“...the raid resulted from a 20-month probe, while confirming there is an informant – all the while,...”
This is what I have been waiting to hear - that there was an informant involved in this FUBAR. I am willing to be the informant gave some bad intel like has happened in many other police departments many times resulting in innocent people getting arrested or killed by the police.
“Dupnik needs to be recalled and stripped of his position and benefits.”
Not only that he needs to lose his pension to be used to pay the surviving wife and child, arrested for murder, throw in jail, stripped searched, have a full investigation of everything he done in his career as a police officer and sheriff, put him in pink clothing, group him in with a chain gang and do hard labor.
There no excuse to have this little tyrant running a police department.
The SWAT team needs to be held accountable in some way for their part in this. There needs to be an evaluation of the need for them, possibly dis-banded. If it is kept on a whole new policy needs to be adopted on when and where they can be used and the training that is required to have such a team.
If we don’t don’t get these SWAT teams under control all they will become are death squads that third world countries have usually suffered under.
Remember, this wasn't ONE department's SWAT TEAM. This RAID was conducted by specific SWAT TEAM members from county departments.
In other words, he took the rookies from each team, and put them together so that just ONE unit or department could not be held responsible, if things went wrong. Also, he could depend on them to be fairly ignorant of the facts behind this raid.
He told them the person in the house (Jose) had been involved in a HOME INVASION with a double homicide.
He didn't tell them that it was Jose's relatives who were the victims of that double homicide.