Rise of the Warrior Cop

[Kasik]

The below story demonstrates, again, you cannot fix stupid.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...chool/4263321/

As a now retired LEO I met guys (and gals) who did this kind of thing and gave it no thought until a complaint was made.

"Spraying cats..." - perhaps more a CAT4 officer

[GratefulCitizen]

This type of action will prove far more effective over the long term:
http://youtu.be/8P-2pEmR3y4

Hearts and minds.

[FlagDayNCO]

Scenes from a militarized America: Iowa family ‘terrorized’

By Radley Balko, Updated: February 4 at 10:37 am

Watch this video, taken from a police raid in Des Moines, Iowa. Send it to some people. When critics (like me) warn about the dangers of police militarization, this is what we’re talking about. You’ll see the raid team, dressed in battle-dress uniforms, helmets and face-covering balaclava hoods take down the family’s door with a battering ram. You’ll see them storm the home with ballistics shields, guns at the ready. More troubling still, you’ll see not one but two officers attempt to prevent the family from having an independent record of the raid, one by destroying a surveillance camera, another by blocking another camera’s lens.

From the images in the video, you’d think they were looking for an escaped murderer or a house full of hit men. No, none of that. They were looking for a few people suspected of credit card fraud. None of the people they were looking for were inside of the house, nor was any of the stolen property they were looking for. They did arrest two houseguests of the family on what the news report says were unrelated charges, one for a probation violation and one for possession of illegal drugs.

A couple other points about this story. First, note that the police say they knocked and announced themselves before the raid. The knock and announce requirement has a long history in U.S. and English common law. Its purpose was to give the occupants of a home the opportunity to avoid property damage and unnecessary violence by giving them time to come to the door and let the police in peacefully. As you can see from the video, the knock and announce today is largely a formality. The original purpose is gone. From the perspective of the people inside, there’s really no difference between this sort of “knock and announce” and a no-knock raid. (The covering of the officers’ faces is also troubling, though also not uncommon.)

Historically, the other purpose of the knock-and-announce requirement is to avoid the inevitable tragedy that can result if homeowners mistake raiding police for criminal intruders. As the requirement has been eroded, allegedly to protect the safety of police officers, we’ve seen plenty of tragedy — and many of those tragedies have been the deaths of police officers. There was another one just last December. And it almost happened here:

Prince’s son, Justin Ross, was in the bathroom when police burst in, and he was carrying a gun that he has the legal right to carry. “I stood up, I drew my weapon, I started to get myself together to get out the door, I heard someone in the main room say police. I re-holstered my weapon sat back down and put my hands in my lap,” Ross recalls.

Ross says he didn’t hear the police announcement until after one officer had already attempted to kick in the door. Had that officer been successful, there’s a good chance that Ross, the police officer, or both would be dead. The police department would then have inevitably argued that Ross should have known that they were law enforcement. But you can’t simultaneously argue that these violent, volatile tactics are necessary to take suspects by surprise and that the same suspects you’re taking by surprise should have known all along that they were being raided by police. Well you can, and police do, and judges and prosecutors usually support them. But the arguments don’t logically coexist.

Finally, note that police department officials say they “do not have a written policy governing how search warrants are executed.” That’s inexcusable. Most police departments do. But whether or not they’re governed by a formal policy, the use of these kinds of tactics for nonviolent crimes like credit card fraud is hardly unusual, and it’s happening more often, not less. I’ve reported on jurisdictions where all felony search warrants are now served with a SWAT team. At least one federal appeals court has now ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, there’s nothing unreasonable about using a SWAT team to perform regulatory inspections. To be fair, two others have ruled that such tactics are not reasonable. But it’s concerning that this would even be up for debate. We have plenty of discussion and analysis about when searches are appropriate. We also need to start talking about how.

Washington Post civil liberties blogger Radley Balko is author of the book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.

/////// Web page below has the link to the video.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/o...ized//?print=1

[GratefulCitizen]

http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/20...-camp-absent-/

Encroaching the 3rd Amendment?

<edit>

Other interesting news:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsul...during-a-raid/

[Stobey]

This is not exactly news; (the incident occured on July 5, 2011) but I did a search and could find no links/threads to the murder of a homeless man - Kelly Thomas - in Fullerton, CA. Apparently, Thomas suffered from schizophrenia, according to his father. Now I know people who work at institutions for "troubled" and violent people; and I have witnessed firsthand a demonstration of how to quickly immobilize such individuals without harm to either the violent individual or to those who have to deal with them. What happened to this man was utterly unnecessary and brutal.

If you listen carefully at approx. 10 mins. into the tape, this human version of the Pillsbury DoughBoy keeps telling Thomas "Feet out in front of you." Well, Thomas' feet are out in front of him. Then a little bit later you can hear DoughBoy say: "You see my fist? Well, it's going to fuck you up." ** Nice talk from a so-called "professional". **

Here is the link to the video of the entire confrontation. (Unfortunately, since this was apparently close to traffic, the background noise of the traffic makes some things difficult to hear. I wish there was a way to filter that out!) These cops - none of whom weighed in at less than 230 lbs. - beat and crushed this man to death, and all were exonerated from any wrongdoing in Orange County Superior Court. And all but one has been returned to active duty. There is something seriously wrong with these LE employees to have found it necessary to literally kill this man. And something even more seriously wrong for a court to have found all "innocent of any wrongdoing". I'm not saying that Kelly Thomas was innocent of all wrongdoing. Apparently, he had stolen peoples' mail. Was he a screwed-up individual? You bet. But IMO that was no reason for that man to have paid the price he paid. Any opinions?

http://www.ocregister.com/video/v/16...ton-government

[Stobey]

Following the entire timeline, apparently there are some of these psychopathic cops who are no longer employed in that municipality. Precious little comfort, I'm afraid.

Cops have to remember that "That badge on your chest covers a small portion of your chest and none of your arse!"

I remember watching the special video that was shown across the country in just about every agency in the country within 4-6 months after it occurred. This was LAPD's shootout at the North Hollywood bank. We were all interested in this video up to the point when the senior sergeant on SWAT told everybody that the AK-47 round would penetrate through an engine block. Then most of us started to question the validity of the entire video at that point. Also, IMHO, they are given a larger leash than should be allowed and the length gets a little bigger every year with such things a "The Patriot Act, The NDAA, and by executive order.

Any of you think these officers are out of line?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IqZOdtcGFg

[Pete]

Originally Posted by MAB32

Any of you think these officers are out of line?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IqZOdtcGFg

Wonder what would happen if you went downtown, stood outside their office and started taking pictures outside their office.

Lets start with coming over and telling you it against the law to take their pictures, they go for your camera, you start to complain, they put you on the ground, beat the shit out of you while they scream "stop resisting", bust your camera, frogmarch you inside, process you, make you sit in jail a while then a few weeks later drop the charges of resisting arrest.

[Streck-Fu]

SWAT drug raid based on 'informant' that was busted. Investigator claimed to 'smell strong chemicals'......During raid, 80 year old man shot in bed. Shooting officer first claimed to confront in the hallway, investigators call bullshit.

LINK

In the early morning hours of June 27, 2013, a team of Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies pulled up to the home of Eugene Mallory, an 80-year-old retired engineer living in the rural outskirts of Los Angeles county with his wife Tonya Pate and stepson Adrian Lamos.

The deputies crashed through the front gate and began executing a search warrant for methamphetamine on the property. Detective Patrick Hobbs, a self-described narcotics expert who claimed he "smelled the strong odor of chemicals" downwind from the house after being tipped off to illegal activity from an anonymous informant, spearheaded the investigation.

The deputies announced their presence, and Pate emerged from the trailer where she'd been sleeping to escape the sweltering summer heat of the California desert. Lamos and a couple of friends emerged from another trailer, and a handyman tinkering with a car on the property also gave himself up without resistance. But Mallory, who preferred to sleep in the house, was nowhere to be seen.

Deputies approached the house, and what happened next is where things get murky. The deputies said they announced their presence upon entering and were met in the hallway by the 80-year-old man, wielding a gun and stumbling towards them. The deputies later changed the story when the massive bloodstains on Mallory's mattress indicated to investigators that he'd most likely been in bed at the time of the shooting. Investigators also found that an audio recording of the incident revealed a discrepancy in the deputies' original narrative:

Before listening to the audio recording, [Sgt. John] Bones believed that he told Mallory to "Drop the gun" prior to the shooting. The recording revealed, however, that his commands to "Drop the gun" occurred immediately after the shooting.

When it was all over, Eugene Mallory died of six gunshot wounds from Sgt. John Bones' MP-5 9mm submachine gun. When a coroner arrived, he found the loaded .22 caliber pistol the two deputies claimed Mallory had pointed at them on the bedside table.

Mallory had not fired a single shot. The raid turned up no evidence of methamphetamine on the property.

To find out more about this case, including details about what the police did find, watch the above video, featuring Mallory's widow Tonya Pate. Pate has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, an agency plagued by prison abuse scandals, questionable hiring practices, and allegations of racial profiling and harassment in recent years.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department declined multiple requests to comment on this story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZFlIK-zAO8


The were executing a narcotics warrant for meth but try to sell finding a small amount of medical MJ that belonged to his step-son as a 'grow operation'....LINK

During the June raid, Mallory raised a semi-automatic handgun in response to deputies, who fired on him, the sheriff’s department said at the time. Two guns were recovered at the scene, according to sheriff’s department spokesman Steve Whitmore.

“Age does not preclude somebody from being aggressive toward deputies,” Whitmore said. “The lesson here is… don’t pull a gun on a deputy.”

Pate said Mallory, a former engineer with Lockheed Martin, respected law enforcement and would never have used a gun against officers.

“He would never point a gun at officers,” said Pate, 48. “Every day I stay in that house with that bloody bedroom … where I know he was taken from me for no reason.”

Mallory did own two guns that were in the house, Pate said. She said his glasses were beside his bed when he was killed, and could not have seen because of poor eyesight.

“He was shot in his bed before there was any warning given,” Bergener said..

Marijuana was found on another part of the property where Tonya’s lived, she said.

“There was a drug operation that was certainly going on in this house,” Whitmore said.

[Pericles]

Originally Posted by TacOfficer

RIP Officer, prayers for the family.

No details of the circumstances. Usual refrain from the offender "I didn't know".

Another article, little details:
http://www.officer.com/news/11284640...f-texas-deputy

No bill from the Grand Jury.

[gwill034]

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/...istrict-n37921

Came across this browsing around this AM. Seems like an interesting addition to the Beslan and Use it or Lose it aspects of this thread.

School Police with AR15s, necessary?

[Box]

...long gone are the days when citizens saw LEAs as "officer friendly"

[Max_Tab]

This is a crack pot website, but the video is crazy

TEXAS HIGHWAY COPS CONDUCTING WARRANTLESS VAGINAL SEARCHES
http://tellmenow.com/video-texas-hig...inal-searches/

I remember when I went down to our State School to be an Instructor in "Chemical & Specialty Munitions". When we got to the part on using "Flashbangs" (We were using Def-Tech's No. 25) we were warned about Federal Law governing their use. When the Instructor told us that we were to to make a quick look into the house, building, doorways, and rooms before deploying them it made me shutter to think that I could get killed very easily.

The reason we had to look was a huge mistake made by the LAPD many years ago. From what we were told was that the LAPD went in to bang a house. They tossed flashbangs into every open window, including a second floor window. That flashbang had landed in a baby's crib with a few months old baby in it. The baby was killed instantly. With Law Enforcement work, when I was into it, everything seemed to go from west coast to east coast including all of the bad things done by both good and bad.

This includes the story of a officer who was in the original LAPD SWAT and responded to the North Hollywood shoot-out. We watched the video during "In-Service" Training once and everything seemed a mess but it looked like they were handling it. Then this guy comes out and says something like "The round an AK shoots will go through and engine block!" A few of us chuckled and I for one refused to belief anything he had to say in the rest of the video.