Another Comment About Police Raids

I just got another comment to my post about the Lima, Ohio SWAT team’s shooting of an unarmed mother who was holding her child. The guy calls himself “Major.” Let’s see what he has to say:

Yeah, enter and clear a room with taser or pepper spray first. You people are a joke. If you thought someone and not to mention a felon was in your house when you came home, you would probably be too cowardly to go in there at all.

He’s right. I’d call the police. So what? I’m not saying that the Lima SWAT team members are cowards, I’m saying that as unit, they are dangerous jerks.

The reference to a taser and pepper spray is apparently a response to my assertion that discharging a firearm to shoot the household dog is a fairly risky thing to be doing in a house with children in it. Those bullets don’t always go where you point them or stop where you want them.

I think there’s got to be a less dangerous approach to stopping a dog, such as a taser or pepper spray.

Now you are going into the felon’s house, known drug house, violent offenses, are you still going in pepper spray first?? I think not.

There are certainly a lot of things I don’t know about conducting a SWAT raid. Maybe this is one of them.

Tell me, Major, are you saying that you can’t switch weapons in the middle of clearing a room? Then what do you do when you encounter someone who presents a non-lethal threat? I big guy swinging his fists, or a woman with a baseball bat? Do you shoot? Do you kill all resisters?

If yes, then SWAT raids are a monstrous atrocity that should be stopped at once.

If not—and I’m sure this is the case—then stop shooting people’s dogs. A search warrant shouldn’t be a death warrant for any large dog in the house.

Lure them out of the house?? This is not a hostage situation or a murder suspect only or a child molester. They went to the house because it was a drug house. It would defeat the purpose if you let them come out at their own leisure, you dip shits!

It’s a stupid purpose, you dipshit!

They would just take a couple minutes and flush all the drugs instead of going to jail for 30 years, don’t you think?

Probably. But I can live with that a lot easier than I can live with this unceasing parade of home invasions. And for what? To gather some evidence against drug dealers, so you can put them in jail while other drug dealers replace them. This is a stupid waste of police resources, and a dangerous risk to take with people’s lives.

If it’s not a hostage or barricade situation, then there’s no immediate danger. Nothing violent is happening. The violence doesn’t start until the SWAT team starts it.

All over the country, SWAT teams are doing close assaults on people’s homes in the name of the War on Drugs. It accomplishes nothing, but it leads to tragedy after tragedy.

What’s the exchange rate here? How many successful drugs busts do you have to do for it to be worth the cost of this young mother’s life? How many more for the next one?

You sell drugs you put you’re dogs at risk. You sell drugs you put you’re kids at risk. You sell drugs you put you house and vehicle and all of you money at risk. Don’t sell drugs!

Are you saying that people who sell drugs are responsible for their kids getting injured or killed by careless SWAT teams?  It’s all their fault? The SWAT teams have no duty to not shoot innocent people?

It’s true that people in the drug trade put their families at risk because they deal with a lot of violent people, but the police should not be part of the problem. Don’t shoot mothers and babies!

That being said the person that has all of this at risk; do you think they are going to come quietly??

I think they’re a lot more likely to come quietly than to start a gunfight with the SWAT team, especially if they have time to think it over.

When you people start doing a service for your community then you start entering houses with pepper spray and tasters and do things your way.

When you do that on your own time and on your own property, you can do it your own way. But as long as you’re doing it in people’s private homes and on the public dime, you are accountable for your actions. Besides, I don’t believe that the community would consider having their homes raided a “service.”

Until then shut the hell up and let the professional do their jobs.

Do you hear me complaining about patrols? Detectives? Homicide? The bomb unit? I wasn’t complaining about the Lima police department until their SWAT team killed an unarmed woman and shot off a baby’s finger.

We have been letting the professionals do their job and they just failed miserably. Innocent people were badly hurt. That’s not something anyone should shut up about.

They don’t come to McDonalds and tell you how to flip burgers do they? Or come down to the office and tell you how to put on a pot of coffee and make a power point slide, do they?

Are you kidding? Cops are always butting their noses into other people’s business. Granted, they do that because it’s their job, and in a general way it’s what we want them to do, but it’s the height of hypocrisy for them to complain when other people question what they’re doing.

It’s sad to see that the only people that have their heads in the clouds about what the real world is like and what human nature is are the people the bleeding hearts, the biggest mouths and the blind folds on!

I don’t have to be a world-weary seen-it-all supercop to know that I don’t want a SWAT team throwing flash-bang grenades through my windows and breaking into my house just because someone inside might be involved in the drug trade. I assume other people feel the same way.

If narcotics teams, SWAT teams, dynamic entry teams, and any other kinds of police can’t do drug raids wihout without endangering public safety or themselves, then they shouldn’t do them at all.

I’m not anti-police or anti-SWAT. Police work is a worthy and admirable profession, and SWAT teams can do an amazing amount of good. But having SWAT teams do dynamic entries for the sole purpose of gathering evidence for a victimless crime is just stupid. It’s a waste of talent, and a danger to the public.

Update: When considering whether it’s worth all this trouble to gather evidence against a drug dealer who will be replaced within a couple of days, don’t forget that it’s not only the occupants of the houses that die in these raids. Sometimes they kill one of the cops in the raid team instead.

(Unless it’s the Atlanta PD doing the raid. Then a slow entry can give a frightened 93-year-old occupant enough time to find her gun and fire a single shot that touches off a flurry of panic fire in which the police gun down her and each other.)