Well, I have a stupid question: what ever happened to surrounding a house, and cop on a bullhorn saying “We have you surrounded. Come out with your hands up?”. This seemed to work fairly well FOR ABOUT 70 YEARS, and was safer and less costly for everyone involved. I thought that SWAT teams were designed for life-and-death situations (armed kidnappings, hostage situations, and so on). Not potheads.
Take away the dope, and ya got a lot of cops standing around, looking for something to do...
Lots of people make a good living off dope.
Burton said a federal drug conviction and a history of combative arrests prompted the use of heavy police force.
“What ever happened to surrounding a house, and cop on a bullhorn saying “We have you surrounded. Come out with your hands up?”
Sounds like a good model of a hostage situation, that way.
Information likely included presence of woman and child in the home.
And raids like this have been done for...jeez...how many years since King ‘enry o’ Britain??
I think that whatever happened was that TV and movies have changed their preferred lenses!
The idea is to use surprise & overwhelming force to avoid nastiness that can develop when the subjects of a warrant have a little time to cogitate upon whatever evil with which they may be so inclined to respond.
I watched the video and they did knock and say Police come out and waited about 5 seconds before kicking in the door and executing the dog.
Now 2 things come to mind here, first I now know NOT to even attempt to try to open the door EVEN if I knew the cops were real (it being night, how could you know?). And second, what do they expect? They are the ones busting into someone’s property and dogs are normally going to protect an invasion.
Quite frankly, this shit needs to stop. They deliberately wait to wee hours of the morning and then bust in on triffling warrants like some kind of goon squad killing in their path. One day, they are going to hit the wrong place and cops are going to die, and by wrong place, I mean a lawful armed citizen is going to shoot invaders in black with no insigna that come busting down their doors.
“I thought that SWAT teams were designed for life-and-death situations (armed kidnappings, hostage situations, and so on). Not potheads.”
Enough SWAT teams act like the bad guys in BATF to give SWAT teams bad PR and in some cases, a bad name.
My son is a Deputy Sheriff and ex-US Marine Sergeant. He has also worked with SWAT teams locally. He usually volunteered to be the first one in – he had confidence in his own capability, and preferred that to having someone else be first in. He never shot a dog. And they never got any bad PR for what they did. Neither suspects nor deputies were not killed.
These things can be done correctly, or they can be misused by bad training, bad leadership, or bad use of this approach to law and order in our society.
Waco is an example of misused power and authority. If they wanted David Koresh, he could have been had any day of the week away from the compound by arresting him on one of his frequent trips into town. Clinton, Janet Reno & Wesley Clark chose to make it a big thing by attacking the compound with full armament. They, the administration, got what they wanted – death and destruction, including women and children. BATF was used in this murderous raid. Read more here…
http://www.serendipity.li/waco.html