Caveat up front: I’m normally a huge supporter of the police and military, giving them the benefit of the doubt and generally respecting everything they do to protect us.
The SWAT buildup and general militarization of local police forces is troubling. On the one hand, your local PD needs to be able to respond to serious situations and you don’t want them outgunned, untrained, and caught off guard when something truly bad goes down.
But when you fund the SWAT team, provide lots of cool gear, and they train like hell all the time, they’re going to be used. They want to be put their training to use, the superiors want to use them and show that continued funding is necessary, and so you have an escalation in the perception of threats. Suddenly the routine warrant service becomes a high risk scenario that requires flash bang grenades, full deployment of the SWAT team, and maneuvers that look like more like military operations than civilian police actions. All justified because, hey, we want our guys to go home at night.
In the worst cases, you get overkill that results in innocent people being killed because they responded in an understandable way to people banging on their door at 4 am and screaming instructions. (I’m not a meth dealer, so if that happens to me, I don’t automatically assume it’s the police serving a lawful warrant. I may answer the door with a shotgun, which will get me killed and then the PD spokesman will say it was my fault.) In other cases, you get real bad guys arrested in a way that still leaves me with a queasy feeling about the militarization of the local police.
The only alternative would be to surround the building (after getting everyone out) and trying to negotiate a surrender.
In the case of the man shot in Tuscon, it is a very difficult case. The police do seem to have solid grounds to for believing he was involved in drug smuggling (actually ripping off drug dealers). They claim to have found high-powered rifles and bulletproof vests in his home after the shooting. They claim – and the victim’s wife seems to agree with this – he answered the door carrying a high-powered rifle. That was a crazy thing thing to do. Former Marine, decorated Iraq war veteran, faithful husband, loving dad, no matter. That was a very foolish thing to do.
The problem is – as some cops see it, believe it or not – society condones just about anything that happens to a bona fide bad guy. Reality is, occasionally mistakes are made and innocent people get hurt. Society can’t have it both ways.
Should the SWAT team’s protocols be revised? Possibly. But what were the protocols?
Sad to say, mistakes like this are – I don’t want to say common – but they have happened in the past. SWAT teams executing no-knock warrants arriving at the wrong address. What was different here was, the home owner answered the door carrying a high-powered rifle.
It is not foolish to bring a weapon to confront a group of armed men who just broke down your door, who may or may not be police officers. It’s reasonable, and to some, even admirable to violently resist a perceived threat to you and your family’s life.
Oh please! I admit I haven’t had too much experience with armed men breaking down my door but I think my first inclination would be to call 911. Then hide.
Unfortunately for you, they design things so you can’t do that. Unfortunately for everyone, it is enough time for a frightened homeowner to grab a gun.
A reasonable response? I don’t agree. It didn’t work out too well did it?
Look this isn’t the Old West. Somebody tries to invade your home you call the police. They roll up in an armored vehicle and yell, “Police! Police!” You can STILL call 911. When’s the last time you heard the police killed someone because he was on the phone.
Even if he thought they were some of those drug dealers him and his posse were accused of ripping off come to get a little justice street style, he was outgunned.
Brandishing the rifle might’ve made him feel like a macho stud but it also got him killed.
I think that non-lethal weapons need to be developed further. There should be further research into effective methods of immobilizing suspects without risk of fatal injury.
So…let’s make a tear gas delivery method that does not pose a risk of fire. We went to the fucking moon (at a time of vastly inferior technology, no less) - I think we can figure this one out. It’d be a start.
Reasonable and an unfavorably outcome are not mutually exclusive of one another.
And what should I do in the intervening 5+ minutes it takes for the police to arrive The few times I’ve had to call 911 the police didn’t actually arrive in time to be of any use. That’s not a dig at the police. It’s just that they can’t be everywhere at once. By all means, call the police. I wouldn’t rely on them for my safety though.
It’s not as if the bad guys are just going to sit still while the police are called.
So you should just calmly lie on your back and bare your throat when the bad guys come for you? Given what we’ve read in the news over the past year about the behavior of drug cartels, it would be unreasonable to be unarmed no matter how outgunned you are.
Of course it’s not a game. Was someone treating it as such?
I don’t know if this guy did anything wrong and I don’t know if the police did anything wrong. The subject of dynamic entries by the police has been a hot topic for a while now. I remember people discussing it back in the 1990s.
Absolutely not. However, they probably will be shot on sight if they have the misfortune of opening the door this way and finding a police officer on the other side.
The police could have handled this so much better. Why send a SWAT team? Has America become such an urban battlefield that it’s now necessary to use shock and awe tactics on someone who might be selling drugs?
It reads to me like the police feel they have to use overwhelming force for a couple of arbitrary reasons. First, the suspect may be armed. Well, welcome to the US. You wrote into your supreme laws of the land that God gave your citizens the right to carry guns and fight off tyrannical overlords (without being all too specific on who those overlords might be) so tough titty. Does this mean that every suspect has to be approached as if it’s Waco 2.0? In other words, have you (the police) so little faith in your citizenry that you don’t think they’ll have the common sense to not shoot a police officer at their front door? People might sell drugs, intimidate their neighbors, even answer the door with a gun in hand… but most people aren’t actually hard enough to do life in prison for pulling that trigger, especially against a cop. The police are creating a vicious circle here. If they are assuming the suspect will shoot, hence they must shoot first, they are creating the kind of environment in which the suspect will indeed shoot because the suspect knows the police are coming to kill him rather than arrest him.
Here’s how I think the police could have handled this in such a way that it would have been a minor headline on page 9. Have two regular patrol officers knock on the door. The first officer does the talking while the second one stands by with the radio. If the suspect cooperates, all is well and the SWAT team (parked nearby) can go home. If the suspect doesn’t cooperate, the SWAT team can then bust in. And if by chance the suspect manages to get the stash of drugs down the toilet before the cops can get him, so what?
I mean seriously, so what? First, no drug dealer ever wants to flush product. You don’t make any money feeding it to the toilet. So a few hundred to thousand dollars of profit just literally went down the drain. Nobody likes having that happen to them. Drug dealers don’t have insurance to cover such losses. In fact, a drug dealer might be operating in such a way that the sales of that product are meant to cover the cost of it. So instead of this dealer facing a criminal charge they instead have to face the wrath of whomever they fronted it from.
If the dealer decides to give up drug dealing and work at McDonalds instead, the police have done what they are supposed to do. If the dealer keeps dealing, the police now know they have a crafty bad guy on their hands and may have to work harder to get warrants, wiretaps, et cetera but with the knowledge that they are barking up the right tree. But shooting them is so much easier.
The police were probably looking for more than just drugs. In fact, I doubt they expected him to have drugs at all, considering they suspected him of “enforcing,” not dealing.
If the police were honestly there for a search warrant, they should have taken every reasonable measure to ensure the guy was not home while the search was executed. To do otherwise just invites disaster, as we see here. At the very worst, it endangers the lives of the police, the suspect, and innocent people in the home. At the very BEST, it doesn’t provide any benefit at all. The guy had a regular job! They KNEW where he would be every day!
I agree with this type of SWAT operation being performed to serve an arrest warrant on a potentially dangerous suspect. I don’t agree with this type of operation being used to execute a search.
Look we’re talking about an armored vehicle rolling into this guy’s driveway. Men in flak jackets jump out and start yelling, POLICE!" This was clearly no home invasion.
Even if it was. Brandishing a weapon against an group of armed thugs is only going to get you beaten up or worse.
Actually the reaction will be to have the police be even more on a hair trigger so that they can eliminate the threat before he gets his gun out.
The problem is that if you have a gun pointed at someone and they are bringing a gun out to aim at you, you don’t have time to wait for them to finish so you can talk to them, you have to take them down now for your protection.
Similarly if your home is being invaded by an army of heavily armed thugs, bringing a gun to bear is not a good idea, they will be able to react before you can. If you run to call 911 you have a chance of getting out with your skin intact depending on what they want. If you get at your own gun, best case scenario you take one or two with you before you get fatally ventilated.
Two weeks ago, local police in Madrid were pursuing two guys in a car. They saw one of the guys grab something and fired. One unarmed guy dead, seven cops suspended while being investigated for murder.
That’s the most recent case I can recall, there’s been others in diverse locations.
I doubt that the yells of Police were particularly understandable, and we don’t know that the former Marine had been able to see the SWATs before answering the door. It could very well be that all he knew was “something real noisy just invaded my driveway and there are some guys yelling something and banging on my door”. I’ve lived in houses in the US where the front door was pretty much the only front-side opening where looking out didn’t involve moving stuff out of the way or rising blinds.
I read the attachments and I totally agree there are some concerns with these SWAT teams. But I don’t know if it’s tactics so much as training that should be changed.
The problem is, there would have to be a real outcry to get police departments to look at this. But many Americans undoubtedly don’t agree there’s anything fundamentally wrong.
The way they probably look at it is this: The police have a very dangerous and difficult job. We can’t ask them to do it if they are outgunned. The best deterrent law enforcement has is a show of overwhelming force. Today’s gang member or habitually violent career criminal is usually packing some serious weaponry.
That violent crime and violent criminals are the problem not law enforcement.
Be real, we have guns and mrAru has one bullet proof vest [military issue, bought as surplus that is exactly like the one he used to get issued to stand topside watches with] that I know of though I doubt he would be answering the door with a rifle in hand. Though if someone bashed in the door I would be fairly inclined to snipe whomever was first in through the door on general principals. How the fuck do they expect someone to actually hear them saying anything after a flashbang has been tossed in?
