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To: VRing
When I lived in FL during the early '90s there was an incident in our county in which a squad of cops acting on a tip broke down the door of a young couple's home in the early AM hours and dragged a young couple out of bed. The man and wife were held at gunpoint on the bedroom floor for over an hour while their home was ransacked by cops searching for drugs. That kind of thing isn't at all uncommon these days, but if true the worst part for the couple was that the wife had a habit of sleeping in the nude and she claimed to have been held at gunpoint on the floor completely naked for over an hour while the search was conducted.

She told reporters that male cops stepped over and around her while she was lying on the floor naked, and that the cop in charge refused to allow her husband to cover her with a sheet from the nearby bed. If that's true, and who besides the people who were there can know for sure, there is no excuse for treating even a convicted female criminal like that, much less a woman who had not been convicted or even formally charged with anything. The couple filed a lawsuit against the police dept before I moved from FL, but it hadn't gone to trial yet when I left and I don't know how it turned out.

BTW, no drugs were found in the raid, and the local paper discovered that the tip came from a known druggie who had previously given the police another bogus tip.

After reading or hearing of incidents like that, will you still take the very real chance of being riddled by police bullets if you respond to a late night invasion of your home with a gun and it turns out that the invaders are a squad of cops? A totally innocent 91 year old black lady was killed by police bullets in exactly that manner a few months ago in metro Atlanta when she brandished a gun thinking the cops were criminals. That no-knock raid was based on a tip from a known drug pusher who was cooperating with the police.

No-knock police raids on private homes are an abomination in a nation where the 4th amendment supposedly protects our right to be quote; "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". I don't approve of illegal drug use by anyone anywhere anytime, but is enforcing drug laws with late night no-knock raids worth surrendering our inalienable Constitutional rights to the "authorities"? No-knock raids on private homes sound to me more like Hitler's Nazi Germany than the USA.

144 posted on 02/04/2008 10:19:58 AM PST by epow (I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win, than win in a cause that will some day lose!)
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To: epow
No-knock raids on private homes sound to me more like Hitler's Nazi Germany than the USA.

I think the Nazis were more polite and actually knocked first.

168 posted on 02/04/2008 11:26:11 AM PST by A. Patriot (CZ 52's ROCK)
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