CNN.

Police in Elyria, Ohio, deployed exploding flash-bangs while raiding a home last week while a toddler on a ventilator was inside, newly released body-worn camera footage shows, and the mother says her child was harmed during the incident.

Yeah, I’ll bet.

Footage from eight officers’ body-worn cameras was released Tuesday by Elyria Mayor Kevin Brubaker’s office, which has requested an outside investigation into the January 10 incident and how the search warrant for the home was obtained.

Police believed stolen guns were also taken to the residence where the toddler and mother were staying, and the officers were searching for the weapons, the report said.

Later that day, officers entered the home with guns, a battering ram and flash bangs, according to bodycam footage.

“It was very fast-paced,” the mother, Courtney Price, told CNN on Wednesday. “I didn’t have time to process anything.”

Price was alone with her son when she first heard a knock at the door, and she thought it was her uncle, she said. But as she approached the door, she could see police officers through the glass.

“All I seen was lights flashing and smoke coming into the house,” Price told CNN affiliate WOIO.

Redia Jennings, Price’s aunt, told WOIO she and her husband have rented the home for the past year, and the person police were looking for has not lived at the residence for more than a year. His family now lives down the block, Jennings told the station.

His hearing is likely irreversibly damaged.

Here is the team.

Fat boys, kitted up for playing soldier-boy, after having conducted an ill-conceived raid, the ill-conceived warrant having been obtained from an immoral judge. But hey, at least they’ll be able to go home and tell mommy they “got some” today just like the Georgia cops who threw a grenade into a crib and almost killed an infant.

These sorts of raids are immoral. How long with the American public tolerate them being legal?

I guess just like the ATF hates dogs, cops everywhere hate babies.

Prior:

Another SWAT Raid, Another Flash-Bank Thrown at a Baby

Grand Jury Recommends No Charges In Georgia Police Raid That Severely Injured Toddler

Dean Weingarten rehearses some additional information on the Breonna Taylor raid in Kentucky.

Many questions remain to be cleared up, and it’s certainly the case that she wasn’t a pillar of the community.

Questions are raised as to whether this was an announced raid, or a so-called no-knock raid, how long the cops banged on the door, who shot whom, where she was when she was killed, etc., etc.

Somebody (or somebodies) are lying, maybe everyone.  I encourage you to read this additional information.  However, some very important points remain, and we may insist on one very important observation.

One commenter remarks “It also shows the wisdom of not getting involved, in any way, with drugs. It’s too bad that Taylor lost her life, but when you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”

This misses the point entirely, as does the question of whether she was guilty of anything with which she was charged or thought to be guilty before the raid.

A much more astute commenter says “Anyone can yell POLICE ! I’m not going to second guess who’s breaking my door down. Especially from a sound sleep. I doubt I would even hear someone knocking on my front door. With location of my bedroom. As proven in my past. Which leads to me to ask Breanna didn’t have a DOORBELL ? Or does a NO KNOCK warrant specificaly mean you need to knock ? This case & many others show why we don’t need NO KNOCK warrants. These were Red Coat tactics. And people should install their own video surveillance system. Not from a third party.”

Yes, he’s got it.  We’ve documented cases before just like this.

Norfolk, Va.

NORFOLK, Va. – The Norfolk Police Department is looking for two people who impersonated police and forced their way into a Norfolk home.

It happened in April in the 3300 block of Illinois Avenue.

The two victims inside the home heard a knock at the door, someone yelled, “Police!” and moments later the door was kicked in, according to court records.

Records state the two suspects entered the house wearing ski masks armed with handguns.

Houston, Texas.

The masked men got away with three Rolex watches and five guns. They are also accused of inappropriately touching Ouellette’s wife.

“This reminded her of something she would see in Colombia,” he said. “She never thought she’d see it in America.”

On the assumption that anyone who yells “Police” is actually police, you can lay on the floor out of fear of being sent to prison for the rest of your life, or on the other hand, on the assumption that it’s home invaders intent on killing your family, you can defend your home.

You see the dilemma, of course, if you’re a thinking man.  If you’re too stupid to see the problem here, it’s only because it hasn’t happened to you, or you haven’t sat and thought about it enough.

So instead of saying that “If you lie down with dogs you get fleas,” you could say something like “If you own firearms when the FedGov has made that illegal …,” or “If you believe in fairy tales and believe that your local home invaders will act like cops to get the advantage …”

It’s all the same thing.  Having to disarm, lie on the floor and follow orders when someone shows up and yells “police” effectively extinguishes the God-given right of self defense.

I only need one good reason to demand an end to police raids.  This is one.  It is the best.

As for your drug evidence – where cops are trying to get evidence before it gets flushed down the toilet – that’s just too bad.  Cops can find another way to get that evidence.  An exchange of evidence-gathering latitude for the extinguishment of the right of self defense is not a tradeoff I’m willing to make, even if the cops are.

Idiots and dolts, incapable of complex thought.

Seven-year-old Samari Boswell said she was terrified the night of her younger brother TJ Boswell’s birthday party last month. She was expecting a party with cake and singing, but instead she and her family suddenly found themselves surrounded by police with guns pointed at them.

With her mother Stephanie Bures by her side, the second grader recalled the scary Sunday night of Feb. 10, when a team of Chicago police officers raided her brother’s party carrying a battering ram and a sledge hammer, and with weapons drawn.

“They were saying F words and stuff,” Samari said. “It was horrible.”

Bures called what happened “horrible” and “unnecessary,” because the suspect who police officers were looking for hadn’t lived in the building for five years.

“As long as they continue to do that, there will never be trust between citizens and the Chicago Police Department,” said Al Hofeld Jr., the attorney who represents the family.

Hofeld Jr. said it is another case of a “bad” search warrant where police did not do their homework.

“My law firm took 30 seconds to do a person search and came up with [the suspect’s] most current address, which is on 83rd street nowhere near the property,” Hofeld Jr. said.

This is the fourth search warrant case Hofeld Jr. has handled involving allegations that police raided the wrong homes and pointed guns at innocent people, including children. He said he plans to file suit against the Chicago Police involving the Boswell children and other adults at the party, including an adult relative, Kiqiana Jackson.

I’ve said it before.  When you’re dealing with American SWAT teams, you have the worst, most dangerous, stupidest people on earth.  Stay as far away from them as possible.  Someone always gets hurt when they’re around.

Good job, boys.  Do you feel proud or stupid?  Do you at least have the minimal intelligence necessary to feel stupid?

Reason:

This week a North Carolina mom told the Raleigh City Council that police “terrorized” her parents and her 6-year-old special-needs son.

A Selective Enforcement Unit (SEU) team—Raleigh’s version of SWAT—had a warrant to search Michael and Wanda Clark’s home last November. Michael’s nephew, Brian Clark, was a suspect in a recent armed robbery. Police found a box Brian had left at the scene of the crime with his uncle’s name and address on it, Indy Week reports. So they paid a visit to the Clark home, where Michael and Wanda’s daughter LaDonna had dropped off her son, who has autism and cerebral palsy, before going to work.

Brian Clark did not live at his uncle’s house and was not there at the time. Nonetheless, police forced Michael, Wanda, and their grandson to walk out of the house and sit on the ground. “On a 35-degree and rainy night, my son with autism was forced out of the home with military-style rifles aimed at him and made to sit on the cold, wet ground for over an hour by RPD SWAT,” LaDonna told the city council Tuesday.

“You can sit down there, or I will handcuff you,” an officer told her father, according to a complaint Michael Clark later filed with the department.

“Having guns pointed at a six-year-old was extremely frightening and completely unnecessary,” Wanda Clark wrote in a complaint of her own. “Even now, I still have nightmares about those guns being pointed at me and my grandson.”

“Not only was I not allowed to see the footage of my son being terrorized,” LaDonna told the city council, but the police wouldn’t give her an internal affairs complaint number unless she specifically stated which department policies had been broken and agreed to an in-person interview. At this point, the police already had three written complaints describing the incident.

That’s because you’re not special and they are because they are cops.

Why didn’t they just walk up the sidewalk and knock on the door?

I think the entire unit, including cops who didn’t participate in the raid, should be forced to strip naked and parade through the streets of Raleigh from one side of the town to the other, with the entire city watching, wearing signs that say, “I am a toad.”

Right before they are all fired and hauled into court for breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon, and carrying firearms to the terror of the public.

WFLA:

LAKELAND, FL (WFLA) – A 2-year-old child was burned by a flash-distraction device when Lakeland Police Department SWAT team members executed a search warrant on a home known for continuous drug activity on Thursday.

According to police, members of the SWAT team executed a high-risk search warrant at 1103 West 9th Street.

Once at the home, SWAT officers knocked and verbally announced that they were executing a search warrant, as per protocol.

Officers entered the home and cleared the room, not seeing anyone inside.

The small room was cluttered with clothing and furniture items, including old mattresses leaning against a wall.

With no one in sight, a less lethal distraction device was deployed by an officer.

Officers used a noise-flash diversion product.

As the officer was backing out of the room, a 2-year-old child, who is believed to have been hiding in the mattresses, began walking toward the device as it was activated.

The officer immediately grabbed the child and took him outside to the SWAT team medic.

The child suffered third-degree burns and was taken to Lakeland Regional Health, then Tampa General Hospital.

There is a very small set of circumstances in which I believe that a military raid is warranted.  One such example would be a hostage situation, but even then I prefer to see men employ their wits and negotiate their way to a peaceful resolution.  And any team that ever attempts to do something like this should be a professional team who has trained day and night with the other team members in shoot houses for a couple of years.

My own son told me that he spent so much time with his own unit – living with them, eating with them, shooting with them, room clearing with them – that they didn’t even have to speak to each other and they all knew what the other team members were going to do next.  His NCO told them all if one of the Marines in a fire team gets into some kind of trouble then the whole team had better be in trouble because the fire team had better not be split up.  Ever.  If you’re not trained to that level of proficiency, then you shouldn’t be doing this sort of thing – ever, under any circumstances.

Finally, I am a Christian libertarian.  I don’t believe in a militaristic police state or SWAT raids or the so-called “war on drugs.”  Evidence gathering and taking people into custody isn’t a good enough reason to breach the doors and force your way into property that doesn’t belong to you.  Old fashioned police work with detectives is good enough to gather evidence the classic way and also to ascertain whether children or the person of interest is in the domicile, when they come and go, and when is the best time to effect arrest.

This wasn’t it.  As for the Lakeland police SWAT team, it’s my hope that you see the toddler every day for the rest of your lives in your mind, and in your dark dreams during sleepless nights.  I hope not a day goes by in your miserable lives that you don’t hear the screams of a burning child.

CNN:

Nearly a week after police shot and killed a Kansas man while responding to a prank call, the victim’s mother pleaded with authorities to allow her to see her deceased son.

Lisa Finch wrote in a letter to the Wichita, Kansas, mayor and police chief that she doesn’t know where they’re keeping his body and that she wants to give her son “a proper funeral service and burial.”

She questioned “why Wichita City leadership is compounding our grief and sorrow, by keeping my son from us?”

“Please let me see my son’s lifeless body,” she wrote in a letter dated Tuesday. “I want to hold him and say goodbye. Please immediately return his body to us.”

Her son, Andrew Finch was killed by police last week in his home in a case of swatting. Swatting refers to when a person makes a false report to draw a major police response or SWAT teams to a certain location.

The cops won’t even release the body to the family.  What a bunch of bastards.  In other news, remember I said this?

There are a number of misdirects in this report.  Let’s address two of the most prominent and important.  First of all, the blame will be placed on the illegal practice of Swatting, or calling the police and reporting an active shooting or hostage situation.  The perpetrator will likely be found and dealt with, and the blame will be placed squarely on him.

[ … ]

It doesn’t matter if he was armed, any more than it matters whether he was a gamer or if he was Swatted by another gamer.  While Swatting is illegal, the perpetrator didn’t do the shooting.  Being armed while answering the door isn’t illegal or immoral.  Gaming isn’t illegal or immoral.

True to form, the gaming community is self examining.

A joke gone bad ended in tragedy last week, and it brings into the spotlight one of the worst aspects of gaming culture.

Last week, someone made a fake emergency call (known as swatting) to police in Wichita, Kansas, and the police shot an innocent man. On Friday, police in Los Angeles arrested 25-year-old Tyler Raj Barriss, who reportedly goes by the name SWAuTistic, for allegedly calling in the false report. Social media posts on the incident have continued this week. Let’s hope that this leads to increased awareness of these prank calls among law enforcement and realization that toxic behavior like swatting can have deadly consequences.

While it’s deplorable that someone would do this, it wouldn’t be a problem if cops wore uniforms, didn’t assume that the call was legitimate, and simply knocked on the door to chat with the occupants since, after all, it is their property.

The practice of swatting is a problem only because of the hero soldier-boy complex that infects the police forces around the nation.  Take their guns away from them and they won’t be able to shoot anyone.

The Wichita Eagle:

Blue and red lights flashed outside of the McCormick Street house just after 6 p.m. on Thursday. Curious of what was going on – Andrew Finch, 28, opened the door.

“I heard my son scream, I got up and then I heard a shot,” his mother, Lisa Finch, said Friday morning.

Finch and other relatives invited reporters into their home Friday morning – more than 12 hours after Wichita police said an officer fatally shot a 28-year-old man, who was identified by family as Andrew “Andy” Finch.

“We want Andy’s side of the story to be told,” his mother said.

On Thursday, Deputy Wichita Police Chief Troy Livingston said a substation received a call that there was a hostage situation in a house in the 1000 block of West McCormick — and that someone had been shot in the head.

“That was the information we were working off of,” he said, explaining that officers went to the house ready for a hostage situation and they “got into position.”

“A male came to the front door,” Livingston said Thursday night. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon.”

Livingston didn’t say if the man had a weapon when he came to the door, or what caused the officer to shoot the man.

Finch said her son, a father of two young children, wasn’t armed.

There are a number of misdirects in this report.  Let’s address two of the most prominent and important.  First of all, the blame will be placed on the illegal practice of Swatting, or calling the police and reporting an active shooting or hostage situation.  The perpetrator will likely be found and dealt with, and the blame will be placed squarely on him.

The second misdirect for the readers is the question whether the innocent man was armed.  We’ve dealt with this in detail before.  First of all, the Castle doctrine is based on Biblical precept and it’s moral standing is rock solid.  Home invasions, whether by criminals bent on evil, or police criminalds bent on soldier-boy impersonations, are all immoral in the superlative.

Furthermore, we’ve seen that even if the police announce their presence, there is no compelling reason to believe that it is the police.  Criminals have become savvy to the ways of the police SWAT teams and make a pretense of the same kind of entry procedure.  Men announcing that they are the police may be the police, or they may not be and may intend on rape or murder.

It doesn’t matter if he was armed, any more than it matters whether he was a gamer or if he was Swatted by another gamer.  While Swatting is illegal, the perpetrator didn’t do the shooting.  Being armed while answering the door isn’t illegal or immoral.  Gaming isn’t illegal or immoral.

While the media will present all of these misdirects as will the Sheriff when he finally presents his case to the public (the gamer did something illegal, my deputy thought he was armed, blah, blah, blah), the reality of the situation is that the shooter is a murderer, and the team that helped him is guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.

The police in America have become the most dangerous hoodlums, thugs and murderers.  As I’ve said before, I feel more comfortable around gangsters who might threaten me than I do around goober cops who have no discipline or moral compunction about shooting innocent people.

Before we get to the main subject of this article, let’s cover an incident perpetrated by Carroll County’s Sheriff’s Office in Maryland.

Gaithersburg, Md. –  The Carroll County Sheriff’s Office is admitting it was a mistake that led to a SWAT raid at a Montgomery County man’s home where he and his family were detained by police.

Israel Orellana has the same name as a man investigators were searching for in a gun theft case. Somehow, Carroll County got a warrant to search the wrong man’s home.

Orellana says he was in his bedroom Tuesday when he heard the noises. He says his mom had friends from church at their home at the time.

“I thought it was my mom’s friends because sometimes they pray and they start dancing,” he said. “So I get up from my bed and I start walking over to my door. And as I’m opening my door, I make eye contact with the SWAT officer and he pushes up against the door with his shield and he slams me against the wall. He starts screaming at me, ‘Stop resisting! Stop resisting!’”

Orellana showed FOX 5 a bruise on his face and scrapes on his arm. He said his hands were tied behind his back and he was taken upstairs to find that his family and his mother’s friends were also detained. He says officers barged in on his 14-year-old sister in the bathroom.

“It was really horrific,” he said. “You feel really helpless during the whole situation. Like you know you’re innocent, you’re telling them you’re innocent, but they just see you as a criminal.”

The Carroll County Sheriff’s Office got the search warrant for Orellana’s home and requested that Montgomery County police execute it. According to the search warrant, a man named Israel Orellana was linked to a home burglary where 20 guns and money were stolen. The suspect in the case was identified in surveillance video and investigators believed that Orellana’s driver’s license photo matched that video.

Both Israel Orellanas live in Gaithersburg.

“Stop resisting.”  Compliant sheeple, citizens are expected to be.  Shooting home invaders isn’t considered a right of citizens, and it’s questionable what a jury would have found, but there is no question that the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would have given the cops a pass had they shot the man if he had in fact resisted.

This all put citizens in a dangerous position.  Men need to protect their families, and single women are even more vulnerable in this calculus.  The reason is clear.

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Police are trying to catch a group of armed robbers who pistol whipped a couple inside their condo while wearing fake SWAT uniforms.

“I think it made us hesitate enough to give them the jump on us,” Brad Ouellette said. “Just oh, SWAT, maybe the wrong house, what are you doing here?”

The masked men got away with three Rolex watches and five guns. They are also accused of inappropriately touching Ouellette’s wife.

“This reminded her of something she would see in Colombia,” he said. “She never thought she’d see it in America.”

Never forget those words.  “I think it made us hesitate enough to give them the jump on us.”   As I said before concerning armed invaders and the proliferation of police SWAT raids, “For those of you who are LEOs, do you understand?  Does this ring any bells with you as home owners and family members?  Does it make any sense to you that this is number 18,399 on the list of reasons not to conduct home raids, even if they are intended to find evidence of wrong-doing?

Well, does it?  I hope a LEO weighs in, because it’s crystal clear to me and most readers.  In addition to your felt need to “go home safely at the end of your shift,” we have an equivalent need to be safe in our own homes, to prevent flash-bang grenades from being thrown into our toddler’s cribs, to prevent your reflexively shooting our family dogs, and to prevent street thugs like this from raiding our homes under the guise of being police officers.

You see, we can’t just lay down and let people screaming “police, police, get the fuck on the floor, police, police” … come into our homes without countering those efforts with close quarters battle.  Because they may not be police.”

The proliferation of military tactics into ordinary policing work in America was first promoted by progressives fighting a war on drugs, but the police-worship is possibly even worse among the “law-and-order” neocons who also happen to be some of the most virulent Northeastern gun controllers.

This is all setting up a national confrontation between the police and those who are being policed, and whether those who are setting all of this up actually understand the hazard this creates for themselves as well isn’t clear.  What is clear is that this is bound to get much worse before it ever gets any better.

But you simply cannot lay on the floor waiting for your door to be busted down because the home invaders might be police.  No honorable man can do something like that, any more than an honorable man can bust doors in and point guns at other people just because a judge says so.

Remember that we extensively discussed the idiotic and immoral raid on baby Bou Bou’s house in search of someone who wasn’t there?  The horrible and inept “criminal justice system” didn’t even hold the people who perpetrated that evil act accountable for it.  A grand jury couldn’t even convince themselves that they should have continued legal action against the police, and the raid ended up crippling the poor child and causing multiple surgeries.

The police state in America is so screwed up that it can’t even learn from such a disaster as that.  “Officer safety” must return home at the end of his shift, and the war on drugs must go on.  True to form for the police state, I missed that yet another flash bang was thrown at a baby in Indiana after the raid on baby Bou Bou.  This time, at least the court had doubts and threw out the evidence collected in the raid.  Fortunately, no one was harmed.

The Evansville (IN) Police Department has seen a drug bust go up in a cloud of flashbang smoke. A search warrant for drugs and weapons, based on an informant’s tip, was executed perfectly… if you’re the sort of person who believes it takes a dozen heavily-armed officers, a Lenco Bearcat, and two flashbangs to grab a suspect no one felt like arresting when he was outside alone taking out his trash. (via FourthAmendment.com)

The state appeals court decision [PDF] hinges on the deployment of a flashbang grenade into a room containing a toddler. Fortunately, in this case, the toddler was only frightened, rather than severely burned. But it was this tossed flashbang that ultimately undoes the PD’s case. The evidence is suppressed and the conviction reversed.

Scattered throughout the opinion are some amazing depictions of the PD’s SWAT team at work — and how those officers seem to believe the violence of their entries during warrant service are somehow just the new normal.

Things like the following paragraph. First: some background. In some cases, it’s (theoretically) more difficult for law enforcement to obtain no-knock warrants. Facts need to be asserted that show that warning the occupants of a residence in any way would most likely result in the destruction of evidence and/or an armed response. Some judges are more willing than others to hand these out, but either way, the standard warrant boilerplate can’t be used.

So, here’s the difference between a “knock and announce” warrant and a no-knock warrant, as deployed by the Evansville PD.

The SWAT team rode in a Lenco Bearcat that followed a patrol vehicle to the residence. At least a dozen officers were involved. Upon arrival and prior to entry, three officers and a police vehicle approached the rear of the residence and at least nine officers, most armed with assault weapons, approached the front of the residence. At 10:30 a.m., the police knocked on the residence and one of the officers announced, “Police – Search Warrant – Police – Search Warrant,” and another officer announced over a loudspeaker “Search Warrant. 314 Illinois.” State’s Exhibit 1 at 3:55-4:00. One second later, the SWAT team knocked down the door with a battering ram.

ONE SECOND. Technically, still a knock-and-announce warrant, even though the residents had been given no chance to respond.

Within the next couple of seconds, a flashbang grenade was tossed into the front room, which contained a playpen and a baby’s car seat. The toddler was in the playpen.

After the flash bang grenade was deployed, Detective Gray entered the residence and picked up a nine-month old baby crying on top of blankets in a playpen just inside and “very close to the door.” Id. at 332. The room also contained a baby’s car seat and a toddler’s activity center in the line of sight of the front door. One of the officers moved the car seat with his foot to proceed further into the residence.

The officer who tossed the flashbang said he could see more than what was captured by his helmet cam, but still admitted he could not see everything in the room into which he tossed the grenade. This grenade was thrown within two seconds of the officers’ announcement that they had a warrant and roughly one second after the door was breached.

Officer Taylor testified that his perception of things involved a much wider view than what the camera could see. At a time stamp of 4:01 on the video, a member of the SWAT team rammed the door open several inches with a battering ram. From an angle to the right, Officer Taylor tossed the flash bang into the house at 4:02, and it detonated at 4:04. The video at 4:02 shows only a portion of the right rear of the couch and the wood floor on which it sat. The video reveals that about five minutes after the initial entry someone stated: “Make sure you get a picture . . . are you taking a picture of that?” State’s Exhibit 1 at 8:50-8:55. This appears to be a reference to a charred stain on the floor. The person then stated: “Because the baby was in this room, but I put it right there for a reason.” Id. at 8:55-9:00.

The lower court found these tactics unreasonable on the whole and granted suppression of the evidence obtained during the search. The state argued that suppression wasn’t the proper remedy and anything resulting from the “unreasonable” use of a flashbang grenade in a toddler’s room was something to be addressed in a civil lawsuit.

The appeals court disagrees, finding nothing justifiable about the SWAT team’s violent entry into the home.

The video shows almost no time lapse between when the door was battered in and the tossing of the flash bang. The door was barely opened when the flash bang was immediately tossed into the room, and the angle at which Officer Taylor was standing to the door did not allow him an opportunity to see what was inside the room. Indeed, Officer Taylor acknowledged that he could not see portions of the room in which the flash bang was placed. Specifically, he testified that he could see “from the couch over to the left, I can’t see the corner, the left corner inside the room and I can’t see the hallway in front of it, that’s why the flash bang goes in the threshold.”

That’s the flashbang, delivered two seconds after the police announced their presence. This is only part of it. The attempt to salvage the fruits of the search with a claim that the house potentially contained dangerous criminals also receives no judicial sympathy. The state makes assertions, but cannot back them up.

The State does not point us to any other evidence indicating the criminal history of Watkins or the other occupants of the house. The record contains no evidence that law enforcement could not have safely presented the person matching Watkins’s description with the search warrant during the time that he was outside the house and before he re-entered it.

The court basically gets it right in terms of the correct way to do this kind of police work.  Observe the residence, proceed with entry when no one is at home, and then present an arrest warrant to the perpetrator when he returns.

Or better yet, we could give up this ridiculous war on drugs.  Either way, it will never be necessary to throw grenades into homes towards babies for any reason under the sun, unless you’re immoral and a coward.  As for the objection that they didn’t know a baby was there (if that is indeed the objection), that is no excuse.  They should have done the rudimentary investigative work to find out.  That’s what detectives are for.

The smart people are supposed to work as detectives.  Call them first.  They can think about smarter ways of doing this sort of thing.  Finally, rather than just throw out evidence, the court should have imprisoned the officers who did this and the judge who approved it for violation of the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the constitution.  They deserve to be in the state penitentiary with the general prison population.

The constitution is a covenant under which stipulations we are all supposed to live.  Failure to do so means that the covenant has been broken, and breakage of the covenant means that punishments are supposed to ensue.

From The Salt Lake Tribune:

Eric Hill woke at 2:30 a.m. on Dec. 20 to his scared daughter telling him she had heard knocking near her closet.

Hill thought the 10-year-old was hearing things, but then came the banging on the front door of his Ogden home.

He went from his basement bedroom to the front door and asked who was there.

No answer.

Another bang.

Hill said he finally armed himself with a baseball bat and asked again who was there.

“Ogden Police,” a voice called out from outside the home, located in the 1000 block of Harrop Street.

“At that point, I didn’t believe it,” Hill said. “It took them so long to respond to me.”

But Hill opened his front door and was met with six men who he said were dressed in black, with no police identifiers that he saw. Three had assault rifles, Hill said; two were carrying tactical shotguns.

The men pointed their guns at Hill and told him to drop the bat and come outside.

“They just automatically placed me in handcuffs,” Hill said. “I [told] them my name, and they [kept] telling me my name is Derek.”

Hill said the officers told them that a felony arrest warrant was being served because he had gone AWOL from the military. But Hill, 28, had never been in the military.

The man police were looking for was a 23-year-old whom officers found a couple of hours later, according to arrest records. Second District Court records show the man has been charged with desertion.

While Hill was upstairs trying to reason with the officers that he was who he said he was, Melanie Hill, his wife, said she was in their basement bedroom with their two children, ages 4 and 10, trying to make out what the voices were saying upstairs.

She said she grabbed her phone to dial 911, thinking the voices were that of a distraught neighbor. But when she went to the stairwell, she was met with a man holding an assault rifle.

“I thought we were getting robbed,” she said. “I had no idea who the person on the stairs was.”

Melanie Hill said she was told to go downstairs and grab her husband’s wallet so he could prove his identification. She said her children followed her up the stairs and were terrified to see armed strangers in their home.

Here is where the report really gets good.  Pay close attention to what the police didn’t say … and said.

Melanie Hill said one of the officers made a comment about her husband coming to the door with a bat, saying that had it been a gun, the officers would have “blown you away.”

Ogden police Lt. Will Cragun said officers initially thought Eric Hill matched the description of the man for whom they were looking. He said once the officers verified Eric Hill’s identity, they released him and apologized for the error.

“These things are going to happen on occasion,” he said. “It’s unfortunate for Mr. Hill. His response [in holding a bat], I totally get. He has the right to protect his family. I would hope [the officers] are professional.”

Cragun said instances of mistaken identity are not common, but do happen. He said that the officers who went to the home were patrol officers working the night shift and would have been dressed in a patrol uniform, which includes a navy blue shirt with police patches, and tan pants.

Eric Hill said he received a phone call from police Chief Mike Ashment several days ago, explaining that the warrant was served at his house because it was the last known address of the man facing the arrest warrant.

No muzzle discipline.  In our world, if one of us does that, we get charged with assault with a deadly weapon (which includes the threat of use) and brandishing a weapon to the terror of the public.  If the police do that, they get to brag about blowing people away.  They get the support of the judges, who are on their side.  Thus do poor people like Eurie Stamps perish at the hands of idiots in homes holding rifles pointed at people.

But to rehearse a bit, here is the impeccable and tightly woven logic of the evening.  The syllogism goes something like this.  The person whom we are after at one time lived in a specific location.  We have never met this person and don’t know him to be a threat of any kind.  Therefore, since people never move and always live at the same address their entire lives, and since people are known to go crazy if you talk calmly to them, we will send in an armed team in the middle of the night to point rifles at the people in this home, who must be our target because, after all, people never move.

There you have it.  Wonderful, isn’t it?

These officers are morons.  As I have said a hundred times, this is the time for calm detective work and uniformed officers knocking at the door in the middle of the day, asking for a conversation.  If you want to play Soldier-boy or Marine and get into “stacks” and do room clearing and CQB, join up, get the training, fly across the pond, and do it for real.  Otherwise, you’re just cowards.

As for “blowing people away” who are attempting to defend their loved ones from an unknown threat, I hope that if any of them ever cause an innocent victim to perish, the officers sees the face of that victim every night before going to sleep.  I hope the memory of that victim haunts that officer’s existence, and I hope he lives with the shame of having shot an innocent man to death the rest of his life.  And I hope his wife and children feel and have to live with that shame.