[thefactor]

you smell a cop? what gave it away? when i wrote that i am a cop? nice work.

what are people questioning here? the raid itself or the tactics? i myself have questioned the tactics used. but i do not question the raid itself.

[TalonDJ]

i myself have questioned the tactics used. but i do not question the raid itself.

Depends on what you call the tactics and what you call the raid. Certainly if they found some pot in the mail they need to follow up and track the sender and receiver down. Swat teams and deadly force however were not justified.

[Dead Corpse]

Reading comprehension wasn't your strong suit was it.

Full quote is, "I smell a cop trying to justify..." You'd already outed yourself as a LEO, I'm outing you as someone trying to work his way around to feeling good about the fact that his actions are on the wrong side of the Constitution and it's Founding principles.

I'd be delighted to be wrong on this one, but you've got "wanna-be Storm Trooper" plastered all over your posts...

[An Old Man]

He is a TROLL!

by thefactor (contributing nothing of value to threads since 2001...)

[fr_freak]

what are people questioning here? the raid itself or the tactics? i myself have questioned the tactics used. but i do not question the raid itself.

OK, since you are a police officer, maybe you can explain to us why the police couldn't simply check who lived in the house, check their record, determine the threat risk (which was virtually zero), perform their sting, then knock on the door?

I disagree with no-knock raids, period. We cannot reasonably claim to be honoring the 4th Amendment if police can simply kick in the door and begin shooting without having to show any warrant. In this case, the violation of that particular Constitutional protection is even more blatant, given that a person has no control over what is mailed to him, and therefore, receiving a package is not de facto evidence of a crime.

I have seen two basic arguments in defense of no-knock raids: 1) to stop drug dealers from flushing evidence, 2) to ensure officer safety. Perhaps you can tell me how either one of these concerns even applies to this situation? Even if I were to accept those two concerns as legitimate reasons for throwing Constitutional protections out the window, those two reasons don't even apply here.

Finally, they arrested nobody, even though it is indisputable that there was 32 pounds of marijuana in the package. If there wasn't enough cause to arrest someone for that, then there certainly wasn't enough cause to kick in the doors with guns blazing. If you can't understand the reasons for concern here, then you are part of the problem, regardless of what your intentions may be. Your attitude is more of a threat to our freedoms than pot dealers.

It is supremely ironic that we have soldiers who risk their lives to safeguard freedom, while police officers increasingly justify trashing those freedoms to avoid risk.

[supercat]

i myself have questioned the tactics used. but i do not question the raid itself.

What could they reasonably and legitimately have hoped to accomplish by giving him the package and waiting until he was inside the house to conduct the raid? If they had a search warrant, wouldn't it have made more sense to hand him the package and then, as soon as his hands were occupied with it, identified themselves as police shown him the warrant? The only reason I can think of that such an approach wouldn't have been preferable would have been if they didn't actually have a warrant to show him.