Originally Posted by Team Sergeant (Post 517539)

Simply the fawn could have been armed. And there's no doubt in my mind that the guy had links to al quada using Society of St. Francis as a front. You ask why "Nine" heavily armed DNR agents and "four" sheriff department personnel? How else do you justify your job in the middle of a recession. This is not the rise of the "warrior cop" (I laugh every time I read that) it's the rise of the idiot cops. And let's not forget the drone and drone operators that took aerial photos.

All in all a few thousand dollars of taxpayer's money spent on "Operation Fawn-bin-laden".

Well done officers....

Originally Posted by cbtengr (Post 517678)

In all fairness to the officers the fawn in question was wearing camouflage and there was the potential for disease and danger to humans.
I euthanized a ground squirrel out in my yard earlier today and it did not take a SWAT team , but that's the difference between Iowa and Wisconsin too much overkill up there :) !

Originally Posted by MR2 (Post 517689)

Originally Posted by fng13 (Post 518058)

ETA: Police said he had a knife, but this is refuted in this article

http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/ww...077#f284da71cc

Originally Posted by ironyoshi (Post 518376)

Right, this was one of those steroid-pumping 95-year old studs. The funny thing is, every time a death from mostly-nonlethal devices (tazers, beanbags) gets in the news, someone will always be saying "but if it weren't for those things, the cops would have to physically subdue the individual, which is more dangerous." So how is four or five grown men holding this senior citizen down more dangerous than shooting him with a beanbag gun behind a riot shield?

Originally Posted by TacOfficer (Post 518395)

Ironyoshi,

I really won't argue the facts of this one. because I don't know all the facts. The officers are going to have to do a lot of justifying.

But your argument is that what a person reads in an opinion piece is more factual than an on-scene witness that saw what happened and should be held accountable to a journalist's perspective.
Got it.

Originally Posted by TacOfficer (Post 518395)

... if you call the police to respond to your home for a burglary or home invasion etc. I hope the officer waits for a search warrant while the occupants within fend for themselves. ....

Originally Posted by Team Sergeant (Post 516370)

You are correct, but it doesn't matter to me what it's makeup, it was 12 heavily armed LEO's making entry into a home that, IMO, was not justified given the circumstances.

I've discussed the militarization of American Law Enforcement before and it needs to end. MRAPS, Drones, machineguns, it needs to end.

Originally Posted by SF18C (Post 519676)

...When is this kind of shit going to be looked at as too much????

Originally Posted by Sdiver (Post 521507)

.... and the hits just keep on comin' ....

Originally Posted by Tree Potato (Post 521518)

why not just wait for her to leave home

Originally Posted by Team Sergeant (Post 521576)

Some of the LEO's problems is that they take Close Quarters Training from frauds that have NEVER done it themselves.

And yes there are hundreds of frauds teaching police all over this country. Many inflate their military training to gain contracts from law enforcement.

Maybe the police need to take a hard look at the training they have been receiving and start suing those ""Police/SWAT Training" outfits for putting them and their "victims" in grave danger.

Yeah, hundreds of law enforcement training frauds. Sort of like the martial arts training, 75% are total frauds.

Originally Posted by Richard (Post 516252)

An interesting question to ponder in today's world - Is it time to reconsider the militarization of American policing?

Richard

Rise of the Warrior Cop
WSJ, 19 July 2013
Part 1 of 2

On Jan. 4 of last year, a local narcotics strike force conducted a raid on the Ogden, Utah, home of Matthew David Stewart at 8:40 p.m. The 12 officers were acting on a tip from Mr. Stewart's former girlfriend, who said that he was growing marijuana in his basement. Mr. Stewart awoke, naked, to the sound of a battering ram taking down his door. Thinking that he was being invaded by criminals, as he later claimed, he grabbed his 9-millimeter Beretta pistol.

The police say that they knocked and identified themselves, though Mr. Stewart and his neighbors said they heard no such announcement. Mr. Stewart fired 31 rounds, the police more than 250. Six of the officers were wounded, and Officer Jared Francom was killed. Mr. Stewart himself was shot twice before he was arrested. He was charged with several crimes, including the murder of Officer Francom.

The police found 16 small marijuana plants in Mr. Stewart's basement. There was no evidence that Mr. Stewart, a U.S. military veteran with no prior criminal record, was selling marijuana. Mr. Stewart's father said that his son suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and may have smoked the marijuana to self-medicate.

Early this year, the Ogden city council heard complaints from dozens of citizens about the way drug warrants are served in the city. As for Mr. Stewart, his trial was scheduled for next April, and prosecutors were seeking the death penalty. But after losing a hearing last May on the legality of the search warrant, Mr. Stewart hanged himself in his jail cell.

The police tactics at issue in the Stewart case are no anomaly. Since the 1960s, in response to a range of perceived threats, law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier. Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment—from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers—American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene: the warrior cop—armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.

The acronym SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics. Such police units are trained in methods similar to those used by the special forces in the military. They learn to break into homes with battering rams and to use incendiary devices called flashbang grenades, which are designed to blind and deafen anyone nearby. Their usual aim is to "clear" a building—that is, to remove any threats and distractions (including pets) and to subdue the occupants as quickly as possible.

The country's first official SWAT team started in the late 1960s in Los Angeles. By 1975, there were approximately 500 such units. Today, there are thousands. According to surveys conducted by the criminologist Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University, just 13% of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team in 1983. By 2005, the figure was up to 80%.

The number of raids conducted by SWAT-like police units has grown accordingly. In the 1970s, there were just a few hundred a year; by the early 1980s, there were some 3,000 a year. In 2005 (the last year for which Dr. Kraska collected data), there were approximately 50,000 raids.

A number of federal agencies also now have their own SWAT teams, including the Fish & Wildlife Service, NASA and the Department of the Interior. In 2011, the Department of Education's SWAT team bungled a raid on a woman who was initially reported to be under investigation for not paying her student loans, though the agency later said she was suspected of defrauding the federal student loan program.

The details of the case aside, the story generated headlines because of the revelation that the Department of Education had such a unit. None of these federal departments has responded to my requests for information about why they consider such high-powered military-style teams necessary.

Americans have long been wary of using the military for domestic policing. Concerns about potential abuse date back to the creation of the Constitution, when the founders worried about standing armies and the intimidation of the people at large by an overzealous executive, who might choose to follow the unhappy precedents set by Europe's emperors and monarchs.

The idea for the first SWAT team in Los Angeles arose during the domestic strife and civil unrest of the mid-1960s. Daryl Gates, then an inspector with the Los Angeles Police Department, had grown frustrated with his department's inability to respond effectively to incidents like the 1965 Watts riots. So his thoughts turned to the military. He was drawn in particular to Marine Special Forces and began to envision an elite group of police officers who could respond in a similar manner to dangerous domestic disturbances.

Mr. Gates initially had difficulty getting his idea accepted. Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker thought the concept risked a breach in the divide between the military and law enforcement. But with the arrival of a new chief, Thomas Reddin, in 1966, Mr. Gates got the green light to start training a unit. By 1969, his SWAT team was ready for its maiden raid against a holdout cell of the Black Panthers.

At about the same time, President Richard Nixon was declaring war on drugs. Among the new, tough-minded law-enforcement measures included in this campaign was the no-knock raid—a policy that allowed drug cops to break into homes without the traditional knock and announcement. After fierce debate, Congress passed a bill authorizing no-knock raids for federal narcotics agents in 1970.

Over the next several years, stories emerged of federal agents breaking down the doors of private homes (often without a warrant) and terrorizing innocent citizens and families. Congress repealed the no-knock law in 1974, but the policy would soon make a comeback (without congressional authorization).

During the Reagan administration, SWAT-team methods converged with the drug war. By the end of the 1980s, joint task forces brought together police officers and soldiers for drug interdiction. National Guard helicopters and U-2 spy planes flew the California skies in search of marijuana plants. When suspects were identified, battle-clad troops from the National Guard, the DEA and other federal and local law enforcement agencies would swoop in to eradicate the plants and capture the people growing them.

Advocates of these tactics said that drug dealers were acquiring ever bigger weapons and the police needed to stay a step ahead in the arms race. There were indeed a few high-profile incidents in which police were outgunned, but no data exist suggesting that it was a widespread problem. A study done in 1991 by the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute found that less than one-eighth of 1% of homicides in the U.S. were committed with a military-grade weapon. Subsequent studies by the Justice Department in 1995 and the National Institute for Justice in 2004 came to similar conclusions: The overwhelming majority of serious crimes are committed with handguns, and not particularly powerful ones.

The new century brought the war on terror and, with it, new rationales and new resources for militarizing police forces. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Department of Homeland Security has handed out $35 billion in grants since its creation in 2002, with much of the money going to purchase military gear such as armored personnel carriers. In 2011 alone, a Pentagon program for bolstering the capabilities of local law enforcement gave away $500 million of equipment, an all-time high.

The past decade also has seen an alarming degree of mission creep for U.S. SWAT teams. When the craze for poker kicked into high gear, a number of police departments responded by deploying SWAT teams to raid games in garages, basements and VFW halls where illegal gambling was suspected. According to news reports and conversations with poker organizations, there have been dozens of these raids, in cities such as Baltimore, Charleston, S.C., and Dallas.

(Cont'd)

Originally Posted by MR2 (Post 521681)

107-year-old Arkansas man dies in shootout with S.W.A.T.

Somebody better check on Dusty... :p