Posted on 08/17/2008 12:46:00 PM PDT by ellery
Armed with a battering ram and shotguns, Buffalo police looking for heroin broke down the door and stormed the lower apartment of a West Side family of eight.
The problem is that the Wednesday evening raid should have occurred at an apartment upstairs.
And, that’s only the tip of the iceberg, according to Schavon Pennyamon, who lives at the mistakenly raided apartment on Sherwood Street with her husband, Terrell, and six children.
Pennyamon alleges that after wrongly breaking into her apartment, police proceeded to strike her epileptic husband in the head with the butt end of a shotgun and point shotguns at her young children before admitting their mistake and then raiding the right apartment.
She says she’s left with a broken door, an injured husband, jittery children and — what bothers her most — still no apology from police.
“They know they did something wrong and they were still ignorant,” said the 29-year-old Pennyamon. “At first, I just wanted an apology. Now, because they want[ed] to be ignorant and rude, I have to take it to the next level.”
She filed a report with the department’s Professional Standards Division and also contacted Mayor Byron W.
Brown about the incident. Pennyamon said Friday evening she also has retained a lawyer and intends to pursue legal action.
Police brass acknowledge that officers with the Mobile Response and Narcotics units entered the wrong apartment.
“As the officers were in the lower apartment, one of the detectives reviewed the search warrant application and realized it was for the upper [apartment],” said Dennis J. Richards, chief of detectives.
“It appears to be an honest mistake and we certainly apologize to all involved,” added Michael J. DeGeorge, Buffalo police spokesman.
Police declined to comment, however, on Pennyamon’s allegations of assault and other police impropriety. The internal investigation with the Professional Standards Division is now under way to determine exactly what happened.
“We wouldn’t be comfortable discussing the internal investigation,” Richards said. “We can say comfortably that over 1,100 search warrants were executed last year and 580 to date this year and that, with such a high volume and such a fast-paced environment, it is understandable that mistakes could happen.”
Pennyamon remains unconvinced it was a mistake. She says officers told her they had “raided the house before” and she believes they felt entitled to do it again — warrant or not.
“The way they make it seem is ‘we can do whatever we want,’ ” she said.
Pennyamon’s troubled by what she says is an arrogance by police officers and an unwillingness to “serve and protect” those who need it.
“It’s a sad situation. I’ve always looked up to the police. I’ve always expected them to be on my side.”
Pennyamon was called home from her job as a certified nursing assistant at a local health care facility at about 6:30 p. m. Wednesday to find police at her house, her children partially dressed on the porch and her husband — a U.S. Air Force veteran — injured. She said police were rude and unapologetic.
It was a harsh welcome to the neighborhood for the family. They’ve only lived at the apartment on Sherwood Street, on the far West Side just south of West Ferry Street, for two weeks after she says they moved from the East Side to escape crime. Now, Pennyamon said, the family already is looking to relocate again.
“I don’t know what was going on upstairs, but it gives police no right to bust in my doors,” she said. “That’s just ridiculous.”
Richards said police protocol dictates that search warrants are executed by police first announcing their presence and then quickly and forcefully entering a property with guns drawn for their own protection.
“Police have been faced with fortified doors and windows. In numerous locations, they’ve been met with individuals armed with weapons or attacking animals,” he said.
Pennyamon said the event left her husband with physical injuries and left a lasting impression on the children.
She said her husband, Terrell, suffered a dislocated arm after he was yanked up by police during the raid and is expected to return to his doctor Monday to possibly have glass — left behind by the door window police broke to get into the apartment — surgically removed from his foot.
Pennyamon’s 5-year-old daughter now sleeps with her.
“My 12-year-old and 6-year-old don’t want to be home at all,” she said, adding that her younger children cower or run to the back of the house when they hear anyone approaching.
“ ‘That’s the police,’ they say,” Pennyamon said.
Police said no arrests were made in the subsequent raid at the upstairs apartment.
A coupla of my ancestors fought a war because they were tired of these little stunts by the King’s men....
Strange, it doesn't mention any broken jaw or cheek bone, nor any broken neck.
BINGO. Use the Navy's rules for commanding officers. Your ship hits the reef, you're fired. Even if you were sleeping, and a junior officer was conning the ship, it's no excuse. You were responsible for the junior officer's training, and YOU are fired.
Police departments went wild furnishing their DARE programs with hot Trans AM and SUV vehicles.
In my hometown a kid who worked in another town bought a new Trans and within weeks it had DARE painted on the sides.
Seems the drug sniffing dog picked up the scent of Marijuana dropped by an officer and between a crooked local judge, DA and police chief he lost the car.
Exactly! Payback time.
I guess I fail to see your point. Are you saying that busting down doors with no reason to believe that there might reasonably be armed resistance is a legitimate exercise of authority, so long as serious injury doesn't result?
So let me make sure i understand your position. If 10 seconds from now, as I sit here at my computer, and my wife sits watching the olympics, a battering ram knocks my door down, flash-bangs and tear gas are thrown in, I find myself thrown to the floor with a gun in my ear and a knee in my back, my wife in the same position, its all good so long as we can walk away from it when they realize they were supposed to raid a house on Ivy road, not Ivy lane?
Then we clearly need SWAT to enforce traffic laws.
Really? Does your coveting monetary judgements really cause you to forget that people's lives are lost in these raids? Do you really think that someone thinks "my spouse is dead, but its ok because I got a half million dollar judgment"?
There was a certain sarcasm meant there. The point is that compensation or revenge has only occurred through civil action. So far, people have not been hunting down the SWAT team members. I do not like the litigious society one bit, nor the mentality of someone bringing their own cockroach to a restaurant to scam a settlement. But the good side is that it so far has prevented violent remedial action, and I have been tiptoing all around trying not to advocate it.
I have personal opinions on what should happen to anyone who violently and _illegally_ uses force to enter someone's home, though. And it does not involve lawyers. There, I finally said it.
Sorry, Herr DeGeorge, but your apology won't make the lawsuit go away.
BEGINNING? Where have you been hiding?
Thing is though that that is the rare thing and the tens of thousands of arrests that gets bad people off the streets from good folks is the more common happening.
I'm agreeing with you 100% that more should be done to correct the mistake of going into the wrong address.
They need to triple verify the address before they get the warrant and probably at least three people also should verify the correct address again before they move in.
Nothing wrong with more caution at all.
I think you're contradicting yourself here (or slightly changing the subject), FRiend. You originally and correctly stated that humans are fallible and imperfect. The logical conclusion of that statement is this: if we are going to allow the police the widespread power to storm private houses, we must accept that a certain number of corrupt and incompetent officials will use that power to terrorize, steal from and kill innocent citizens in our own homes.
The alternative to stormtrooping through the homes of American citizens is to apprehend suspects in a different way -- not to let them go free altogether. The only time SWAT team attacks on private homes should be legal is in rare hot pursuit or hostage situations. David Koresh very likely should have and could have been arrested peacefully on the street when he left his compound to go shopping. Instead, we know what happened -- and many innocents were murdered. Yet we still have countless mini-Wacos happening every day.
As for what the Founders believed about what government encroachments were acceptable in the name of fighting crime, Benjamin Franklin said: "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved."
http://www.bartleby.com/73/953.html
Ok, I missed the sarcasm. I agree that it appears that we are again going to find ourselves having to fight for our liberty. And those that are so willing to ignore our right to be secure in our persons seem a good place to start.
Before forfeit laws.
No. The man was butt stroked military style the way the article was written, but the specific injuries were not mentioned.
The issue is that there are mistakes in the process and that some people are suffering for it.
The best thing to be done here is to come up with procedures while getting the warrant and before using it that triple verifies the address and that all information is correct.
This is not a bad cop issue.
This is not a breach of rights issue.
There has been no right established I know of to be a criminal and to have that criminal's home be off limits to the law.
This is about mistakes that we'd all like to see happen less since we know law officers will throughout the future will be having to chase down the future bad guys.
It's hard, because there are things we just cannot publish. You just hope people read between the lines, nod, and say, "Oh yeah..I get it".
How to tiptoe delicately...Hmm. SWAT team members are our FRIENDS and neighbors. They live in the community, they live in a house somewhere, their children go to our schools, they buy groceries just like everyone else............
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