I’m afraid I don’t know much about US law enforcement, so don’t really understand what’s involved in delivering a warrant. Would it normally involve breaking into the house if the door isn’t opened? Is so, then again would it not be better for them to be clearly visible as police?
I agree that it is bullshit, but the reason they don’t operate as you describe is because it gives the people inside of the home time to dispose of drugs down the toilet or wherever. There needs to be a better way to execute this.
Perhaps shut the water off to the house? That gives one half-assed flush and any clown with a wrench can do it. I don’t know.
I’d have been a more formidable opponent. A couple of officers would not have gone home that night, I’m sad to say. But if you kick down my door, I had better see flashing lights outside or you had better be OBVIOUSLY in uniform and holding your badge in the air. With so many home invasions in our area known only via the police scanner because they aren’t in the local paper, I won’t be going for a chest shot.
Well, they claim they knocked and announced the warrant, but who knows what that actually means? Maybe they yelled Police! Warrant! one second before smashing the door in, maybe they waited a reasonable amount of time, and didn’t want all the “drugs” to get flushed down the crapper.
Presumably, if they had the right house, someone gave them a tip that this house had drugs… I wonder who that someone was.
Which doesn’t mean that it is the correct house. Several times locally the police essentially destroyed the wrong apartment/house trying to serve a warrant, sticking to their story for days before reluctantly admitting they got the wrong house. It could have been the right address on the warrant but the warrant was typed wrong. Or it could have been the warrant was typed right but based on a miscommunication. Or they had a bad source. Or, alternately, granny was a front for a massive meth lab someone set up in her basement. Let’s wait and see.
Forgive me for bein a doubting Thomas…I mean no disrespect for the lady defending her home. But I think I see some inconsistency in the statements of her niece, Sarah Dozier.
From this story:
but from this story::
Which is it? It just seems inconsistent.
Sailboat
Then it is a good thing they shot her before she killed any police officers.
The police did everything right. Being 92 does not give you the right to shoot cops any more than if she were a nineteen year old gang banger.
Sorry, Grandma, but if you shoot at a cop who is doing his job, then you can kiss your wrinkly ass good-bye.
Regards,
Shodan
But you have a right to defend yourself against home-invaders, e.g., three men in civilian clothes breaking down your front door. How was she to know that they were cops?
If you’re lucky; the link I gave earlier gave dozens of “raids on innocent suspects” where they never apologize. Indeed, the 90-year-old is probably lucky she died; had she lived she’d likely be prosecuted for attempted murder of a cop.
And apparently at least one was wearing a bullet-proof vest.
If she is sharp enough to shoot three people, she should be sharp enough to understand the phrase “POLICE! WE HAVE A SEARCH WARRANT! OPEN THE DOOR!”
Regards,
Shodan
Plainclothes does not equal civilian clothes. I don’t know for sure what happened here but usually when executing a warrant plainclothes officers wear vests with “Police” or “Atlanta PD” on them. Easily recognized as police officers. This is as much to identify themselves to other officers as it is to be identified by others.
The article Shodan quotes says they were shot as they approached the house, not after they broke in the door. This would be easiler proven by the physical evidence. That is not defending your home. That is attempted murder. I of course do not know this lady. But don’t equate age with innocence. I was talking to an old blind guy who was arguing with his wife. At first it seemed funny that these 80 year olds were still bickering at their age. Then the guy mentioned how he had been in prison for killing someone.
I can sympathize with an elederly woman being alone in her house and scared by three intruders and defending herself. But I can also sympathize with three cops being shot at while doing their job and defending themselves.
It was just a tragedy all around. It’s unfortunate one person died unnecessarily and it would have only been worse if two, three, or four people had been killed.
Unless you are arguing that it is part of police uniform, the bulletproof vest is irrelevant.
And do you have a cite for those being the exact words used? And that she should have been able to hear them? I can imagine people being able to hear the front door being broken down without being able to hear a warning being given before. There’s also the problem, that others have alluded to, that police don’t want suspects to destroy evidence before they can carryu out a search, so there would be likely to be a very short time frame.
But yoiu have not addressed the most serious problem that I see: police breaking into a house, but not wearing uniform. Even if there are people yelling “police” and “search warrant” outside, how does she know that the people breaking her front door are police? They might be criminals escaping from the drug bust across the road.
I’m not a lawyer, and let’s hope we hear from one soon, but my understanding is that there are warrants and then there are warrants. A warrant to take into custody, for example, won’t necessarily imply permission to enter/break into just any building or dwelling to look for the person you hope to arrest. A search warrant, on the other hand, necessarily assumes access to a given named space (box, room, building, property, I don’t think it gets any vaguer than that), and may confer a right to effect entry with or without consent or knowledge of the owner.
In any event, the granting of a warrant usually weighs the possibility of obstruction, resistance, and/or destruction of evidence, which is the justification for what is called a “no-knock” warrant. That doesn’t seem to be what happened here, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in the minds of any person who has to execute a “knock then enter” warrant.
I am very sorry that the right of the police to protect themselves clashes with the right of people to be secure in their homes, but I think that’s what happened. In that situation, more time and information can mean either defusing the situation or creating a bloodier and costlier mess, and there’s no way to know which until it’s too late.
If the cops didn’t just screw up, there was information. convincing not just to them but to a judge, justifying the search/entry. I suspect that such information might have been false, because if I were a cop, I’d have searched that house thoroughly for drugs and contraband and made sure that any reporter within earshot knew about anything I found. But that doesn’t by itself make the APD evil, it only means they can be fooled. I’m pretty sure that, as three officers went down, any and every policeman who pulled a trigger should not be a scapegoat for this mess.
My impression is that home invasions in the U.S. are not occurring in huge numbers and are declining. The number of home invasions perpetrated by criminals who announce themselves as police and then kick the door in immediately anyway must be smaller still. The number of police raids and searches is comparatively large. The prudent strategy might therefore be to demand to see the warrant (even if you have to shout to do it because you can’t move very fast), which I think you have a right to do even if the police have to slip it through the crack allowed by a chain bolt or by the letterbox installed in your door. A criminal probably won’t have bothered even with a fake; the cops will probably give it to you. Either way, if you don’t shoot at the men entering your house, the criminals might not kill you, and the police almost certainly won’t. And either way if you do, both sets will do their very best to kill you, and they’ll probably succeed.
However, my hat’s off to Euthanasiast, who’s willing to die to make sure that in the future, every cop dealing with any citizen for whatever reason, has his/her finger on the trigger, and to Shodan, who wants the mere word “police” to substitute for the rule of law. Both are admirable in their denial of any ground between the extremes, and we will no doubt someday mourn them both if they stick IRL to the ideals they express here.
We have only the Police’s word that the warrant was legitimate and presumably accurate. None of the reports I’ve read verifies that. Indeed, so far the police won’t say who the warrant was actually for, and there doesn’t appear to have been anyone else living there who might have been selling/doing drugs, no mention of what kinds of “evidence” was found before it was removed from the house. We don’t know WHO tipped off the police or why this woman’s address was given.
We have only the police’s word that they knocked and announced before they forced themselves in and started shooting. You’ll pardon my skepticism. I was there. I know how dark it was, the lack of streetlights on the street, I heard the barrage of shots, I saw how many cops responded afterwards, how the area was cordoned off, how far neighbors were pushed back away from the house. We don’t know what was said, or how loudly, or how quickly before they started kicking in the door of a ninety year old. We do know none of the plainsclothes officers were dressed in a clearly recognizable uniforms: they were black form-fitting outfits. The police insignias are on the BACK of the uniforms; I did not get the impression they were easily recognizable from the front. We know they served attempted to “serve a warrant” at night on an armed nonegenearian who lives in a rough neighborhood.
Let me type the words: police brutality. We know they cops didn’t do “everything right.” This is brutal, aggressive behavior by cops who, so far, doesn’t look like they knew what the hell they were doing beyond terrorizing an old woman in her final moments on Earth, who showed no idea who they were up against, and probably assumed the worst simply because the neighborhood.
So they weren’t in plainclothes, they were in SWAT uniforms. How is it police brutality to return fire? How many need to be shot before it is OK to return fire? Even if the warrant was improperly executed or wrong (which we don’t know) that is not police brutality. Kicking in a door is not brutal, unless you are the door. You are assuming a whole lot about the woman and why they were there.
As much as I feel sympathy for this woman, you don’t know this. It’s entirely possible that the cops did everything by the book, exactly in the manner they were trained, exactly in the manner appropriate for serving a warrant, and got shot at by an old lady who got scared. If they’re getting shot at, it doesn’t matter if the lady was 90, the cops will end up just as dead in the end, if they don’t return fire and elimitate the threat.
Until we get more information, it’s all speculation, there are more than enough incidents to prove that early information is often misleading.
Hey, I’d say that being willing to take it on faith that (a) someone asserting authority is who they say they are, and (b) your proper reaction is compliance, is a situational call. Sure, it means you take your chances… IF, as according to Askia, in that neighborhood it would be a lousy gamble… BUT, what we have to trust on that aspect is itself hearsay, isn’t it? It would have to be a pretty fucked up community where the expectation is that someone showing up under color of authority is really a phony hoping to take you down w/o resistance, on the level of Tikrit or Sadr City.
Oh, and for the people who asked: the Courts recently held up the legality of “no-knock” raids – though the police in this case argues this was not one of such. We need to let more information come through.
So far, the articles – in some cases, the same article – contain conflicting accounts, such as the police claiming they were shot “on approach” and that they knocked and identified. Until we get an internally consistent story, this ispurely a Rorschach test on how each poster feels about authority, police, gun ownership, etc.
Sailboat
It is possible the police got everything right. I grant you this is just my opinion that police screwed up. But it’s one shared by Argent Towers that they could have effected entry better.
Whose fault would it have been for scaring her? Who controlled the situation from intial contact and entry the degree of aggression and professionalism displayed? Why deliver a warrant at night on a poorly lit side street in plain clothes instead of uniforms? Why has NONE of the information about this incident revealed who the warrant was for, or what kinds of drugs were being sought? Where did the information come from – an anonymous phoned-in tip, or a snitch off the street?
This is also a community where a 72 year old missionary woman was likely raped and killed by a homeless man not five miles from where this woman’s house is – a man police still haven’t found, in a neighborhood frequented by homeless men.
Some blame needs to be placed at the feet of these cops, cuz any “warrant” that only dregs up a nonegenarian as the only suspect of a drug raid of a given house strikes me as being fatally faulty, given the circumstances.
I’d like to see if any physical evidence backing up the cops’ claims that they were fired on from approach – and that it was from someone INSIDE the house.
Well, the way I see it, the more aggressive cops get as to barging into places, the more they’re going to get shot.
I fail to see this as a bad thing. Truthfully, I don’t care if suspects get to dump single baggies, which is about all you could flush. I think that a certain amount of respect for the citizen is needed among the police, which is generally less and less apparent, these days.
If it takes making the cops afraid of the citizens to make them back off… then it’s fine by me.
Now, I respect the bravery of policemen. I also hate the arrogance certain ones display. I hate the erosion of rights and liberties, and I hate how, even with the erosion of liberties, police still go above and beyond that.