To sum up, there was a apparently some kind of operation going on where pot dealers were delivering weed to each other by using the addresses of uninvolved civilians. I’m not exactly clear on how this could have worked, but it sounds like one person would leave the weed outside a house, then somebody else would pick it up without the homeowners knowing anything about it (like I said, I’m not exactly sure how that could work. Don’t people notice the giant boxes of weed on their porches?).
So some kind of UPO leaves a box of weed on the Mayor’s porch because his wife’s name had come up as one of the victims in this operation. The Mayor sees the package on the porch when he gets home, brings it inside and leaves it on a table. He then goes upstairs to change clothes to go out that night. Then a SWAT team busts in without knocking (in violation of their warrant), kills the family dogs, terrorizes the Mayor’s mother-in-law, ties everybody up in the blood in the kitchen., leaves them there for two hours, finds nothing, makes no arrests, and leaves…without apologizing?
This doesn’t appear to be the first time the Prince George pigs have raided the wrong house either, and killing family dogs appears to be a favorite sport of theirs.
What the fuck, man? I don’t understand why they won’t even apologize.
If this was a poor black family instead of the white Mayor, I wonder if they’d be able to get any attention at all. This police chief and sheriff need to be put under the fucking jail. If not, I can only hope the next wrong house they bust into has a resident with a Scarface M203 waiting for their asses.
This story is only notable because the PG police did it to a well-connected white person.
–Kicking in the door is just how police serve warrants nowadays, at least in PG County.
–Killing the family dogs is just what is done. Happens every day, three times on Sunday.
–If they arrest you, they leave the cats and other pets to starve.
Let me give you a little background (I AM NOT MAKING EXCUSES FOR THE COPS – they most of the time have no fucking idea on how to handle volatile situations). In their infinite wisdom, developers bought a bunch of this land and built a lot of “affordable” homes through various parts of the county and invited the riff-raff from DC to come out and buy homes. This was also part of an initiative to clean up Washington, DC. Well, riff-raff doesn’t change. The place is a complete shithole now and there are several reports of murders every single night on the local news, mostly all within Prince George’s Country and Montgomery County.
That said, the police force is still adjusting to what happened to their once affluent and rural jurisdiction. They’re a little on edge.
How does that justify them knocking down doors without warrants? I don’t give a fuck if they’re on edge. If they can’t handle their jobs, they should be shitcanned and replaced with people who can.
Easy to say, but the people they’re terrorizing are powerless. If you’re a good person part of a good family but live in a very shitty neighborhood, it’s very easy to spin the situation against you – guilt by association.
If police went into PG county and shot it up, My Lai style, it’d get less press than the Jon Benet Ramsey case.
Actually, the city police had nothing to do with it. The city police chief was critical of the sheriff’s staff, saying that his department should have been notified of the operation.
Well, they could always come to work in the great state of North Carolina, where we give jobs back to animal abusers. (And I can’t find it now, but I swear we had an incident a few years ago where an officer shot a yellow lab in the head without provocation – the dog survived though.)
What a pathetic bunch of cowards. They probably wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot a puppy either.
Sadly enough in Prince George’s County, this could have been worse.
About a month ago, there was the case of Ronnie White who was arrested for running over and killing a cop in PG County. Two days later, he was found strangled in his jail cell. It turns out that quite a few guards there have arrest records.
DudleyGarrett I have to disagree with you on PG, it hasn’t been a rural county for quite some time. It borders with DC so parts of it become suburbs back in the fifties. Additionally, from what I recall, the big rise in population was in the 1980s. Its not like they went from a small county with 2000 people to 800,000 overnight.
I agee with Paul in Saudi and Diogenes, if it weren’t for the fact that they did this to the mayor of a town who actually has resources, nothing would have been done.
I think it was just incompetence. They were shopping the departments for someone to serve the warrant.
The entire story is just one screw up after another. The other thing I don’t understand is that if the drugs were detected in Arizona why were the feds and the DEA involved?
Good point, I think I unfairly described it as being an overnight change. You’re right that is happened over several years.
But I’ll still argue that PG county as we know it has only been such for 10-15 years. There are areas where it’s clearly departed the “suburbs” and into “crime-ridden shithole.” Not to derail, but it’s another result of bad mortgage lending practices and giving loans to people who have no business getting them.
That’s still incorrect. I grew up in PG County. I went to Suitland High School in the 70’s, crime and drugs were an everyday occurrance. My brother got carjacked in the late 80’s and his neighborhood became an open air drug market. He moved. PG County has been bad for a long while.
I should probably add that the police system in PG seems a little unusual in that there are a lot of conflicting jurisdictions. It seems that each town has its own police force in addition to the county force and the sheriff. I can’t imagine that this creates a lot of efficiency.
Virginia counties have both a sheriff’s department and a police department as well - the police perform normal police functions, while the sheriff and his deputy provide courthouse and jail security, serve warrants, and enforce the county’s tax laws.
It should also be noted that while the police chief is an employee of the county hired by the board and answerable to them, the sheriff is an elected official with constitutional duties that operates independently of the board.
> Let me give you a little background (I AM NOT MAKING EXCUSES FOR THE COPS
> – they most of the time have no fucking idea on how to handle volatile
> situations). In their infinite wisdom, developers bought a bunch of this land and
> built a lot of “affordable” homes through various parts of the county and invited
> the riff-raff from DC to come out and buy homes. This was also part of an
> initiative to clean up Washington, DC. Well, riff-raff doesn’t change. The place is
> a complete shithole now and there are several reports of murders every single
> night on the local news, mostly all within Prince George’s Country and
> Montgomery County.
The events described in the OP happened about a mile south of where I live. I consider this description to be rather racist. Prince George’s County is only less than wealthy by the standards of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, where several of the counties in the metro area are among the ten richest counties in the U.S. (going by average household income). I believe Prince George’s County is one of the one hundred richest counties in the U.S. No, it’s not as rich as Montgomery County or Fairfax County, but by the standards of most of the U.S. it’s actually more well-off than average.
Until about thirty-five years ago, Prince George’s County had the reputation of being rather “rednecky.” It wasn’t poor then either, but it tended to have more working-class whites than the other parts of the Washington metro area and only a fairly small number of blacks. There was a large growth in the black population of D.C. from about the 1930’s till about the mid-1970’s. This happened for the same reason as it happened in many other big American cities. A lot of blacks decided to leave the rural South. The easiest place for them to find a place to live in the North was in the middle of cities, where there were already small black neighborhoods. D.C., even back before the 1930’s, already had a significant black population. The same thing happened as in many big American cities from the 1930’s to the 1970’s - blacks moved in (generally from the rural South) and whites moved out. By the mid-1970’s Washington was a little over 70% black. Many other large American cities also acquired large black populations.
Then in the mid-1970’s many whites realized that inner-city homes were quite cheap and conveniently close to work. Gentrification started in many big American cities. Whites moved into the middle of the city and blacks moved out, generally to the suburbs with the cheapest house prices. This meant Prince George’s County for the Washington metro area. Now Washington is less than 60% black, perhaps close to only 50% black. Prince George’s County is now majority black. P. G. Country didn’t become any poorer as its population shifted from majority white to majority black. Indeed, it became slightly richer. Many of the working-class whites moved to Southern Maryland.
Prince George’s County is no more crime-ridden than a lot of the U.S. The crime rate in the Washington area has generally dropped over the past fifteen years. (The worst time was in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s during the crack epidemic.) I’ve lived in P. G. Country for 24 of the last 27 years. It’s reasonably cheap rent and close to whatever I want to get to in the Washington/Baltimore area. Yes, it does have incompetent cops. I wish they’d improve them. No area is perfect.