As usual. Hoosier pundit Radley Balko reports on a SWAT team raid that happened back in February in Missouri. It's events like this one that point up the fact that we don't need SWAT teams in most locations and that those that do exist are being misused. It's only going to get worse. The search warrant in this case could have been served by a couple of regular officers and a knock on the door. It didn't have to include the deliberate killing of these peoples pets, (which seems to be SOP, as often as it happens). If you watch the video, do be warned there's some bad language and overall it's a horror story if you like dogs. This could happen to you, your family, your friends. Even if you're innocent.
via The Agitator
via The Agitator
YouTube - Columbia Mo SWAT Raid 2/11/2010. Cops Shoot Pets With Children PresentIn February, I wrote the following about a drug raid in Missouri:
SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.Now there’s video, which you can watch below. It’s horrifying, but I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.
They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.
So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.
Just so we’re clear.
But Jonathan Whitworth won’t be smoking that pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.
I’ve exchanged emails with the mother of the family, who was in the home at the time of the raid. I’m waiting on her permission to publish her account of what happened.