SWAT

By. Steve Elliot, Toke of the Town

 

Seattle Police officers brandishing submachine guns broke down the door of a 50-year-old medical marijuana patient Monday night and pushed him face down to the floor. His offense? He was legally growing two tiny cannabis plants.

 

Will Laudanski, a military veteran who was an Airborne Ranger in Desert Shield, wasn't even breaking the law. As an authorized medical marijuana patient in the state of Washington, he's allowed to grow up to 15 plants and possess 24 ounces of cannabis.

 

But Seattle Police have shown they are willing to treat the smallest of pot cases -- even in cases where the marijuana is legal -- as if they were raiding the biggest crack house or meth lab in town. Read more »

By. Steve Elliot, Toke of the Town

 

The city of Atlanta will pay $4.9 million to the family of a 92-year-old woman killed in a botched November 2006 drug raid, Mayor Kasim Reed's office announced on Monday.

 

Kathryn Johnston, 92, was shot to death by narcotics officers serving a so-called "no-knock" warrant. Investigators later determined the raid was based on falsified paperwork saying that illegal drugs were present in the home. Three former police officers were sentenced to prison terms for the cover-up that resulted, reports CNN.

 

The Atlanta Police Department's drug unit underwent a major, though probably largely cosmetic, housecleaning as a result of the incident. Read more »

By. Drug War Chronicle

 

As is periodically the case, law enforcement SWAT teams have once again come under the harsh gaze of a public outraged and puzzled by their excesses. First, it was the February SWAT raid on a Columbia, Missouri, home where police shot two dogs, killing one, as the suspect, his wife, and young son cowered. Police said they were looking for a dealer-sized stash of marijuana, but found only a pipe with residues. When police video of that raid hit the Internet and went viral this month, the public anger was palpable, especially in Columbia.

 

Then came a botched SWAT raid in Georgia -- not a forced entry, but otherwise highly aggressive, and directed at the wrong building -- that left a 76-year-old woman hospitalized with a heart attack.

 

And then came the tragedy in Detroit two weeks ago, where a member of a Detroit Police SWAT team killed seven-year-old Aiyana Jones as she slept on a living room couch. Allegedly, the officer had a tussle with the girl's grandmother as he charged through the door after a flash-bang grenade was thrown through the window, and the gun discharged accidentally, though the account has been disputed by the family's attorney. In this instance, police were not looking for drugs but for a murder suspect. He was later found in another apartment in the same house. Again, the public dismay and anger was palpable. Read more »

By. Norm Stamper, Huffington Post

 

As of this morning, over 1.2 million people have clicked on the YouTube video of the February 11 SWAT raid on a suspected drug dealer's home in a quiet suburban neighborhood of Columbia, Missouri. Produced by the police themselves, the video went viral soon after it was posted earlier this month.

 

It's a fair guess that many of those clicks represent individuals who, revolted by what they saw and heard (gunshots, the screaming of a wounded dog), abruptly stopped viewing the video. What happened to that Missouri family, a terrifying police paramilitary attack that left two dogs shot, one dead, and a couple and their seven-year-old boy in shock, is an all-too common occurrence across the country. It is also profoundly un-American.

 

As Radley Balko writes in "Overkill: the Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America," his excellent 2006 Cato Institute report, "These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors." Read more »

BY AMBER LANGSTON

 

On May 4, Washington, D.C., Assistant Police Chief Peter Newsham was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, “People don’t feel marijuana is dangerous, but it is because of the way it is sold.”

 

On Feb. 11, when the Columbia Police Department conducted a SWAT raid on the home of Jonathan Whitworth, the officers shot both of his dogs, killing one and wounding another in the same house with his terrified wife and 7-year-old son. Undoubtedly, the police were following protocol for a policy that we, the American people, have endorsed. And although we might try to change the protocol to mitigate its effects, the flawed policy itself is the root cause of the problem.

 

That policy we have endorsed is, of course, marijuana prohibition.

 

These seemingly unemotional executors of the law — in this case, officers of the Columbia Police Department — were merely following procedure for what is potentially a very dangerous situation: policing an illegal market. Read more »

By. Allison Kilkenny, Trueslant

 

A follow-up to the Missouri SWAT team story. Unsurprisingly, the Missouri police chief has gone on the defensive and started accusing the internets of being comprised of a bunch of liars.

 

Pete Guither makes an interesting point about the timing of the warrant. The whole reason given for the night raid was that the suspect is a big, bad drug dealer, and the bust had to be a surprise because otherwise he’d transport his mountains of pot he definitely possessed out of the house through — as Pete hypothesizes — complex underground tunnels…or something.

 

The warrant authorizing investigators to enter Whitworth’s home at 1501 Kinloch Court was executed eight days after Boone County Associate Circuit Judge Leslie Schneider approved it. [Police chief Ken] Burton said the state allows police 10 days to execute a signed warrant, and he thinks Columbia officers should have done so immediately. Read more »