Free Republic

The U.S. military has some of the most advanced killing equipment in the world that allows it to invade almost wherever it likes at will. We produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns out a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens. Benjamin Carlson at The Daily reports on a little known endeavor called the "1033 Program" that gave more than $500 million of military gear to U.S. police forces...

FULLERTON – Acting Police Chief Kevin Hamilton publicly apologized Tuesday night for four narcotics detectives mistakenly entering the wrong house while searching for a suspect. Hamilton, a captain filling in for the chief, who is on medical leave, also outlined during the City Council meeting several policy changes resulting from the incident. On Oct. 20, 2010, detectives entered the home of Chuck and Robyn Nordell, in the 200 block of Ventura Place. The suspect who police were looking for was actually in the house next door. The Nordells, along with their 23-year old daughter and 26-year old son, were home...

In September 2009, 28-year-old Jonathan Ayers pulled into a gas station in Stephens County, Georgia, to withdraw money from an ATM. Ayers, a pastor, had just given $23, all the cash he had in his pocket, to Johanna Barrett, a drug addict alleged to be a prostitute to whom Ayers had been ministering. His purpose was to help Barrett pay rent at the motel where she was living with her boyfriend. According to friends and family members, it wasn’t unusual for Ayers to give the money he was carrying to help those to whom he was ministering get out of...

STOCKTON (CBS13) — The San Jose Police Department stormed into a Stockton home searching for an accused killer, but they left without him, and left behind a complete mess. “I feel like a war was taken on here, and we lost,” homeowner Joann Rice told CBS13. Almost all of the windows are smashed in, there are holes in the wall, and there’s a layer of tear gas in the air so thick breathing it in makes you cough. That is the home Rice came back to after the San Jose police held a fruitless 12-hour search on Saturday for Steve...

Two centuries ago the Founders feared a strong, centralized federal government would establish a standing army, an irresistible force capable of crushing those rights of individual liberty which had been so carefully and deliberately crafted into the Constitution. Today that fear has been realized, not with the American military, but in the increasingly disturbing form of paramilitary units and heavily equipped tactical assault teams which exist in even small town police departments and bureaucracies within the federal government. In Waco, 80 lives were taken by masked SWAT team members driving armored vehicles in what one writer properly called an “…ATF...

ALAMEDA -- Police and FBI agents arrested a drug suspect in Alameda on Wednesday, but not before mistakenly trying to raid a home across the street belonging to a network TV reporter and her political consultant husband. Alameda and Martinez police, together with FBI agents, pounded on the door of CBS News contributor Priya David Clemens and her husband, Alex Clemens, at their home on Lina Avenue at about 7 a.m. Alex Clemens, a political consultant and lobbyist in San Francisco, said he peered out the window and saw "four guns raised at my face." Several agents pulled him outside...

Does SWAT Need to Be Explained? Written by Ed Sanow I get frustrated with the educational sessions at chief’s conferences on SWAT. The attendees are treated like kindergarten kids. “There are some vewy, vewy bad people out there. They won’t do what the nice police officers tell them. So, sometimes, those nice police officers need help from ‘special’ police officers.” You got to be kidding me! Some 90% of agencies serving populations of more than 50,000 people, and 70% of agencies serving smaller populations have some kind of SWAT team. Yet, SWAT has to be explained like it is something...

Last night I went to see the documentary Farmageddon in Chicago. I also stayed for the full panel discussion. The film is shocking. Documentaries are supposed to shock you. Michael Moore has made millions presenting slanted facts to us. Documentaries are designed to get you to do something. This documentary illustrates the plight of the organic farmer, specifically the organic dairy farmer. If a dairy farmer wants to sell raw milk, they will be run out of business and many times imprisoned by the federal bureaucracy. The USDA actively tries to run Raw Milk Producers out of the business. They work closely with agents from...

<p>STERLING HEIGHTS, Mich. (WJBK) - Drug Enforcement Agency Officers bust into a home in Sterling Heights, armed with a search warrant. The only problem? The guy they were looking for doesn't live there. Fox 2 talked to the man who opened the door, and was stunned by what happened next.</p>

"As soon as I opened the door, somebody grabbed me and took me outside and put me on the grass," Tossa said. "The first thing I thought was they were terrorists who want to kill me because I served in Iraq." The DEA agents were executing a search warrant. “I kept asking, what’s going on?” he said. “And they held my neck to the ground so I can’t talk.” According to the report, the DEA was executing a search warrant for Tossa’s landlord’s son, who apparently uses Tossa’s one-story house’s address for mailing. “Before they raid any house, they should...

DURHAM (WTVD) -- Did a member of a Durham police SWAT team go too far when he shot and killed a dog during a raid in April? Some say it was unnecessary force. ABC11 cameras captured the incident at a home on Dunstan Avenue April 12. Officers were looking for Pete Moses and Vania Sisk. According to search warrants, Moses is a suspect in the disappearance of a woman and a 5-year-old boy. Sisk is the boy's mother.

Knox Update - The Knox Update No-Knock Warrants from the Department of Education? By Jeff Knox ItÂ’s 6 AM and a groggy Ken Wright is getting ready to start the day. Thinking about jumping in the shower, getting the coffee on, and wake the kidsÂ… Suddenly noise from outside draws his attention and he looks out the window. He sees dozens of black-clad, armored men swarming on his lawn and now someone is pounding on the front door. As he starts down the stairs in his boxer shorts the front door shatters and the heavily armed men charge into the...

VIPR Searches and the American Citizen: 'Dominate. Intimidate. Control.' By John W. Whitehead 7/5/2011 "They're trying to scare the pants off the American people that we need these things... Fear is a commodity and they're selling it. The more they can sell it, the more we buy into it. When American people are afraid, they will accept anything."--Kate Hanni, passengers' rights advocate "Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government...Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and...

Napolitano’s V.I.P.R. Vows to “Dominate,Intimidate and Control”the American People BY COACH COLLINS,ON JULY 15TH,2011 By Doug Book,staff writer Since its inception in 2002,the Department of Homeland Security has grown increasingly contemptuous of the rights of the American people. Indeed,the Gestapo-like tactics of one of the Department’s better known masters of overreach–the TSA–are responsible for countless examples of the organizations daily assault on the Constitution. But recently,another of Janet Napolitano’s handmaidens of harassment has begun to make news…albeit only on the web,of course. It is the TSA’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response task force–or VIPR. Organized into mobile swat teams,VIPR has...

Cops mistakenly converge on wrong home in Struthers By John W. Goodwin Jr. jgoodwin@vindy.com YOUNGSTOWN A case of mistaken identity nearly roped a Struthers family into one of the largest drug sweeps in the area this year. Doreen Fox of Lewis Street, Struthers, was home with her 30-year-old son Wednesday morning preparing to leave for a doctor’s appointment when she noticed movement outside the home. She opened the front door to a flood of local and federal police. “They [police] were in my front yard, my rear yard; they had my house surrounded. When I opened the door to see...

Tucson Police confirm that a weapon they found in Jose Guerena's home had been stolen in 2008. SWAT officers killed Guerena in his southwest side home last month when they went to serve a search warrant. Investigators say Guerena pointed an assault rifle at officers when they went in the house.

The part-time mayor of an upper middle class Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. found himself and his mother-in-law handcuffed in his own home by a Prince George’s County SWAT team one July evening three years ago. His two black Labrador retrievers had been shot dead, the second one from behind as it fled the officers who had broken into the home in a ‘no knock’ raid as part of a drug investigation. Five months later, Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo and his entire family had been cleared of all wrongdoing and suspicion, but the county police were still refusing to...

The SWAT team that gunned down a former Marine in his Tucson, Ariz., home was cleared today of any wrongdoing in the incident. Jose Guerena, 26, was killed in a hail of bullets from the SWAT team, which broke down the door to his home on May 5 while trying to serve a search warrant as part of a home invasion probe. Guerena did not fire a single shot in the incident, but Pima County Chief Criminal Deputy Attorney David Berkman said in the report issued today that the five SWAT team members were justified in using deadly force because...

“He [a federal agent] had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there.”--Anthony Wright, victim of a Dept. of Education SWAT team raid The militarization of American police--no doubt a blowback effect of the military empire--has become an unfortunate part of American life. In fact, it says something about our reliance on the military that federal agencies having nothing whatsoever to do with national defense now see the need for their own paramilitary units. Among those federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions are the State Department, Department of Education, Department...

A federal SWAT operation kicked down the doors of Kenneth Wright’s home in a 6 A.M. raid because his wife, who no longer lives at the residence, failed to repay her student loan. Wright, who had been sleeping, was dragged out of the house in his underwear, thrown face down on the front lawn and held at gunpoint. His three children were not harmed. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan defended the harsh tactics. “Too many people are defaulting on their student loans,” Duncan pointed out. “The old system of pursuing collections through the courts may have been the only alternative...