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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

#351

Post by gertef »

chc wrote: post #229
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?

OK, so, to the best of my knowledge, 1 kg of cocaine is worth about $20K. Assuming cocaine has roughly the density of baking soda, this amount ought to be easily disposable in a single flush. So you could flush $100K worth of coke down a toilet in under a minute.

Surely such a flush would leave residue on the bowl that would be easily detectable by a forensics kit.

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

#352

Post by JPKab »

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…

Sometimes "no-knock" warrants can cause the deaths of police officers when they otherwise wouldn't have.

Check out this case, which happened in my buddy's neighborhood:

http://hamptonroads.com/2010/01/ryan-frederick-loses-appeal-...

TLDR: No knock raid with officer trying to batter down door, guy inside with small amount of weed who had previously been robbed by armed intruders fires through the door and kills officer.

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

#353

Post by ScottBurson »

We didn't learn our lesson from Prohibition, and now it's happening all over again, only worse.

I'm starting to think we need a Constitutional amendment that prohibits the outlawing of drugs. Something like --

  The right of access to drugs of all kinds shall not be infringed.
  Congress shall have the power to regulate and tax drugs, but may not
  ban a drug outright.
This obviously needs work, but I think it's headed in the right direction.

The intent of the phrase "right of access" is that people should have the right to obtain a drug if they can afford it; my intent is not to create any obligation on the part of the government to make it affordable, and certainly not to provide it for free.

The intent of the phrase "drugs of all kinds" is to include any substance someone may wish to ingest, inhale, or inject, for any purpose, medical, recreational, or otherwise.

The intent of "Congress shall have the power to regulate" is that I think the FDA should continue to enforce purity and labelling requirements.

It would be nice to find wording to clarify that intoxication does not relieve one of responsibility for any act committed while intoxicated.

I know, it's hard to imagine such a thing passing anytime in the next 50 years. But it's not too soon to start talking about it :-)

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

#354

Post by erbo »

300bps wrote: post #168
Crito wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "making it possible for the victims' families to sue them for every penny they have. Yes, leaving them and their families living under a bridge if necessary." General question: could the spouse of somebody being sued for every penny they have insulate their risk by divorcing the person being sued and winning some of their assets before the lawsuit was complete? I'm thinking that if I was being sued, was almost cert…

It is complicated and state specific. In my state it would not be necessary to divorce to protect your largest asset - your house. Any house owned by a husband and wife that is titled as Joint Tenants of the Entirety (default) is protected from creditors of the husband OR wife (but not AND).

I'd remove that exemption in this case. I want an officer that uses excessive force to be at risk of losing his house, his car, and all of his assets right down to his underwear. And I want him to be aware of this, because I want that knowledge to influence his decision to use that force in the first place. I want him to know that he's literally laying everything on the line. (Again, if he doesn't like this, he's free to resign.)

I want that officer to consider if, instead of using all his shiny military toys in a flashy no-knock raid, perhaps some old-fashioned police work might work better. Instead of storming the place in search of the suspect, how about just staking it out and waiting until the guy goes out for beer? Instead of charging in with M-16s blazing because the guy might flush drugs down the toilet, how about intercepting the sewer lines from the house and watching in case drugs get flushed out?

But those just require patience and legwork, and you don't get to be all gung-ho with your fancy SWAT gear and your armored vehicles and all that.

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

#355

Post by mickdarling »

tomarr wrote: post #322
EpicEng wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This may sound silly, but it seems like there could be a MythBusters episode specifically on this to prove or disprove how likely these no-knock raids are needed to prevent an effective coverup of evidence.

They could actually make some actionable data for public good.

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

#356

Post by thathonkey »

EpicEng wrote: post #343
thathonkey wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 may…

A scale with a bit of powder on it does not demand 10+ years in prison. A gun, if registered (and it's not like all dealers have illegal guns) carries no penalty in and of itself. They (the cops) need something to barter with. You're much more likely to get useful information from someone facing 10+ years than someone facing 1 year (6 months with good behavior) or probation. They want to find everything.

Now you're onto something! Your first point is true. If the suspect manages to dispose of even some of the substance, that could hurt the case. Or it may not. There's lots of factors, I was just giving the simplest example I could think of (trying to flush a sufficiently large amount of cocaine).

To elaborate on your own example though, pretty sure that even if a firearm is legally registered you can still get in trouble for having it around, especially loaded, in the context of selling illicit substances.

That is almost beside the point, though. How many dealers do you think are using registered firearms to protect their trade? Of that group, how many are registered to the dealer using it and not some random family-member or whatever?

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

#357

Post by ZachPruckowski »

robrenaud wrote: post #329
EpicEng wrote: post #296

Earlier 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.

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.

Fairly hard actually - you've got to stakeout the house without being detected and tail the guy when he leaves. Plus you may not know how many folks were in the house in the first place (and thus how many are still there when the main guy leaves) - you could wind up raiding a house full of awake and semi-alert criminals with guns and have a bloodbath on your hands.

Additionally, the idea of this sort of raid is to arrest anyone who might be involved when they're found to be in a drug house. If you raid an empty house and find drugs, the owner of said house is gonna go underground if he sees his place crawling with cops, and everyone else is gonna steer clear of it.

Finally, there's a time-sensitivity component - the entire premise of drug dealing is that the drugs are in more or less constant motion, so your chances of success go down the longer there is between tipoff and raid.

I'm not saying that I like no-knock warrants or that they're a good idea, I just wanted to offer some reasons when trying to hit the house when nobody's home might be less safe or less effective.

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

#358

Post by gertef »

ars wrote: post #315
jliptzin wrote: post #280

Earlier 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…

That solves nothing whatsoever. People aren't selling drugs because they believe everyone should have access to them. They sell drugs because it makes money. Legalize drugs and they'll make money some other illegal and dangerous way.

That's ridiculous. They sell drugs because it is the Easiest way they know. Without drugs, they'd need to find some other, less easy way. Supply+Demand teaches that those other opportunities would be less available

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

#359

Post by homulilly »

cgh wrote: post #208
simplemath wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The "we're big, these events are outliers" meme is patently false.

My point was most Americans have no experience with these sorts of events despite their apparent pervasiveness, just as most Europeans have little experience with far-right parties despite their recent successes.

Most financially well off, white Americans have no experience, I suspect that's also the demographic of most people on HN. I have friends who come from a poorer background than me and most of them have either been subject to police abuse themselves, or have friends/family who has been abused or even killed by police.

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

#360

Post by watwut »

jliptzin wrote: post #280
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…

They will sit on unused SWAT teams and use them to collect unpaid parking fees and arrest suspected loiterers from yesterday. I'm exaggerating only slightly. The point is, if judges are signing no-knock raids from non-violent suspects possibly owning small amount of marijuana, they will be signing them for other petty crimes too.

End of war of drugs would just re-channel the same tactic against other targets.

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