If there's evidence I was flushing drugs down the toilet (and such evidence would be there), can the state be allowed to assume I had a lot more of the drug than I really did? What are the policy implications?
A sane person would probably argue that you don't get to run roughshod over people's freedoms just because a particular law is hard to enforce otherwise. But I think that's where it's coming from. You get a pervasive environment where the guys at the top are trying to be tough on drugs and the guys at the bottom keep having to let criminals go because they flushed the evidence, and it's only natural that they'll start to push for more draconian measures.
You could have no-knock raids to capture evidence without needing to stun everybody.
Believe it or not, this is the safest way to do "no-knock" for everyone involved. Think about it- if a law-abiding gun owner was woken up to the sound of unknown men breaking down his door and had time to access her weapon, the situation would be much worse for everyone. There have been many instances of this exact thing happening, often resulting in the death of the raid victims and/or police officers. That is why stun grenades are always the first thing that goes into the building during a no-knock raid.
Tell that to this child and to his parents.
(ie. You can't exactly flush a kilogram of cocaine and a triple-beam down the average toilet in a matter of minutes)
I would think you could - that's the 'brick' size you see in the movies, I would guess you could flush that down in 2-3 flushes as long as it didn't clump up too bad.
P.S. I'm not defending the cops here, just saying, you don't need truck fulls of drugs to be considered "big-time", and they usually get to the bigger fish via the smaller ones.
Not to mention the fact that the penalty for such an amount is on the order of 10 years in prison (of course, that depends on a lot of factors like where you live, how good your lawyer is, etc., but it's quite a large amount of cocaine.)
For example, you can't flush a scale down the toilet.
If we're talking low-level or mid-level dealers, chances are they have a quantity of pre-packaged amounts of their product on hand and maybe even a firearm or two. Unless they can quickly melt-down and/or liquify all of that stuff, it isn't going down any toilet pipe while the homeowner argues with the cops at the door about the status of a warrant.
They (the cops) need something to barter with. You're much more likely to get useful information from someone facing 10+ years than someone facing 1 year (6 months with good behavior) or probation. They want to find everything.
To elaborate on your own example though, pretty sure that even if a firearm is legally registered you can still get in trouble for having it around, especially loaded, in the context of selling illicit substances.
That is almost beside the point, though. How many dealers do you think are using registered firearms to protect their trade? Of that group, how many are registered to the dealer using it and not some random family-member or whatever?
I can't imagine a scenario in which finding a small percentage of the drugs wouldn't hurt the case though. If you can't find it then you can't charge them with possessing it.
In most of the US, and I suspect for most of the population, there is no such thing as registering guns (that would be akin to registering laser printers, especially those high capacity ones).
On the other hand it's illegal for a drug user to possess a firearm, 18 USC § 922(g): http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/922
(it's just that the average consumer doesn't know about it)
To the extent there's any tracking of printers, it would at most tell you which store it was sold from, there isn't any required serial number recording done at checkout (well, as of when I last bought a color printer in 2006).
What you're referring to would be akin to comparing a bullet found at the scene of a crime with one fired from a seized weapon, albeit easier; a comparison system. Much less of a privacy concern, without any required "registration" involved.
I'm sceptical. The police don't need to find 1 kg of cocaine, to find a bag with powder in and powder around the toilet should be sufficient.
The penalty for 1 oz and destroying evidence (if they can prove that) is nothing compared to the penalty for 1 kg.
They could actually make some actionable data for public good.
It seems simultaneously safer and more effective than a no knock warrant.
Additionally, the idea of this sort of raid is to arrest anyone who might be involved when they're found to be in a drug house. If you raid an empty house and find drugs, the owner of said house is gonna go underground if he sees his place crawling with cops, and everyone else is gonna steer clear of it.
Finally, there's a time-sensitivity component - the entire premise of drug dealing is that the drugs are in more or less constant motion, so your chances of success go down the longer there is between tipoff and raid.
I'm not saying that I like no-knock warrants or that they're a good idea, I just wanted to offer some reasons when trying to hit the house when nobody's home might be less safe or less effective.
Hmm ... so, you know, do actual police work? Carefully investigate, all that crap? Nah ... easier to move in with both surprise and massively overwhelming force. And if somebody sneezes and a few of the officers' guns go off in response, well, nothing to see here folks, move along.
They lost my vote with the lie about the toddler "losing a tooth".
If someone pulls a knife or even a pistol in Germany, the police will try its best to save even the offenders life - even if it takes hours.
I also find it odd that you included "stand your ground" laws in there. Those laws would actually protect a homeowner using deadly force in opposition to this type of raid in many cases.
I spend a large part of my free time engaged in the online firearms enthusiast community, and I can assure you that no group is more outspokenly opposed to these tactics as we are. The "militarization of police" is such a well-known thing that we have a few memes built around it. "Tacticool" is what we'd probably call these people, and it's something of a running joke that an police officer's professionalism is inversely proportional to the number of cargo pockets the have on their pants.
(1)http://rt.com/usa/168072-us-drugs-swat-police/
WRT to Jose Guerena, with the exception of Massachusetts at certain points in the '70s-80s, I don't know of any state that requires or required you to retreat from your own residence. It's unthinkable Arizona would have ever required that.
Finally, I don't see how it helps anything to paint people like us as racists, especially, as LyndsySimon points out, we've been the biggest group fighting for the longest time the tactics that are being discussed here.
I knew about it because my dad was a member of the NRA. The big, bad NRA used to write about police militarization and criminal abuses of force by federal agencies every single month in their member publication, they seemed presciently worried about the encroaching police state two decades before most people. Instead of reporting the same stories of government abuse the NRA aggregated from regional media, the national media painted them as anti-government for calling BATF agents "jack-booted thugs" (because they were) and for saying "in Clinton's administration, if you have a badge, you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens." (because they did, and still do today under two successive administrations.)
SWAT excesses in the "War on Drugs" started in the '70s, there was some back and forth, first encouragement of that, then a reaction to the excesses.
It was Waco, started by the BATF as a "rice bowl raid", that is, a big publicity event prior to asking for more money in the next Federal fiscal year, that really brought this to a head with Dingell, the NRA, gun owners, and other concerned citizens.
Why isn't this headline news across America?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramilitary
The list of examples (while possibly biased) gives a clear idea of where, having these kinds of miitarised civilian forces, can lead a society.
I see no evidence of this.
In addition to preserving evidence, they are also issue when it's believe there could be an issue of officer safety. (E.g., someone armed & dangerous.)
The second section, really the last 1/3rd of the book, is a series of essays and articles, more op-ed than factual history. This is where Radley Balko's libertarian streak comes out full-bore, and it moves from semi-scholarly work to libertarian polemic. It's fine, of course, it's his book and he's entitled to write what he likes, but there's a lot of anti-government rhetoric and anti-social policy language in there that I found offputting.
In addition, throughout the book, the police are described in aggressive terms, they're always "threatening" or "menacing" or "assaulting" - while the people being arrested are "cowering", "hiding", "pleading".
It seems like it would be hard to know exactly in many cases what everyone was doing, and instead Balko is putting his emotional slant on what was happening. Then, in the second section of the book, he freely admits that he started tracking and writing about when dogs were killed during SWAT raids because it got a much more impassioned response from readers.
None of this removes the value of the book, which as I said was excellent. But I think I would have appreciated a little more nuance in some of the tone.
When you find a police department that fits this definition, please let us all know. I'm skeptical it's even a possibility.
I think making sure police have some skin in the game, instead of pursuing the illusory chase of perfect security for them, is the answer. It's supposed to be public service, after all.
The number of places and the absurdity of the manner in which you can get killed, hurt, jailed, or have your entire life irrecoverably change is just frightening.
Now, I don't intend to be Anti-American, I already accepted that there is a possibility that this sort of thing gets reported more for the US. Also, I know that one can claim that I am generalizing and this doesn't happen all the time, all over the place.
However, I've read so many news reports[1] of simple things like frivolous lawsuits that completely damage a persons life to completely avoidable instances of serious life altering events like this news story which makes me wonder why would a professional making a decent living (like say a software engineer) would want to move to America. I personally, am not too inclined.
[1] I have often thought about creating a site that aggregates such horror stories to serve as a warning -- a mirror, lets say ...or if you really want me to spell it out -- a reminder, that, 'No, American is not the greatest country in the world'. Before you decide to downvote and retort, read the article (again) and empathize with me, if you can, how this sort of thing would invoke such a reaction.
Not in my experience, but I have no trouble believing that has much to do with my social circles.
The thing that always amazes me about this is the unbelievable incompetence of our administrators. They keep doing things that don't work and expect them to work.
The unofficial motto: "If violence isn't doing the job, you're not using enough."
> Jose Guerena was a U.S. Marine veteran who served in the Iraq War and was killed in his Tucson, Arizona home, on May 5, 2011, by officers of the Pima County SWAT team, while they were executing a warrant to search his home in relation to an ongoing investigation into drug smuggling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Guerena_shooting
There was a story I saw yesterday about police shooting a 95yr old WW2 veteran in his own home because he didn't want to leave and was brandishing a knife. They were bean bag rounds but they shot him 6 times from close range and he died.
You think you are law and power and can condescendingly dismiss me in your mind as a criminal. No, I'm with God. Fear yourself and your sins, nigger.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwebjunk....
2. The suspect was later arrested for dealing meth. This isn't a little dime bag situation as the clearly biased writer would have you believe.
3. This isn't the suspect's first arrest, he was arrested before for distribution. Police found an AK-47 in his house.
Here are things that could have been done to prevent this situation. 1. The homeowner could have not dealt meth. 2. The parents could have not moved in with their AK-47 owning, meth dealing nephew.
Here are some likely other outcomes even if the SWAT raid didn't occur: 1. One of homeowner's guns could have accidentally discharged and killed the child. 2. Criminals could have robbed the house (a higher likelihood when you are running a drug ring out of your house) and killed the child.
That poor child's situation is a direct product of irresponsible parenting. There was a reason the police were at this house. Their tactics and the damage they did would have not been remotely possible if this guy wasn't armed with illegal weaponry and dealing drugs.
This isn't reddit. America is not out to get you. Don't be a criminal and don't associate with criminals and this doesn't happen to you.
Signs point to this guy not storing the rifle in a safe fashion, however.
This is HN, so remember to get the polish out before you commence with the bootlicking.
1. The suspect is the nephew. 2. The nephew is not the home owner. 3. The home owner wasn't the one dealing meth. 4. The nephew/suspect wasn't present at the home at the time.
That said, your comment is off. The suspect is not the father of the child as it appears they were visiting the suspects house.
It must be nice to never associate with criminals. For many poor families, this is not an option as the only uncle who will let you stay for free with him after your house burns down, just happens to sell some meth on the side. Is one grenaded baby worth finding even 100lbs of meth? Not to me. It's certainly not worth mauling a baby to find no drugs.
Does it matter if the meth might be causing far more pain to more people?
This https://www.google.com/search?q=mother+on+meth+kills+child gives a lot of pretty stark reading material.
In my question I'm asking if a simplistic comparative harm analysis would perhaps weigh in favour of non-terminal injury to an infant. It's a very difficult question, of course, and a true analysis couldn't be so simplistic (what proportion of those 900k doses would get replaced by alternate supplies for example). But raising the question seems valid.
> Don't be a criminal and don't associate with criminals and this doesn't happen to you.
Ok, but how far does this 'association' go? Where is your line where the excessive police response isn't justified. We can already see that your line is past throwing grenades at children. What's next? SWAT team mows down a preschool with gunfire because a drug dealer was picking up their kid at the time?
I gave up hope after the same local cops who have long been notorious for shooting everybody [1](2001) got off scot-free for contriving a raid of a local mayor, intimidating his mother in-law, shooting his dogs and unapologetically quipping about it [2](2008).
1: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/content/nation/investig...
"By any measure, Prince George's County police have shot and killed people at rates that exceed those of nearly any other large police force in the nation."
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor'...
"The event gained national and international media attention. While the Calvos were cleared of wrongdoing, the police were accused by the Calvos and civil rights groups of lacking a proper search warrant, excessive force, and failure to conduct a proper background investigation of the home being raided. Despite the criticisms, no action has been taken against the officers or their respective police departments. In August 2010, Sheriff Jackson stated that "we'd do it again. Tonight."[1]"