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A Christian school in California is facing a huge battle with the state. Pacific Justice Institute (PJI) is representing River View Christian Academy in northern California. The school was raided earlier in the year, SWAT style, by the state. According to PJI, the raid was carried out by 16 armed law enforcement from California Highway Patrol, two canine units and 17 social workers. Students and staff were horrified by the sudden and unexpected attack. The state was misled into thinking that the school was harboring illegal drugs, amassing ammunition, and preparing for doomsday. RVCA works under the ministry Teen Rescue,...

<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...

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...

The Fourth Amendment protects us from random invasions of our homes by police, right? We know we're secure in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects" unless the cops demonstrate probable cause to a judge and get a warrant. Except... Except when they don't. The fact of the matter is that police have a lot of leeway to bust your door down and take a look around if they fear that waiting for a warrant could lead to loss of evidence or danger to people. Or lead to something, anyway. That end run around the Fourth Amendment is called "exigent circumstances,"...

A 61-year-old man was shot to death by police while his wife was handcuffed in another room during a drug raid on the wrong house. Police admitted their mistake, saying faulty information from a drug informant contributed to the death of John Adams Wednesday night. They intended to raid the home next door. The two officers, 25-year-old Kyle Shedran and 24-year-old Greg Day, were placed on administrative leave with pay. “They need to get rid of those men, boys with toys,” said Adams’ 70-year-old widow, Loraine. John Adams was watching television when his wife heard pounding on the door. Police...

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...

A 12-year-old girl suffered burns to one side of her body when a flash grenade went off next to her as a police SWAT team raided a West End home Tuesday morning. "She has first- and second-degree burns down the left side of her body and on her arms," said the girl's mother, Jackie Fasching. "She's got severe pain. Every time I think about it, it brings tears to my eyes." Medical staff at the scene tended to the girl afterward and then her mother drove her to the hospital, where she was treated and released later that day. A...

Paul Brown was working on his computer in his north suburban home when police smashed in the front door, pointed guns at and handcuffed him and other family members, and ransacked the house in a search for drugs. The authorities had burst in immediately after a postal worker delivered a package to the home that they said contained marijuana. But a search of the house found no further contraband, and officers left without making an arrest. Brown, outraged, said he was sure the cops had the wrong house. Police maintained they had the right place, but the target of their...

Police officers in Indiana are upset over a new law allowing residents to use deadly force against public servants, including law enforcement officers, who unlawfully enter their homes. It was signed by Republican Governor Mitch Daniels in March. The first of its kind in the United States, the law was adopted after the state Supreme Court went too far in one of its rulings last year, according to supporters. The case in question involved a man who assaulted an officer during a domestic violence call. The court ruled that there was “no right to reasonably resist unlawful entry by police...

Pressure is mounting to normalize the use of drones in the United States. "Don't drone, me, bro!"—that's one way to sum up Charles Krauthammer's heated reaction to last week's news that the Federal Aviation Administration had loosened restrictions on local police departments' use of surveillance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. "Stop it here, stop it now," Krauthammer exclaimed on Fox News's "Special Report" Monday, "I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home. ... I'm not encouraging, but I am predicting that the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that's been hovering over his...

Fred Skinner, 76, of Victory, was caught off-guard on Tuesday when police officers broke through his front door during a drug raid, only to find out they had the wrong house Skinner said at least six police officers broke into his house, smashed through his porch door, and then his front door. The house at on McNeely Road was raided for drugs for over five minutes before police realized they had the wrong house by looking through his mail. After the police realized it was the wrong house, they took the handcuffs off him and left. Auburn police officers were...

There are few people less likely to sell drugs than Fred Skinner. The 76-year-old lives alone on Mc Neeley Road in Victory, getting by with help from neighbors. Much of his home has been quietly abandoned because he can’t get up and down the stairs; his son, also named Fred Skinner, said his mind “goes in and out.” Since suffering a stroke last July, he speaks haltingly, sleeps with an oxygen tank and has a pacemaker in his chest. Skinner doesn’t hear as well as he used to, but there was no missing the pair of crashes he heard late...

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is probing the weekend shooting death of an Iraq war veteran in an armed standoff near Appling County’s Surrency community, Appling Sheriff Bennie DeLoach said. Neighbors of James M. Dixon III, 31, called the Sheriff’s Office about 3:50 a.m. Sunday to say someone had fired a shot through their house, DeLoach said in a release. Deputies went to Dixon’s house but decided for safety reasons to wait until daylight before confronting whoever fired the shot, DeLoach said. As they waited, Dixon left the house and drove to his parents’ house about a half mile away...

A Massachusetts woman says the FBI used a chain saw blade to cut through her door and held her at gunpoint for at least 30 minutes before agents realized they were conducting a raid at the wrong home. Judy Sanchez, of Fitchburg, says she awoke to heavy footsteps in the stairwell on Jan. 26 and walked into her kitchen in time to see a blade chop through her door. "I took two steps, face the second door, and I heard the click of a gun, and saying, ‘FBI, get down,’ so I laid down on my living room floor,” Sanchez...

INDIANAPOLIS -- A Senate committee voted unanimously Tuesday morning in support of a bill that would allow homeowners to use force to resist an illegal police entry. The bill comes after a controversial Supreme Court decision in May that held that current Indiana law didn't allow homeowners to violently resist police officers under any circumstances. The bill specifies under what circumstances police could enter a home: with a warrant, in pursuit of a fleeing criminal suspect, to prevent someone from being harmed or at the invitation of a resident. Otherwise, a resident could use reasonable force, including a gun if...

Six police officers were shot by Matthew David Stewart on January 4, one of them died. Officer Jared Francom was laid to rest today with thousands of mourners in attendance. Police are being pretty button-lipped about some of the basic questions about the case, though there have been strange reports in the last few fays that Stewart had a "possible bomb" in his house. CNN reported: "There was a device that was fashioned in a way that concerned those who found it that there were materials that could have been used as a bomb," Weber County Attorney Dee Smith told...

The Minneapolis City Council approved a $1 million settlement Friday after a botched drug raid in 2010 in which an officer threw a "flash-bang" grenade into a Minneapolis apartment burning the flesh off a woman's leg. The payout to Rickia Russell, who suffered permanent injuries, was the third largest payout for alleged Minneapolis police misconduct on record. --SNIP-- On the night of Feb. 16, 2010, 18 officers were executing a search warrant on the apartment at 5753 Sander Drive based on a tip that narcotics were being sold at the address by someone named David Conley. In what Bennett called...