261–270 of 464 posts
Troubling. Their incompetence is incredible. The thing that always amazes me about this is the unbelievable incompetence of our administrators. They keep doing things that don't work and expect them to work. The unofficial motto: "If violence isn't doing the job, you're not using enough."
When I read stuff like this, I'm really happy that I am not living in the US. It sounds so crazy to a European person, I can't really imagine how Americans manage to normally live their lives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carabinieri http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Gendarmerie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rijkswacht (until 2001) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardia_Civil
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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.
They also have the opportunity to not enter the house. There is a reason that burglary is dangerous: it invites a confrontation that doesn't have to exist. I'm not so starry-eyed as to imagine that the cops never need to enter a house forcefully. But they can make this happen at a time and means of their choosing. They can watch to determine how many people are in the house. They can wait for some suspects to leave a…
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Maybe there needs to be more publicity about drug gangs and the slaves created by the drug cartels. They exist, and they are heinous. But so too are these kinds of reactions from the police. Its really as if the public are caught in the middle of two horrific forces, being created on both ends of the playing field. The question is: who profits? The cold hard answer, which nobody wants to admit is this: the dealers of…
And they only exist because the product they distribute has been made illegal.
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One interesting thing is how long it will take to get rid of these sorts of things once the war on (some) drugs ends.
What makes you think it will ever end?
There'll still be other drugs to chase after but clearly SOMETHING is changing here.
Good grief. SWAT teams in the US are utterly out of control. It's one thing to have resources for the relatively rare armed robbery/hostage/mass shooter situation, to respond to an outbreak of violence; it's quite another to be using them for drug raids and other contexts where they initiate or are the sole cause of violence. This goes hand in hand with the confrontation-obsessed gun culture we have, in which a subse…
That's a fascinating map. One of the interesting things it shows is that the density of botched raids is not correlated to population density. What that suggests is that the raids are the results of authories in some areas not knowing what they're doing while authorities in other areas do.
This 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.
I don't agree, the grenade that was thrown is not part of no-knock, it's because of the extreme violence that gang style criminals are apt to use. You could have no-knock raids to capture evidence without needing to stun everybody.
Believe it or not, this is the safest way to do "no-knock" for everyone involved. Think about it- if a law-abiding gun owner was woken up to the sound of unknown men breaking down his door and had time to access her weapon, the situation would be much worse for everyone. There have been many instances of this exact thing happening, often resulting in the death of the raid victims and/or police officers. That is why stun grenades are always the first thing that goes into the building during a no-knock raid.
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You're missing the social context here. First, this is never about using it's about dealing. Police enforcement efforts are almost entirely preoccupied with trafficking. Second, dealers are, by and large, bad people for other reasons. Your suburban pot dealer isn't the target of no-knock raids. The targets are guys with long rap sheets of felony convictions, often for violent crimes. Drugs are a proxy in a war betwee…
While this specific story is staged in Atlanta, this is happening throughout the country, in every state. We need to stop the demented practice of selling surplus military equipment to local police departments. We're not saving money. Cops don't need armored cars, drones, grenades, etc.