I’m just wondering how she got her gun so fast and into position to be shooting the cops. Either she keeps that gun locked and loaded at all times, or she saw them coming and got ready.
Another triumphant battle in the War on Drugs.
Onward, to victory!
Maybe she saw them sneaking up. Have you guys ever seen a plain clothes officer (especially a drug enforcement officer). They look like the people they hunt. If I saw three big, scruffy dreadlocked dudes creapin up on my house in the hood, they’d open the door to a not so fine mist of buck shot.
I didn’t know this had been established.
OK, let’s say that instead of drugs, they thought she had bootleg DVDs. A police officer had already verified that she was selling them by purchasing one from her, and confirmed it was an illegal copy. I still don’t think the potential crime is serious enough to warrant kicking down her door in the middle of the night, regardless of whether she is guilty or innocent.
I’m not criticizing the individual officers in this case – I have no reason to believe they didn’t do everything by the book. I’m criticizing the policy itself that lead them to kick down this lady’s door in the middle of the night for suspected drug possession. In a country where we allow citizens to own guns and use them against intruders in cases where they feel threatened, breaking down someone’s door in the middle of the night is an inherently dangerous act. While it’s possible that this lady knew the men breaking down her door were police when she shot at them, I think it’s also quite possible that she didn’t. If she didn’t, then the situation was handled inappropriately, in my opinion.
I find it very interesting that the “let’s wait til the facts come in” group have seized on this statement as proof of the essential rightness of the actions. Why not wait til the “suspected”** narcotics are tested, established to be illicit drugs?
** Note for the reading impaired, I’m not claiming that there were no illicit drugs there, just commenting on the fact that there still has not been confirmation of such.
Yes, and Russian Roulette is perfectly safe 83.3% of the time.
The fact that police make thousands of SWAT raids every year on nonviolent drug offenders – often on highly flimsy evidence – means that even a 99% success rate means a lot of people (including cops) get needlessly shot.
Note that I am also not saying that there were or were not illicit drugs there to begin with. I just think that no matter where that kind of thing went down with the police breaking in and shots being fired, they would find drugs there. The stories I got this morning said there where no drugs.
I also don’t see how the presence of drugs would make this ok. If this is SOP the SOP is fucked up. Shoot outs in residential neighborhoods at night should be something police should endeavor to avoid not start.
Please. Some cops bought some drugs off some dude they haven’t even seen or been able to identify since the killing “at” the house, whereas her family insists their aunt lived alone and did not sell illegal drugs. What the hell part of this police assumption that narcotic drugs were being sold out the house by the occupant is verified accurate in the aftermath of the shooting? The prescence of “suspected” drugs? I know the kind of neighborhood I live in: seems to me any one of these fools could have been dealing from her front sidewalk without her cooperation and the police jumped to the wrong conclusion about the occupant.
My knees are fine, thanks. I am not anti-cop. I am anti-zealous cop. I am anti-brutal cop. MY assumptions are that this was a perfectly innocent elderly woman who lived alone whose house was targeted by the cops simply because they scored some drugs earlier that day “at” the location by some alleged dude no one seems to be able to identify, find, know the whereabouts of or his name.
We know the cops injuries. Now I want to know how many times this poor woman was shot.
As for the puzzling mystery of how she got a gun so fast: in MY family, elderly gunowners keep the guns locked and loaded and by their beds.
Whatever the facts that were presented that allowed them to get the search warrant make it now appear that information may well have been wrong wrong. To me, that means the validity of the warrant is suspect and every action the cops took thereafter makes them heinously culpable.
- Eyeing my bottle of antidepressants obtained from a Canadian pharmacy *
Uh…maybe she should have just paid the US price for her Zocor?
You find out BEFORE you get to the door. Competent policing includes the ability to get some idea of who lives in the house prior to busting in in the middle of the night.
The idea that this is merely reflexive cop-bashing is ignorant. Plenty of people who are by no means anti-cop are concerned about this case.
Did you read the link I posted earlier? Here it is again. Pick “all types,” hit submit, and you can spend an hour reading horror after horror story, all quite similar.
Yep. Clearly, the old lady heard the cops, went for her gun, and was going out in a hail of bullets and glory anyhow.
Or she was asleep in her chair with the gun next to her and the knocking and door breaking woke her up. In which case, clearly, if they hadn’t knocked, and just broken the door down, everyone would still be shot just the same.
Which seems more likely to you, Loach? And I think that if cops keep breaking people’s doors down, it’s a real issue. I think that any evidence that can be hidden in a good thirty seconds of knocking, rather than knock-knock-break the door, is probably not worth the risk of the cop being shot over. I think that if cops are so all-fired up about doing SWAT-entrances of houses, they really should be prepared to be shot at.
Especially if they aren’t wearing anything but black clothes.
Let’s drop the “middle of the night” and “sound asleep in bed” stuff, folks. They served the warrant at seven pm. Very dark out, but not the middle of the night. And the niece in the video points out that she had installed mercury lights around the house so it would be nice and bright so her aunt would feel safe. So she probably wasn’t in the bedroom, which means she was toting that gun around the house with her.
The two cops I told this story to today were, surprisingly, on the side of the frightened grandma fending off a home invasion. In fact, the one uniformed cop said he usually gets to go out front when they serve warrants, just because he is in uniform. Of course, that’s how one of his fellow officers got killed a few months back, when the suspect fired through the door and shot him in the head. My friend was covering the back door that time.
Damn straight. Reading this thread is like watching a Quentin Tarantino remake of Rashomon.
You see, in the minds of many gun-lovers, the 2nd Ammendment ONLY applies to cops, and themselves.
It is pretty much waived if you are not wearin’ a badge to go with your piece, or the author of the post stating that the lady’s wrinkly old ass deserved to be blown away.
-shrug- Welcome to America, where it isn’t the biggest heart or the biggest brain that gets you ahead and alive, it’s the goddamned largest-bore weapon you can carry.
:mad:
Cartooniverse
Or she is an old terrified lady living in a dangerous neighborhood… They bought her a gun for a reason. They were scared for her.She was terrifioed and probably didn’t hear the announcement if they made it. Ever talk super loud talking to your old relatives. They do not hear so well.
Hey, still perfectly plausible to be nodding off in a chair at about that time. And if the gun’s in a table drawer or nook…
God knows, but I tend to pass out about then, myself, wake up about eight or nineish.
Right, because criminals never pose as cops. I wouldn’t open the door unless there was a marked car out front and uniformed officers showing me their badge. A no-knock warrant is just inviting to be shot in my view.
A gun isn’t very useful unloaded and locked away. If I were her and living in a bad neighborhood, I would have a loaded gun in reach at all times.
The individual officers who were injured did not deserve such. The morons who establish thier rules of conduct deserve to be hanged.
Suspected narcotics <> narcotics. You might be unaware that it has taket as many as three repeated trials to establish that suspected illeagale enemy combatants held at gitmo are infact suspected enemy combatants.
I don’t know a single person over the age of 50 that doesn’t have what amounts to a personal phamacy at hane. My fuckin’ dog had such by the time he reached 70 in people vs. dog years. The cops are stretching for any hope of a positive spin.
I predict that the “suspected narcotics” will turn out to be nothing other than what might be found on the kitchen counter of any other senior over the age of 75 years.
As for a “valid warrant”…I have personally been forced to provide identification to prove I wasn’t the fellow they were looking for * on two occasions when bad guys have failed to accuratly provide thier address. (One occasion was in Austria, the other in the US) Police need to have it drilled into thier heads that Joe Criminal JUST MIGHT have privided a false address to DMV when he renewed his driver’s license.
I dion’t care what fucking documents you might have in the pocket of your tacticle vest. You come crashing through the door of my house, expect that you will be greeted with buckshot. Good for Grandma, too bad she didn’t go for head shots, as there would now be three more **good **cops.
*I’m an obviously WASP fellow 6’5" tall. In one case the warranted “suspect” was hispanic, in the other he was Turkish (I speak enough german to have found this out) and the taller of the two was 5’8". If you can mistake 6’5" for 5’8" your a fucking idiot who doesn’t deserve a gun, much less a badge. On both occasions, I was in what would be considered a “good neighborhood”. In one case (USA) a female present (my buddies wife) was forced to produce idntification even though there was only a single warrant for the arrest of a male. IMO 10,000 cops at the bottom of a lake would only be a good start.
Kevbo, you might be unaware that the implication I was trying to make is that whether or not there were drugs on site before they got there, I could not believe that they would not have at least something on them ready to plant there should the need arise.