Posted on 05/23/2011 4:37:47 AM PDT by marktwain
A Tucson, Ariz., SWAT team defends shooting an Iraq War veteran 60 times during a drug raid, although it declines to say whether it found any drugs in the house and has had to retract its claim that the veteran shot first.
And the Pima County sheriff scolded the media for "questioning the legality" of the shooting.
Jose Guerena, 26, died the morning of May 5. He was asleep in his Tucson home after working a night shift at the Asarco copper mine when his wife, Vanessa, saw the armed SWAT team outside her youngest son's bedroom window.
"She saw a man pointing at her with a gun," said Reyna Ortiz, 29, a relative who is caring for Vanessa and her children. Ortiz said Vanessa Guerena yelled, "Don't shoot! I have a baby!"
Vanessa Guerena thought the gunman might be part of a home invasion -- especially because two members of her sister-in-law's family, Cynthia and Manny Orozco, were killed last year in their Tucson home, her lawyer, Chris Scileppi, said. She shouted for her husband in the next room, and he woke up and told his wife to hide in the closet with the child, Joel, 4.
SWAT officers fired at least 71 shots at suspect Jose Guerena, a former U.S. Marine, and a family struggles to put the pieces together.
Guerena grabbed his assault rifle and was pointing it at the SWAT team, which was trying to serve a narcotics search warrant as part of a multi-house drug crackdown, when the team broke down the door. At first the Pima County Sheriff's Office said that Guerena fired first, but on Wednesday officials backtracked and said he had not. "The safety was on and he could not fire," according to the sheriff's statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture
In most states and under federal law, law enforcement can keep some or all of the proceeds from civil forfeitures. This incentive has led to concern that civil forfeiture encourages policing for profit, as agencies pursue forfeitures to boost their budgets at the expense of other policing priorities.
In 2008, for the first time in history, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Assets Forfeiture Fund (AFF) held more than $1 billion in net assets—that is, money forfeited from property owners and now available for federal law enforcement activities after deducting various expenses. A similar fund at the U.S. Treasury Department held more than $400 million in net assets in 2008. By contrast, in 1986, the year after the AFF was created, it took in just $93.7 million in deposits.
State data reveal that state and local law enforcement also use forfeiture extensively: From 2001 to 2002, currency forfeitures alone in just nine states totaled more than $70 million. This measure excludes cars and other forfeited property, as well as forfeitures from many states that did not make data available for those years, and so likely represents just the tip of the forfeiture iceberg.
Equitable sharing payments to states have nearly doubled from 2000 to 2008, from a little more than $200 million to $400 million.
http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3114&Itemid=165
Standard practice for safe firearm usage: safety stays on until you intend to shoot.
I actually have a very good idea as far as how to manage druggies.
Take a few bombed-out cities like, say, Detroit. Put 3 or 4 of these zones into the US. These are 100% legal drug zones.
If you want to use, you go in there. The entire zone is surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. You can only enter or leave via several entrances. Near the entrance are a few houses for people who want to leave. If you leave, you stay in the house until you can pee-test clean.
No services are provided whatsoever in the drug zone. You die, your body will lie there and rot. if there's a fire, it burns until there is no more fuel. No food except what you backpack in. No cigarettes, no water, except what you backpack in.
If you use and you have NOT checked into a Drug Zone, your life becomes MUCH worse than if you are caught using now, with normal prosecutorial efforts.
Paranoid ranting does not kill many innocent people. Police states do.
“Sorry, that should be ‘unprosecuted’. You break the law, you go to jail.”
I once sat on a grand jury and was appalled that the cops would collect evidence on a crack house for over a year before shutting it down. They would use snitches and undercover cops to make multiple buys over that time, yet the place stayed open for business. The amount of time it takes to shut these places down is ridiculous.
The legal jurisdiction and sherrif’s dept involved should be sued into tomorrow-morrow land and oblivion. That almost did happen recently in the case of the witchcraft trials in the little WA state town of Wenatchee, it reached a point at which the town could no longer purchase insurance of any sort and there was a real question of it remaining incorporated.
“a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,”
Maybe in Indiana,but not in Arizona!
I remember, back in the 80s, the Wash Post was profiling some squad trying to bust a kiddie porn operation. They explained that they had to allow a film to be made in a MD motel, because if they broke it up, they'd jeopardize the case. So, the conviction is more important than the kid getting raped! That was a real eye-opener for me.
“I’m not happy with the direction police tactics have taken in the last 20 years, but I’m also not a fan of paranoid ranting.”
Paranoid ranting does not kill many innocent people. Police states do.
///
absolutely correct!
...is this paranoid?:
Court Rules Law Abiding May NOT Resist Police Who ILLEGALLY ENTER THEIR HOMES!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2722225/posts
Murder. Plain and simple. I am considering bringing this case up at the next neighborhood get together and seeing if there are other folks thinking like me that perhaps we might need to band together for protection not just against the normal crooks and whatnot but also against the armed gangs with badges.
I used to think that militia’s were wrong. This was back in the 90’s when I let the MSM do my thinking for me.
Now? Who is going to protect us from this kind of thing if not ourselves and each other?
I was wonderin’ where are this murder victims’ former comrades from his unit? I would imagine they might have a question or three.
Bookmark.
You do know, of course, that the acronym for "kinetic military action" is "KMA", which is what 0bama was telling the Congress and the public to do when he went along with military action in Libya.
“It’s wrong to cross my fingers, isn’t it?”
Makes it harder to squeeze the trigger.
It’s actually more like time for a little Judge Dredd action. You know, like getting with the bad guys all personal-like.
Could it be that fedzilla called us (Oathkeepers) “militia” in order to to frame public opinion for when the PTB choose to murder someone....it’s not like they want pushback.
In the past, people went into police work did so to server the public. Now they seen to be motivated by some kind of self-serving macho agenda.
OathKeepers on Memorial Day in Tucson, BTTT.
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