That reminds me of the baby getting a flash-bang grenade thrown in his crib. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/23/toddler...
A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
321–330 of 464 posts
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#322Earlier 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…
Really? So you could cut open whatever's holding it, throw all the powder in the toilet (1 kg will be more than 1 flush also), dispose of the bag, clean the knife/scissors and there be no trace?
I'm sceptical. The police don't need to find 1 kg of cocaine, to find a bag with powder in and powder around the toilet should be sufficient.
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And who gets to foot the bill for all of these new addicts? The cigarette companies have been used for years for killing people. Imagine he amount of people using for ods. Tort reform would also be need for this to ever work.
Some countries have experimented with state supply of heroin to addicts - it's actually a really cheap policy and seems to work well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment
Obviously, the taxpayer is footing the bill for this, but total spending reduces (through the reduction in drug related crime).
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, I was about to type a kind of snarky reply along the lines of "Ukraine is still in Europe, no?" and then I realized I had to pick the country in Europe that is literally in the midst of a civil war to get to a comparable situation. Sigh.
Indeed, I was also contemplating some kind of dismissive reply then I remembered I am reading an excellent book about the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday (which I am old enough to just remember happening) and decided not to make that kind of comment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_%281972%29 [Yes, it was a long time ago, but I don't think anything about our society here in the UK has changed to such an…
I'll raise you this [1], 11 years before Bloody Sunday.
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And who gets to foot the bill for all of these new addicts? The cigarette companies have been used for years for killing people. Imagine he amount of people using for ods. Tort reform would also be need for this to ever work.
This is already being done in Portugal. I don't think the new addicts you're imagining would materialize. If you want to do meth, it isn't hard. Legalizing it doesn't make it that much easier. You get addicted to meth because it complements your personality, not because you have access to it.
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
> 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."
http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/causes.h...
Alcohol is more dangerous than all drug related crimes combined to LEO. Not just raids. anything.
Please provide statistical evidence that a drug arrest is more violent/dangerous than other arrests. Please also provide evidence that a large percentage of these arrest involve violent offenders.
And nothing you've said precludes what I said should happen [ search the premise when its unoccupied ].
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#327Police militarization has many causes and many bad effects. The pointless and faintly racist "drug war" is one that has been noted in many comments here. There's another that deserves mention, not because I believe it's most significant but because it seems strangely absent from those same comments.
>>> Police go in armed to the teeth in part because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that there's a high probability of the people inside being similarly armed. It's a classic arms race. Yes, the police should stop encouraging further escalation. So should others.
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And who gets to foot the bill for all of these new addicts? The cigarette companies have been used for years for killing people. Imagine he amount of people using for ods. Tort reform would also be need for this to ever work.
And yet cigarette use is in decline.
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention you'd have to be a pretty low-level drug offender to be able to destroy enough/all of the evidence in the time "not knocking" saves the police. (ie. You can't exactly flush a kilogram of cocaine and a triple-beam down the average toilet in a matter of minutes)
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.
How hard is it to just wait until the suspected dealer leaves the house, and then use the warrant?
It seems simultaneously safer and more effective than a no knock warrant.
Re: A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not normally a fan of litigation, but in this case they should sue the police department into the ground. If this behaviour was way too expensive to sustain because of liabilities, they'd have to curtail it. Complaints are something they just ignore. Settlements hurt . If this was some national security incident where the nephew was about to activate a nuclear weapon this sort of force might be justified. That it…
"Settlements hurt " ...the taxpayers. But probably just a few dollars per individual per year, so not enough to cause enough outrage to change things.
Yes they hurt the taxpayers, which means the taxpayers should be concerned that their police department is acting so flagrantly and apply more pressure to get that fixed.
Sometimes the only way to get change is to make it painful to not change.
One incident will not be enough, but if this becomes epidemic and they're spending $50M a year on lawsuits...