Posted on 08/13/2008 3:09:59 PM PDT by LibWhacker
WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The violent assault on Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home late last month was certainly not the first bungled raid by a government SWAT team, but the bad publicity it generated should make it the last time these trigger-happy squads target innocent civilians.
Tracking a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, Prince George’s sheriff’s deputies forcibly entered the mayor’s home on July 29 and killed his two dogs before handcuffing him and his mother-in-law.
But like so many other SWAT team raids across the country, this one turned out to be a big mistake. After reviewing the case, State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey acknowledged that the Calvos were victims of a multistate drug ring that used innocent people’s names and addresses to hide shipments of contraband drugs. But the mayor and his family were also victims of a home invasion by the SWAT team, based entirely on what turned out to be a false premise.
In a groundbreaking study in 2006, former Cato policy analyst Radley Balko documented a disturbing pattern of cases across the country in which innocent citizens were killed by armed-to-the-teeth SWAT teams who either acted on the basis of wrong information from an informant or stormed the wrong house by mistake. “One thing I’ve noticed while picking through the depressingly long list of botched drug raids: The cops always shoot the dog,” Balko noted. Sure enough in the local case, Mayor Calvo and his family lost their two beloved black Labrador retrievers, but it could easily have been his own life or that of a family member that was lost. An apologetic “oops” from the responsible officials just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Originally set up to handle volatile, high-risk situations involving snipers, hostage takers or prison escapees, militarized SWAT teams have been unleashed on civilians with predictably disastrous results — as the fatal shooting of unarmed optometrist Salvatore Culosi by a Fairfax County SWAT team two years ago illustrated all too well. Sending a SWAT team to arrest Culosi was excessive compared with his alleged crime of betting on football games.
By sending a SWAT team to Calvo’s home, the Prince George’s Sheriff’s Department made the same mistake, setting the stage for a violent confrontation that could easily have escalated into something far worse.
It’s long past time for law enforcement agencies to restrict SWAT teams for use only in situations where massive lethal force is their only remaining option.
Fine with me. Being a cop is a relatively safe job and they're overpaid anyway.
In the instance of the private facility, you can dig it up at your leisure. In a public sewer, all one has to do is open the cover on the nearest downhill manhole and throw several sandbags into it to prevert the flow of effluent in the line. Again, one can recover the goods in a leisurely manner.
So you're cool with people you disagree with politically having their pets shot to death. Nice critical thinking there.
The dogs are a small price to pay.
Besides, they're just dogs. Some people don't care for them.
Legalizing the manufacture, possession and use of drugs, so that wildly high taxes could be collected is a conflict of interest. What would all this overage children who want to kill something DO if they couldn't claim that they were "stopping drug traffic, for the children!"?
No. That decision had already been made, when they got a warrant that did not authorize them to "go in hot".
They broke the law, and need to be punished. As public servants charged with upholding the rule of law, they need to be punished far more severely than some Joe Blow off the street.
I didn't see pictures of the woman, but her daughter isn't that old, so it's doubtful she was a fragile old woman. Having her get down on the ground and cuffing her keeps her out of the line of fire and keeps her from doing something rash that could be seen as threatening. It may not be dignified, or pleasant to be on the receiving end of it, but it is the safest way to handle such things for all involved.
Shooting the dogs seems far more questionable. Hopefully there is enough physical evidence at the scene to give a good indication of if it was justified or not. If it wasn't justified, then the officers involved need to be held accountable.
I'm saying that anyone with half a brain could realize that given who lived in the house, there was zero chance of violence breaking out when they executed their search warrant.
My fiance works in Children's aid. You would be very surprised to know what happens in some houses in nice neighborhoods with relatively normal and innocent people living inside. It's naive to believe that just because they live in a nice house, are white, and the mother-in-law was there, they couldn't possibly be involved in dealing drugs. You can afford to be naive, the police can't. They have to go where the evidence leads them.
I'm sure that the look of the house and the people make them skeptical, but there was still enough evidence that they had to take it seriously, and couldn't just walk away once they took the drugs inside, and didn't call the police shortly thereafter.
They stormed the house like they expected it to be full of methed-up bikers or MS-13 gangbangers.
The amount of drugs (close to $100,000 worth) make it a high risk warrant because people will do some pretty desperate things with that kind of money involved or to avoid going to jail for trafficking in large quantities of drugs, or to destroy evidence that might lead to other nasty people who would be very upset with the people in the house.
If you're going to go into a house, there's no good reason to go in undermanned. If an officer is faced with multiple threats without enough backup, the officer will likely have to take more drastic action to quickly neutralize one threat so he can deal with another.
That means if you go in undermanned, it is more likely that things like the dogs getting shot will happen, not less likely. If an officer is worrying about someone else being a threat and the dog is keeping them from dealing with that threat, the dog is going to have to be neutralized quickly, and in most cases that means shooting it.
A larger, and well trained team gives them more options. In some cases they are unfortunately still going to end up being justified in shooting the dogs. However, they are more likely to be able to have one or two officers chase the dogs into a room and shut them in without killing them while other officers deal with the people.
There's also the fact that a dangerous criminal might try and fight one or two officers, but is far less likely to fight if they know they don't stand a chance.
The quantity of drugs justified it being a high risk warrant, and the only reason to not take a good sized and well equipped team in on a high risk warrant is because they are too cheap to allocate the resources.
If this was just an ordinary citizen, they probably would have gotten away with their gestapo-tactics. But the cops here actually abused someone who has the power to fight back and get the media, state and Federal authorities involved. Hopefully, these JBT are the ones scared now.
Every time the police execute a warrant and it turns out the people weren't guilty it gets splashed all over the news. Even when the police go in and it really is a drug dealer, if they shoot dogs it gets splashed all over the news.
We live in the world of 24 hour news channels that love things that can be sensationalized. We live in a world where the ACLU is happy to jump up and down and scream about any instance where they might possibly be able to paint the police as being overly aggressive or abusive.
What alternate reality are you living in where you think that such an occurrence would just get quietly swept under the rug. You're tin foil hat is on way too tight if you really believe that.
Bravo Sierra! The police already had the information about the dead-drop scheme, and knew that the delivery addresses on the packages had no relevance to the actual intended recipient.
Puh-leeze. They chose to plant the contraband on an innocent citizen's property. Any repercussions of that decision are purely on their heads.
“How did they spin that?”
He had something “shiny” that looked like a weapon, of course!
Exactly. They knew that none of the people who had been the addressees in the past had anything to do with this scheme. Why did they think, all of a sudden, that this was any different? Why did they even bother to deliver the package?
And, I'm sorry, but that fact that the people inside the house didn't call the cops an hour after the shipments is meaningless. The package was addressed to the mayor's wife and she wasn't there. The natural conclusion is that the guy just put the package on a table for his wife to open. Heck, if I had opened a package like this, I wouldn't be calling the cops first, I'd be calling my lawyer.
Yes; that's why police corruption has become so endemic.
Of course, none of this would have been an issue in the slightest if the cops weren't the ones knowingly delivering drugs to peoples' houses.
No- they wanted to play cowboy. And two dogs are dead. I hope these jackasses pay.
And the Weavers.
You think she was screaming because she thought they were cops?
She was screaming because she saw unidentifiable men with guns. Do you think a completely innocent person should have assumed they were cops?
All they would have to do is deny that they had any idea of what was in the package, and it would quickly become a hard case to win. It leaves reasonable doubt.
They had to have wanted the people inside to not only take possession of the wrapped up package, but to open it and more clearly tie it to them. That's probably why they waited a while after the package had been delivered.
They could still go and knock on the door, and when the person answered the door, identify themselves, and then start asking questions while being prepared to secure the scene if they thought it was necessary.
Unfortunately they were spotted while getting into position, so knocking on the door and trying to keep things calm didn't work out. When she started yelling, the situation changed. That doesn't mean she did something wrong. It simply means that they no longer had the option of a controlled methodical approach.
They could either sit outside risking evidence being destroyed, weapons being readied, or even a hostage being taken; or they could rush in. The obvious problem with rushing in was if the people were not guilty they were being put at risk for no fault of their own. Unfortunately, the police can't always know if that is the case or not before they have to decide to go in or not.
If people inside the house realized what was going on outside, things would have happened differently. If the officers outside the house could have known what was going on inside the house, they would have done things differently.
Americans have had a belly full of the cops shooting up innocent people, killing their pets, busting down doors over stupid things like pot, and conducting bizarre military style home invasions of those that are completely innocent.
If you disagree with the war on drugs, take it up with the legislators. The police don't make the laws.
No one, including the police want innocent people being hurt (except of course the extremely rare psychopath with a badge that you'll use as an example and try and illogically say represents all police).
However, in the world or reality, the people that enforce our laws are surprisingly enough human beings. They are not omniscient, perfect beings.
In reality our standard for a search being justified in PROBABLE CAUSE, not absolute certainty without any chance of being wrong.
Guess what? That means that sometimes the officers are going to collect the evidence properly, a judge is going to examine the evidence carefully and determine accurately that probable cause exists, the officers are then going to execute the warrant with a large and well armed force of people because the evidence they have collected justifies it, and when they go in they will sometimes still be raiding the home of someone who is completely innocent even if they do their jobs right.
It is also reality that we have been taught by liberals that any time something bad happens, it must be someone's fault. This is of course strongly encouraged by the trial lawyer lobby.
Liberals teach us to not use reason and see if their actions were if not perfect at least reasonable given what they knew, they teach us to react with our emotions and say that the results were bad so therefore they must have done something wrong. That they must have done something wrong it taken as truth and then they work backwards to figure out who to hold at fault. Who should be held at fault? Why people pith deep pockets or people with authority of course. It always has to be the fault of the government, or an evil corporation, or barring those at least some horrible rich person.
Your example of just announcing who they were when the package was delivered doesn't really work because the job of the officers is to collect evidence to prove the crime beyond a reasonable doubt, and just putting the package in their hands doesn't do that. However, even if it was a reasonable option, that doesn't preclude what the officers did from also being a reasonable option based on what they knew.
People seem to think that because the results were bad, their choices couldn't have been reasonable, which shows a horrible grasp of logic and reason in our society.
People seem to think that if they can show another reasonable option that would not have produced the same result, then the choice they made must have been unreasonable. That also shows a horrible lack of logic an reasoning ability.
However, that is how most people seem to evaluate things.
It makes it very easy for people to be misled by the media, or taken in by conspiracy theories.
If they're going to continue doing this, they might want to use some common sense for change and lose the Rambo mentality.
I think you need to quit listening to the liberal definition of common sense. From what I've seen being able to use logic and being rational aren't all that common.
I can tell just by that you're the type of miserable person I avoid in real life.
They didn't have any idea what was in the package. The police, having already discovered the dead-drop scheme, knew that the residents at the delivery address didn't have any idea what was in the package. Ergo, the only possible result of having the police deliver the package and then search for it would be to corruptly implicate people they knew to be innocent.
Your own attempt to defend this outrage only digs the JBT, and you, into ever-deeper holes.
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