Free Republic

~On the other hand, tea-wise, the Johnson County Sheriff's Department is taking it to a whole other level. Two years ago, at 7.30 one April morning, a sleepy Bob Harte staggered to the front door of his home in Leawood, Kansas to answer a knock and found a fully-armed SWAT team outside preparing to use the battering ram. They shoved him to the floor, surrounded him with pointing rifles, and the whole rigmarole began... On the other hand, at least the Hartes and their kids are still alive. I've written often about the increasing tendency of American cops to police...

Regardless of how people feel about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s standoff with the federal Bureau of Land Management over his cattle’s grazing rights, a lot of Americans were surprised to see TV images of an armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary wing of the BLM deployed around Bundy’s ranch. They shouldn’t have been. Dozens of federal agencies now have Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams to further an expanding definition of their missions. It’s not controversial that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Prisons have them. But what about the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office...

In 2012, state lawmakers in Delaware – with the support of Attorney General Beau Biden, son of Vice President Joe Biden – pushed through legislation that redefined the duties of sheriffs and their deputies to that of process servers and prisoner transport. The legislation stripped them of all arrest authority to the point where animal control and the game warden had more authority. Christopher and other supporters of the constitutional role of the sheriff, however, are fighting back. “The battle of liberty is never over. We are attempting to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot overturning the law stripping...

“In the military mind set, the “drug war” has moved from metaphor to real life, with American streets as the “front,” American citizens as the “enemy” and law enforcement officers as the warriors. At the direction of Congress, the Pentagon has spent the past 20 years providing military hardware free of charge to police departments throughout the nation, all for the stated purpose of fighting the War on Drugs. Billions of dollars worth of “surplus” military grade equipment has been transferred, literally enabling law enforcement in towns both large and small to serve warrants, control crowds and “keep the peace”...

A troubling bill (PDF) that passed the Mississippi legislature last month would give the state’s attorney general three paramilitary-style “strike forces” to use around the state at his discretion. The bill is being pushed by Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, who told the Associated Press, “These elite forces will respond to a specific high-crime area and hit gangs and drug dealers where they live. Give law enforcement the authority and the resources they need, and they will get the job done.” But it’s far from clear that the state really needs more strike forces with which to hit people. Mississippi already...

Welcome to Salinas, California. It’s a community of only 150,000 people and the owner of the military assault death machine. That’s right, a city of less than a quarter million owns a rolling death machine complete with a machine gun turret on top. What the h-ll would they need that for? Here’s another shot of the armored monster. The Salinas Police Department made its new armored rescue vehicle available for public viewing on Tuesday in front of City Hall. Police said the ARV, acquired and customized at very low cost to the city, will provide protection and rescue capabilities to...

This month, more Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles (MRAPs) have found their way from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the Main Streets of America. These are just the latest acquisitions in a growing practice by Pentagon that's militarizing America's municipal police forces. Police departments in Boise and Nampa, Idaho, each acquired an MRAP, as did the force in High Springs, Florida. The offer of war-ready machinery, at practically no cost, has proven hard to resist for local police departments. Increasingly, they are looking like soldiers equipped for battle. The growing similarity between our domestic police forces and the U.S. military...

Stronger police forces and a more robust surveillance apparatus are blurring the lines between law enforcement and military. WASHINGTON – The recent revelations about the federal government’s surveillance programs underscore a subtle trend in the U.S. that should raise some concerns about personal freedoms in America.According to John W. Whitehead – founder of the Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights organization – more Americans might find themselves in increasingly dangerous situations as SWAT teams and SWAT-team tactics are used more frequently in routine law enforcement activities. Violent crime in America has been on a steady decline since...

Policing: The Dallas County Sheriff's Office gets an MRAP tactical military vehicle, used for counterinsurgency fighting in Iraq, as law enforcement becomes a collection of SWAT teams pursuing not-always-guilty Americans. In early August, a SWAT team broke through the gates of a 3.5-acre farm in Arlington, Texas, that promotes a sustainable lifestyle and did a 10-hour search of the property. Residents were handcuffed and held at gunpoint as police looked for nonexistent marijuana plants and various city code violations. As the owners watched, 10 tons of their private property was hauled off in trucks — dangerous items such as blackberry...

<p>A home was heavily damaged after an operation to find gang members who are indicted on 97 counts.</p> <p>SWAT members were looking for Jashavious Keel. He is one of the suspects named in a Chatham County indictment. The district attorney's office said 14 West 61st Street is his last known address.</p>

We need police to catch murderers, thieves and con men, and so we give them special power -- the power to use force on others. Sadly, today's police use that power to invade people's homes over accusations of trivial, nonviolent offenses -- and often do it with tanks, battering rams and armor you'd expect on battlefields. In his book "Rise of the Warrior Cop," Radley Balko recounts the rise of police SWAT teams (SWAT stands for Special Weapons And Tactics) armed with heavy military equipment. SWAT raids began as rarely used methods of dealing with violent situations, like hostage-takings. But...

Government officials do some really crazy things in the name of law enforcement.I recently wrote about an armed raid on an animal shelter in order to execute a baby deer.That was paramilitary overkill (pun intended), though it probably didn’t waste as many tax dollars as the regulatory overkill of the year-long sting operation by the Food and Drug Administration against an Amish farm for the horrible crime of selling unpasteurized milk to consenting adults who prefer unpasteurized milk.And let’s not forget Robert Norlander, the thuggish, dumpster-diving IRS agent, who sought to ruin the life of an innocent man because…well, for...

Every day it seems more like the "war on terror" is at home in the U.S. rather than abroad in a foreign country. Whether it's the NSA denying they scoop domestic communications while their chief tells hackers "we're looking for the terrorist among us," or it's the growing militarization and equipping of domestic police forces, it seems more and more crows keep coming home to roost. Well, one former Marine colonel has had about enough. In a rousing confrontation at a local council meeting in Concord, NH, he calls out his government for facilitating what he feels is a needless...

Several residents at the “Garden of Eden” sustainability garden in Arlington, Texas, claim that local police raided their farm because they thought tomato plants were marijuana plants. The police reportedly damaged the garden's property and the crops during the Aug. 2 raid, which included a SWAT team (video below). “They came here under the guise that we were doing a drug trafficking, marijuana-growing operation. They destroyed everything,” said garden owner Shellie Smith to WFAA-TV. Apparently, an undercover officer and a helicopter surveillance crew believed there was probable cause that the wrong kind of plant was being grown in the garden and...

WASHINGTON — As hundreds of commuters emerged from Amtrak and commuter trains at Union Station on a recent morning, an armed squad of men and women dressed in bulletproof vests made their way through the crowds. The squad was not with the Washington police department or Amtrak’s police force, but was one of the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads — VIPR teams for short — assigned to perform random security sweeps to prevent terrorist attacks at transportation hubs across the United States. “The T.S.A., huh,” said Donald Neubauer of Greenville, Ohio, as he walked past the...

A cop shot a dog the other day. Again. Maybe you’ve seen the video -- it was all over the Internet, complete with the dog's grisly death spasms. Hawthorne, Calif., resident Leon Rosby was using his cellphone to record a standoff between police officers and armed robbers. At the end of the standoff, officers headed Rosby’s way. He put his dog, a Rottweiler named Max, in his car, then placed his arms behind his back to be cuffed. (He’d had run-ins with the law before.) As the officers began taking Rosby into custody, Max jumped out the car window and...

The terrorist attack in Boston and ensuing events in Watertown had everyone on edge, but shocking new home video from Massachusetts show law enforcement officers trampling over the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution – which guarantees “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures… and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” A video recently uploaded to YouTube by residents whose home was searched...

How is it at all legal for the police to have coerced people from their homes during the house to house search that was conducted in Watertown MA last week? By 'coerced', I mean being told to leave their residence by police SWAT teams. When you have 10 police pointing rifles at you, yelling at your to get out of your house, I'd consider that coersion. These people were removed from their homes and forced to go someplace else. It appears that they were not 'allowed' back into their homes for hours. How is that possible in America? Were homeowners...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has responded to a letter dated November 13, 2012 from Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) regarding the agency's ammunition purchases. Sen. Coburn published the response on the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs website yesterday, April 1, 2013. The response, dated February 4, 2013, says that DHS buys ammunition in bulk to "significantly lower costs."