Posted on 08/09/2008 9:40:03 PM PDT by Natty Bumppo@frontier.net
Armed men in street clothes and masks kicked down the doors of innocent citizens, guns blazing, and rounded up the residents. When they left, the floors were smeared in blood.
It reads like the first line of an intense novel, a Reuters story from Darfur or Zimbabwe, a history of the conflict in Kosovo, or a smuggled-out account of the Chinese pre-Olympics roundups. Recently deceased Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the scourge of the abusive Soviet leadership, could have written it. Sadly, it comes from far closer to home: Maryland’s Prince Georges County.
Last week, the “PG County” Sheriff’s SWAT team stormed the home of a local town mayor, shooting his two Labrador Retrievers, and trussing up the mayor and his mother-in-law. After several hours of interrogation, the police departed, no arrests made. Since then, it has been reported that the raid was a mistake.
It certainly was. The mayor’s wife was randomly targeted by drug smugglers, who mailed a package of marijuana to the mayor’s house, and planned to intercept the delivery. Good policework in another state identified the illicit contents however, and the PG County Sheriff’s Department, without consulting with the local police chief, decided to personally deliver the package to hizzoner, then arrest him if he touched it. The package was recovered, unopened, inside the mayor’s house.
By failing to coordinate with the local police, the un-uniformed SWAT members might very well have been legally gunned down by other police officers. The SWAT team entered the house without prior identification, knocking down the doors of a citizen with no known propensity to violence or prior public record except being elected mayor. The team shot two dogs immediately, despite their near proximity to other people in the house and an apparent lack of aggression by the dogs. By all accounts, the worse those dogs might have been expected to do was a friendly lick or two.
Chief Melvin High, the County Sheriff, already set to retire at the end of this month, has defended the actions of his officers and notably failed to apologize to an elected official for the mistaken raid and the needless slaughter of household pets. Outrageous as it may seem, it’s just more of the same in PG County. One might say the cops have “gone to the dogs” lately, but it seems more accurate to say that they are simply going after them.
In Tennessee, a family watched as the highway patrol shotgunned their family dog at a mistaken traffic stop. In Wisconsin, police showed up at the wrong address for an intruder alarm, and shot the dog while the thief was getting away next door. In a big country with lots of police officers, a few of these unfortunate misunderstandings are bound to happen, but in PG County, Maryland, it happens all too often.
Earlier this summer, a PG County officer was killed in the line of duty, and his suspected killer showed up mysteriously strangled in a solitary cell only hours after being arrested. In 2007, PG County police served a warrant at the wrong house, and shot the dog while figuring it out. In 2001, a PG County policeman followed a young man into another state, and killed him in a hail of gunfire. A former PG County officer was recently convicted of shooting two furniture movers in his home. Another officer has been convicted of setting a police dog on a homeless man, and yet another officer was sued for the mauling and disfigurement his dog inflicted on a sleeping woman. The County has paid multi-million dollar settlements in a number of police brutality and excessive force suits.
The FBI has been called in to investigate the raid on the mayor’s house, but that comes as scant comfort in a County where a recent Justice Department Review has been conducted without any appreciable improvement in the way the police treat citizens. The County has bled millions in settlements, seen officers imprisoned, citizens abused, and endured the humiliation of allowing a high-profile prisoner to be murdered while in custody. But the PG County Sheriff seems incapable of getting the point.
No amount of FBI or Justice Department probes will change that. The retirement of the incumbent will not change that. Only a clean sweep, top-to-bottom, of the entire PG County law enforcement community can begin to root out the persistent thuggery. There are certainly many good cops in PG County – but there are far too many bad ones.
The PG County motto is “Semper Eadam” – Always the Same. Let’s hope not.
It is way past time for the State Government to take over the County government completely and investigate every county employee of that county, elected or other then...oh nevermind, the state is Maryland.
LE doesn’t knock much any more. They smash in and shoot whatever four-leggeds are in the area. Sometimes I think it is dangerous not to have a dog or two on the property when the police come by ‘accident’ to your house. What if they don’t have a dog to shoot? They obviously feel entitled to shoot SOMEone.
There was some question as to the source of the “shrapnel” that hit the combat vests of the two cops. It seems their own gunfire may have accomplished the hits. Considering the level of candor of the officers I don’t think anyone can even say with any certainty that the old lady fired or even had a gun.
I would very much like to see your defense of the officers in Maryland and the ones in Atlanta. Surely you know more about it than any of the rest of us.
The WOD started in the late 1960's.
I pinged Wiki on this and interestingly enough it says Nixon signed the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) into being in 1973. Thus, if true, I'd still argue that we have a non-liberal as the genesis of this problem. Things that make you go hmmm. Though, wait, if the FBI was tasked to enforce these laws before the DEA got them, then, hmmm.
Would not the elimination of the "no knock" warrant go a long way to fixing this problem?
What I would like to see would be a recognition of juries' legitimate role in deciding "reasonableness". If twelve ordinary people would conclude that the manner in which a search was conducted in a particular case was not reasonable, the search should be legally regarded as unreasonable and therefore (per Article VI) illegitimate.
Defendants need to be allowed to have juries informed about the background and execution of searches, and told that they should regard as illegitimate any search that was not reasonable, along with any evidence from such a search. If juries were so informed, policemen who wanted to win their cases would have to refrain from SWAT tactics except in cases where a reasonable person would judge them appropriate.
It's why I turned against the war on drugs
I actually have been anti-WOD for some time, even though I am opposed to drug use, and even when I had a family member involved.
There are just far too many stories of abuse for those of us on the right to pretend it’s just media bias. I truthfully believe the real “law and order” types recognize that a certain segment of law enforcement is just as unlawful as those they are sworn to protect us from.
I grew up in the era of Adam-12 and CHIP's when the police were considered the good guys.
Now because of the war on drugs and and the lower standards and ever increasing militarization along the no knock warrants.The US is turning into a banana republic where the cops are to be feared and mistrusted.
Unfortunately the only way we can stop this kind of stuff is bypass the government and pass a constitutional amendment outlawing no knock warrants and repealing the drug laws
Unfortunately the only way we can stop this kind of stuff is bypass the government and pass a constitutional amendment outlawing no knock warrants and repealing the drug laws
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