Posted on 08/28/2013 3:28:22 AM PDT by LD Jackson
I have been noticing a disturbing trend lately. More and more news reports have been about similar incidents.
Imagine being a law-abiding citizen, as I'm sure everyone who reads my blog is, sitting in your home with your family one evening when your front door is smashed in. Flash bangs start exploding in your home, men in black paramilitary uniforms rush in, all wearing masks, helmets and carrying machine guns. Your dog barks so it is shot to death. You and your family are all screamed at by all these men to GET ON THE FLOOR. You comply, you and your family are handcuffed and while you are all kept on the floor these men start ransacking your home. After an hour or two they realize, oops, we are at the wrong address. You and your family have the handcuffs removed, the men say they are sorry about the trouble and leave.
I'm sure no one wants this to happen to them, but it has happened to many families and it will continue to happen. In 2005, the last year for which I could find data, there were more than 50,000 raids conducted by SWAT-like police units. With this many raids being conducted every year there are most certainly going to be some that are botched.
To be crystal clear, I am not anti-police. I have no axe to grind. The few interactions I've had with law enforcement personnel have always been pleasant and professional. The police in my hometown of Midwest City, Oklahoma are consummate professionals and I am grateful they are there. Midwest City, by the way, has had a SWAT team since 1976. All large cities in the United States have one or more SWAT teams and as of 2005, 80% of towns with a population of at least 25,000 have a SWAT team.
I have come to believe this trend toward militarizing the police has gone too far. Especially when it appears they are allowed to operate with no accountability for errors. I'm sure most law enforcement personnel would say "whatever gets me home" to justify the tactics but when SWAT teams are used for things like raiding poker games at a VFW they have gone too far. A first person account of a SWAT raid at a Dallas poker game is an interesting tale of wasted time and resources that apparently produced nothing in the end. Is a poker game really a place the police think they will need flash bangs and automatic weapons?
Radley Balko, a former policy analyst for the Cato Institute, has written a paper called Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids In America. Just reading a few pages of police misconduct on raids incensed me. While the vast majority of police are good and decent public servants, the ones who are not seem to find their way onto these SWAT teams, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Balko has put together a map (see below) of botched raids over the last few years.
The botched raids and innocent citizens getting hurt will continue until people decide something needs to be done about it. Perhaps it might take a raid at a politician's house or someone important getting killed before something is done. But until that happens, be careful. The men breaking into your home just might be the police at the wrong address.
From an innocent shopping trip to a false drug test, new court documents reveal what triggered a traumatic and fruitless raid of a Leawood family’s home.
When we first met Bob and Addie Harte in March, they had no idea why deputies from the Johnson County Sheriff’s office had banged on their door in April 2012 looking for marijuana. Their only guess was the hydroponic garden in their basement. The father-son project was for growing tomatoes and squash — not marijuana.
The Hartes sued to get the police records, and 41 Action News filed a request for the information weeks ago. Those records reveal it all started when a member of the Missouri Highway Patrol spotted Bob Harte at The Green Circle in August 2011.
The owner of the hydroponics store in the River Market isn’t happy his customers are being watched.
“Why should they be?” asked Bennie Palmentere. “This isn’t a communist country.”
Seven months later in March 2012, that MHP member called the tip into the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office. Incident reports and a search warrant affidavit state deputies then spent three early April mornings digging through the Hartes trash.
The first week they found nothing. But during the second and third weeks, reports say they found wet leaves and stems which “field-tested positive” for marijuana. This led to obtaining the search warrant, which was served April 20, 2012.
Deputies found nothing illegal when they served the search warrant. When the plants in the Hartes basement tested negative, officials had the plant evidence found in the trash retested, but this time in the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office Criminalistics Laboratory.
Lab tests of the plants from the trash came back negative this time. Lab forms state “these are yielding false positive tests from the marijuana field test kits”. There had never been marijuana in the Harte’s trash at all.
The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment, citing pending litigation. Bob and Addie Harte Family released a statement through their attorney:
We have reviewed the materials produced concerning the raid of our home. The facts speak for themselves and are more incriminating of law enforcement than we might have imagined. We cannot understand how the low level of police work, which included using an unreliable marijuana field test, could have permitted a swat-style raid of our home. We have also found out, for the first time, that reliable laboratory testing was done after the raid and proved that there was no marijuana whatsoever in our garbage.
SOUTH COUNTY, MO (KTVI)– Residents were alarmed after a SWAT team lined a South County neighborhood Tuesday night.
The quiet South County street was crawling with SWAT officers, an unnerving situation which turns out to have been the relatively routing service of a warrant.
An unidentified man pulled up around 8:15 p.m. was frisked by police and then detained for questioning, but what got neighbors here very upset happened a few minutes earlier. It was the presence of a SWAT team, complete with officers wearing armor and carrying assault rifles surrounding the man’s home as police went to the door. One woman frantically told her husband, the army’s here.
As it turns out, St. Louis County police say the use of the SWAT team is standard procedure in serving a felony warrant, no matter what it’s for. In this case officers say it was an administrative warrant, though they wouldn’t elaborate. For people on Autumn Drive, it was all a little unsettling.
Police say that it was the service of an administrative warrant by their special investigations unit. Officers will not go into any greater detail, though SWAT team members were downplaying it again saying that their presence on any felony warrant search is standard practice.
http://fox2now.com/2013/08/13/warrant-served-causes-scare-in-south-county-neighborhood/
WND has been reporting on the trend to militarize local police departments for more than a decade. Here is a list of reports on the trend, which recently has begun to garner significant additional attention:
WND founder and CEO Joseph Farah wrote in a 1998 column titled “The cops are out of control” that while in years past seeing a police officer gave him a sense of security, it was no longer the case because of recent actions at the time by SWAT teams.
“The recent incidents in Oklahoma, where police shot an unarmed mother holding her child in her home, in Virginia, where a SWAT team killed a watchman guarding a dice game at an after-hours club and in California, where a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raid on a gun shop resulted in the death of the shopkeeper, provide some hard evidence that police in America may be getting out of control,” Farah said.
He went on to note the danger of police agencies acquiring military gear even back then.
“The biggest danger we face is the federalization and militarization of all law enforcement. Inter-agency task forces, bringing together local and state police with federal agents are now the rule of the day,” Farah noted. “Federal agencies bribe local cops with funding, equipment and training programs.”
http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/wnd-reports-on-swat-raids-on-the-innocent/
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