Talking about it as a tool simply avoids the core issues here.
You are groggy in your bed. You keep a gun in your nightstand. You half-awake think you hear someone screaming something, but if you live in a house that has, well, walls, you can’t understand any of it. Armed men dressed in black burst into your house. Now what?
Do you pull out your gun and defend yourself? Oops! It’s the police. 49 bullets in you, your wife, and the family dog.
Do you not defend yourself? Oops! It’s criminals dressed as police, who kill you, rape your wife, and steal the family dog.
Do you not defend yourself? Oops! It’s the the police, but they shoot you anyway. Someone’s finger slipped on their machine gun. Or you moved in a way that was misinterpreted. Or nothing at all.
And to top it all off, what are the charges and the warrant all about? A poker game. A reported small amount of pot that is never found. For this, apparently, an entire paramilitary force was required. That’s the situation increasingly around the country. The deaths and injuries have been racking up. All of these I described above are amalgamations of real sorts of cases that have been happening all around the country.
Are the tactics effective? Do they save officer’s lives? Maybe, though often they seem to end in officers shooting each other as not. But the real driving force here seems to be that they are cash cows for local police forces, not any debate over their effectiveness. And all of that adds up to a huge problem.
I also want to add that in addition to being cash cows, they allow police officers to dress up like ninjas and run around with submachine guns! How cool is that shit?
I’m not even kidding about that part. They get to play Rambo, or pretend they’re real soldiers, but without anywhere near the same risk or self sacrifice. This appeals to testosterone-laden overgrown boys.
Apos, I’m curious how many times I can say that using the tactic in the wrong situations (for non violent crimes/criminals) is wrong before you stop using that, and that alone, as your argument. Because, ultimately, that’s the entirety of your argument, it’s wrong to use a no knock warrant to arrest a guy for a poker game. I already agreed that it’s wrong to use it on non violent offenders, do you have an argument as to why it’s wrong to use it on violent offenders? That’s the only situation that I’m arguing for using this tactic.
I suppose you think it would be better to arrest a murderer by knocking on the door and announcing that it’s the police coming to take you away for the rest of your natural life, and would you mind unlocking the door for us?
I’d like to see some evidence that no knock arrests on violents individuals is effective when they could be just as easily be taken down when they leave the house.
Far less risk of mistaken address, more likely positive identification, easier to ensure that other people at the address are not accidently caught up.
Given all those advantages, if you already have a warrant out for an arrest it seems this should be the favoured method of arrest.
Now if we are talking of ensuring that evidence is not disposed of, there are ways to minimise this in most circumstances, and it all goes to suggest that no knock arrests should be used far more sparingly, and probably in situations of life and death, like hostage incidents.
Routine use of such a hazardous procedure, where there are so may uncontrolled variables seems to be ripe for disaster.
This sounds like a WAG to me. Have you actually seen any info about this? Burglary, unusally, is defined as robbery of a home when the residents are NOT home.
You are correct that the presence or absence of a victim aren’t required. However, robbery, which generally does involve a direct threat against a person, is condsidered a more serious crime because of the increased chances of injury or death. So when a victim is home and must face the invader, a prosecutor is more likely to charge robbery because the penalties are generally higher.
But maybe we can put this aside – as my question was about why the charge was made. The charge seems to suggest that the cops were going into the property to steal something, whether or not someone was home. And I haven’t seen anything to that effect in the articles I’ve read.
Maybe I’ve missed something. Has anyone seen something specifically about the cops intending to steal something, even the drugs that turned out not to be there?
Not sure where the prosecutor’s office was going with the burglary charges-- I suspect it might have something to do with how they got in possession of those nickel bags of weed earlier that day that they planted in her home – but it doesn’t matter, because those burglary and multiple murder charges they once faced were thrown out days ago.
The *current * charges against officers Gregg Junnier and J.R. Smith have been pled down to one count each of manslaughter, violation of oath of office, criminal solicitation, making false statements and perjury… and I seem to remember that maybe false imprisonment was thrown in there, too. (Mrs. Johnston was handcuffed after they shot her.) They’re expected to get around 10 years in jail… hopefully at a nice maximum security prison surrounded by some pipe-hitting niggas with shanks… but may get less time if the information they have against other officers and other instances of misuse of no-knock warrants pans out.
Use of no-knock warrants by Atlanta PD and adjacent counties is effectively suspended since this case broke, FWIW.
Probably end up in some cop friendly minimum security prison, too. Feh.
Officer Arthur Tesler is fighting all the charges against him–violation of oath by a public officer, making false statements and false imprisonment under color of legal process. He was not charged with manslaughter because he claims he was in the dark about the contents of the warrant, entered the home from the rear and never even fired a shot. Presumably ballistics evidence (or is it forensics?) corroborated these statements and cleared him of those particular charges, but the grand jury indicted him, too, so you figured they must have had some reason to charge him. I find it awfully hard to believe that he didn’t go along with his fellow officers statements in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
Post Duke rape case, this is a dangerous assumption to make. The GJ will pretty much charge him if the prosecutor asks. Being charitable to the GJ process, the most I feel comfortable assuming is that there isn’t direct evidence clearing him of these charges, even that would have been assuming too much with the Duke GJ.
Post-Duke false rape reported case, I think an even more dangerous assumption to make is that any other prosecuter in this country would EVER freely throw away their career the way Mike Nifong did on a she said/they said rape case that was built primarily racial and classist assumptions and the word of a lying whore. Tesler is already cleared of the most serious charges due to corroborative physical evidence and the rest of the charges basically point to his actions in the initial cover-up. This is really comparing apples and oranges here.
The above Georgia statute says “A person commits the offense of burglary when, without authority and with the intent to commit a felony or theft therein” (bloding mine). I’m guessing they are getting charged with “burglary” because they busted in to commit a felony, it’s just that the felony is not “theft”.
Good WAG, but even if true, the question stands. I thought this was about a huge fuckup and subsequent coverup. This suggests they were planning some kind of crime from the start. What would it be?
my WAG:
Since they knew (alledgely) ahead of time that the warrant was bogus, that’s the underlying crime. Had they indeed found any real amount of drugs in the place, I suspect nothing would have been charged.
I’ve got a question. If they had not shot and killed her, and had succeeded in their disgusting little plan, that old woman would be convicted already.
Just by way of ironic comparison, how much time under Georgia law would she have been sentenced to for the crimes they badly wanted to accuse her of? Assuming she did not die in prison, would she have spent more or less than 10 years? ( I don’t believe for one goddamned second that any of those cops will see the inside of a maximum security cell for a day. They’ll do a year or two in a country club prison.)
If she was never shot, they’d have searched the house, found nothing, most likely backed off— the only reason they planted the drugs was because they needed a rationale for why they shot her and why they were there. They’d have thrown the first informant in jail for his thrid posession and paid for the repairs on Mrs. Johnston’s burglar bars. This might have been a one-day blip in the news and just another day in the hood.
Maybe life, since they claimed she shot 3 cops? Attempted murder, aggravated battery, possession, possession with intent to sell, “enhancements” on the penalty depending on how much stuff they planted in the house, seizure of the house, god knows what kind of “drug kingpin” laws they would have thrown at her.
Since she was around 90, anything longer than a year would probably be a life sentence anyway.
Wow, intersting the difference between our two answers. I answered with the idea that she merely survived the assault, you answered like what if the cops just came in peacefully and calmly search the place in good faith.