Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you think it will ever end?
Nothing lasts forever. See Entropy.
I don't really think entropy is relevant to the war on drugs...
A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
301–310 of 464 posts
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#302What 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…
1. Understand the structure of the system. SWAT teams and local police are a local problem, not a national one. Cases like this will happen all around the country, but there really isn't anything you can do about it. It is up to the local population to elect their police chiefs (or... elect mayors / governors who choose good police chiefs). 2. The "Executive Branch" of Obama honestly has nothing to do with this. Unde…
I am, in fact, aware of the difference between local, state, and federal government. Much like the US federal government, state governments are also divided into multiple branches, with law enforcement part of the executive branch. Municipal governments tend to be a little less well-defined, but still nominally respect a separation of powers.
The author did not specify, but the news article linked below suggests that the "SWAT team" was composed of a mixture of town and county officers. I'm not sure what the jurisdictional situation is, but if it were me I would try to contact the mayor of Cornelia first and, if that did not address my concerns, the governor of Georgia.
But maybe there's a better way. For instance (as has been discussed elsewhere in these comments) if no-knock warrants were declared unconstitutional, or if there was a well-defined process for redress of unjustified force complaints, perhaps the situation would improve for everyone.
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could easily flush a couple of kilos of cocaine. Owning a couple kilos of coke makes you a fairly successful mid-level dealer who must know people higher up on the food chain. P.S. I'm not defending the cops here, just saying, you don't need truck fulls of drugs to be considered "big-time", and they usually get to the bigger fish via the smaller ones.
I edited my example to make it a little better. Point being: If you are a big enough dealer to be useful to the police in a larger investigation (or to warrant SWAT team "no-knocking" at your door), you probably have quite a bit of related evidence that would not fit down a toilet.
Except that simply not true. Do you know how much a kilo of coke costs? We're talking ~20k USD. You could easily flush that, and low level street guys don't have kilos lying around, not even close. If you have access to that kind of quantity you know people who are pretty high up.
Not to mention the fact that the penalty for such an amount is on the order of 10 years in prison (of course, that depends on a lot of factors like where you live, how good your lawyer is, etc., but it's quite a large amount of cocaine.)
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#304So... they caught the nephew eventually and took away his meth. Now we don't have to worry about meth anymore. They have taken care of the problem. Oh.... wait a minute. They haven't even put a dent in the problem.
Maybe they should requisition some of those unused cold war nuclear warheads from the military. THAT should take care of the problem. So... just how far are we willing to take this madness hmmm?
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#305Earlier 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.
Wait, so the police only arrest criminals?
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
I edited my example to make it a little better. Point being: If you are a big enough dealer to be useful to the police in a larger investigation (or to warrant SWAT team "no-knocking" at your door), you probably have quite a bit of related evidence that would not fit down a toilet.
Except that simply not true. Do you know how much a kilo of coke costs? We're talking ~20k USD. You could easily flush that, and low level street guys don't have kilos lying around, not even close. If you have access to that kind of quantity you know people who are pretty high up. Not to mention the fact that the penalty for such an amount is on the order of 10 years in prison (of course, that depends on a lot of fac…
Sorry, I think you're missing my point that is even if somehow they could flush the entire amount of the illicit substance in time, they probably have other items on hand that would be just as good from an evidence perspective.
For example, you can't flush a scale down the toilet.
If we're talking low-level or mid-level dealers, chances are they have a quantity of pre-packaged amounts of their product on hand and maybe even a firearm or two. Unless they can quickly melt-down and/or liquify all of that stuff, it isn't going down any toilet pipe while the homeowner argues with the cops at the door about the status of a warrant.
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#307This was the result of a no-knock warrant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-knock_warrant , which allows police to enter a home without prior warning, on the theory that giving notice will allow people inside to destroy evidence. They are almost uniquely a product of the drug war. One can imagine very few situations outside of drugs were evidence could be so easily destroyed as to justify a no-knock warrant.
Knocking down the door, okay fine. But did they really need to throw in a flashbang? Maybe they could have used some kind of thermal vision to see through the wall for children.
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#308What 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…
First, stop to speak about 'war' on insert-bad-thing-here.
With that terminology comes the behavior. And this behavior is 'self-improving'. The Police already has access to that gear of the military, which is left over from the real wars. That gear is more likely being used along with war tactics. Self protection and the appliance of gear and tactics became more important than to protect the civilians and even to protect the criminals from them self.
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#309The increasing militarization of police in the USA has seemingly had a significant (and hopefully unintended) side-effect: Police tend to treat suspects (and those around them) not as law-breaking citizens , but as enemy combatants .
> Police tend to treat suspects (and those around them) not as law-breaking citizens, but as enemy combatants. // Isn't that at least partly because they arm themselves as if they were enemy combatants and treat the police as such. As in this case where apparently there was an AK47 in the house.
> Isn't that at least partly because they arm themselves as if they were enemy combatants and treat the police as such.
That certainly happens. According to http://www.odmp.org/search/year, 30 American police officers were killed by gunfire (not-accidental) in 2013. However, like most things, what's more important is how often it occurs. It turns out that there's somewhere between 750,000-800,000 police officers in the USA, so on the high end, that's 4 gunfire-related deaths per 100,000 officers.
Compare that to jobs like fishing (127 per 100,000), roofing (34 per 100,000), and farming (26 per 100,000) (source: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/personal-finance/10-most-dan...), being shot to death as a police officer doesn't seem especially likely. (Admittedly, gunfire-related deaths don't represent a majority of officer deaths in a given year, it seems, but gunfire is the main justification behind police militarization)
Edit: To put it another way, being a police officer is 2.5 times safer (gunfire-wise, at least), than driving a car.
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#310This was the result of a no-knock warrant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-knock_warrant , which allows police to enter a home without prior warning, on the theory that giving notice will allow people inside to destroy evidence. They are almost uniquely a product of the drug war. One can imagine very few situations outside of drugs were evidence could be so easily destroyed as to justify a no-knock warrant.
The risk of some evidence being destroyed versus potentially killing a kid (and in this case 'luckily' only wounding that kid) seems to be an easy choice. To protect and serve and all that.