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A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son

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Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son

#271

Post by rdtsc »

danielweber wrote: post #148
danielsiders wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also in general the severity of the charge is directly proportional to the quantity of drugs. So if the quantity is instantly flushable, how serious of a charge can it have been, and thus how much accidental damage is acceptable in the arrest?

What is involved in blocking the sewer line coming from a house? Is it even possible? (short of a back-hoe)

From their point of view what is easier throw a flash grenade into a crib or build sewer shut-off valves through-out the city. Control them, repair them. Can you prove that these drugs belonged to this particular house. That this one person flushed them. What if they are 10 people in the house. Are they all drug dealers because they found pot flushed in some sewer trap?

Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son

#272

Post by matwood »

chc wrote: post #219
matwood wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? If you have evidence for a warrant on a supposedly dangerous dealer you don't need to catch them with drugs. Simply wait them out for when they leave their house and pick them up then.

Did you know that a search warrant is not the same as an arrest warrant?

The original comment mentioned arresting someone. If they want to search the house then wait till it is mostly empty. Presumably to get the warrant they have at least a modicum of surveillance? Maybe made and undercover buy or 2?

There are plenty of ways to avoid violence unless absolutely necessary. Instead police want to raise the level of violence and approach every citizen as an enemy combatant. If a cop wants to play military war fighter, then go join the military.

Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son

#273

Post by dllthomas »

berberous wrote: post #257
freehunter wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's unconstitutional as a violation of due process, to suspend officers without pay, before they have been adjudicated as having done something wrong. Bullshit. The police can throw me in jail before a trial, preventing me from going to work. How's that not a violation of due process? >It's probably unconstitutional to impose forfeiture of vested interests as punishment for a crime. True. You could sue them for eno…

> Bullshit. The police can throw me in jail before a trial, preventing me from going to work. How's that not a violation of due process? The amount of process due is largely determined by case law, with judges using a balancing test that balances several factors. Most to the point in your hypo, one of the factors is the government interest involved. The government has a much stronger interest in detaining a possible…

"The government has a much stronger interest in detaining a possible flight risk and processing you through the criminal system than in suspending an officer's pay before some sort of notice and a hearing is given."

Police officers can be flight risks. One of the "riders" from Oakland is still at large.

Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son

#274

Post by fnimick »

leaveyou wrote: post #146
DrJones1098 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you blind? Until recently America had child labor and would lynch black people. A FEDERAL judge in my hometown of New Orleans is famous for saying "We like to try our niggers before we hang them". Human nature is human nature. We live in a 'veneer' of civilization. Underneath are still the same old animal instincts honed over millions of years of evolution. Don't ever forget that. Or forget it at your peril.

A society like the one you describe should not have nuclear weapons. Now I'm afraid that if it weren't for the MAD (mutual assured destruction) US would have been much more genocidal.

Oh, we probably would have invaded/nuked the Soviet Union. It's not like MAD stopped us from sowing destruction and chaos around the globe, either. It just made us fight proxy wars instead of real ones with other nuclear powers.

Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son

#275

Post by Symmetry »

hyperliner wrote: post #218
clarkmoody wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the mentality among the police is "I'm going home tonight, no matter what." Given the opportunity to wear body armor and carry a rifle when confronting a perceived threat, many will take it.

I think that is the mentality they need. I rather have a dead criminal than a dead police officer. Unfortunately, mistakes will always happen, so this OP piece, while unfortunately, will continue to happen. This time it happened to be a baby, which makes matters a lot more terrible for all involved.

Last year 44 police officers were killed violently[1] in the line of duty, and over 400 innocent people were mistakenly killed by the police. I'm not going to complain much about the police shooting violent criminals, but we're well past the stage of worrying about that.

[1] EDIT: Many more are killed in vehicular accidents.

Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son

#277

Post by squozzer »

jonnathanson wrote: post #192
jacquesm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This swat team just committed a violent crime. If you're looking for a small amount of drugs on a person who you aren't even sure is present in a single room with a whole pile of occupants including children and you start throwing flashbang grenades then you should be 100% culpable. Stuff like that has no application in regular policing, definitely not in raids to arrest people on suspicion of some small time crime.…

Exactly. Police believe themselves to be at war. Not with one-off groups of armed bank robbers, per se, but with heavily militarized cartels and street gangs like MS-13. If an ordinary police unit knocked on the door of an MS-13 safe house, they'd probably be met with heavily armed resistance. The problems here are numerous. First, because this was not a cartel safe house, and any degree of diligence sufficient to ob…

The police believe themselves to be at war with everyone. They'd kill anyone they pleased if they could get away with it.

Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son

#278

Post by chc »

opendais wrote: post #254
chc wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems so disconnected from my comment that I'm not even sure you responded to the right one. Either you mis-replied or you have mentally transformed me into a bizarre caricature of what people who don't completely agree with you must be like.

Me: > It would be a non-violent crime, probably. Non-violent crimes shouldn't result in swat teams. Where in here do you see 'hard drug ring'? Or 'hard drugs'? You: > I don't think "nonviolent" is a good description of a lot of hard drug rings. They aren't being violent right at the moment, but if they see a cop standing outside the door, they very well might just shoot him. No-knock warrants are by and large a horri…

You asserted that crimes where the police might need to barge in without knocking in order to prevent destruction of evidence are most likely nonviolent crimes. In fact, that kind of situation is almost exclusively drug crime, and the drug world is a violent place.

As I said, the fact that no-knock SWAT teams are sent in indiscriminately is bad, but it doesn't mean that crimes where evidence can be flushed down the toilet are "a non-violent crime, probably."

The problem is not that SWAT raids are victimizing an otherwise "probably non-violent" drug world. The problem is that many law-enforcement officers behave in a cowardly way, where the prioritize their well-being over that of the public, so they treat people who are not hardened drug lords as though they were — just in case. That is the big problem.

Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son

#279

Post by joeevans »

Then there's the case where the police found drugs in the mail, but let it be delivered anyway. When the homeowner (the mayor of the town, incidentally) came home and brought the package in, they attacked, killing his two labradors (one while it was trying to run away).

After, even though the police had the drugs in their hands when they found it in the mail, the chief said, "We′ve apologized for the incident, but we will never apologize for taking drugs off our streets....Quite frankly, we′d do it again."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor'...

Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son

#280

Post by jliptzin »

nathanb wrote: post #224

What can we do about this? Like many of the commenters here, this article fills me with outrage. Even given the possibility/probability (as mentioned by iambateman) that the target of the SWAT team was guilty of meth pushing, armed, and dangerous. What can an individual do to effect change? The executive branch seem to be nigh-invulnerable these days. Checks and balances don't work when it's the enforcement arm who n…

Legalize all drugs, and fill each one with literature about how damaging it is to you (similar to what some countries do on cigarette packs). If you can get heroin at CVS, you wouldn't need to go to your local drug dealer and help finance his shady/violent activities. I know it sounds crazy but we already knowingly sell stuff that can kill you (cigarettes, alcohol). The gangs/drug dealers would simply not survive if drugs were sold legally and conveniently.
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