Sure, no reason. But suppose you point me to Czarcasm’s post where he acknowledged that criminal charges weren’t on the table and said, “Nowlet;s talk about the issue of justice!”
“Raised?” No. Used it to rebut the general feel that the man was wearing a halo and shot while raising money to feed orphans?
yes.
And who in this thread, pray tell, came within a mile of that rather silly description you bravely defend us against? All that people were saying was that what happened would have been wrong in anyone’s household, and that trying to excuse it after the fact by pointing out defects in the occupant is, at best, a diversion.
So what you’re saying anyone who isn’t 100% prefect has no right not to expect to blown away by an incompetent jackass thug?
The gunman was part of setting the situation up, the gunman pulled the trigger on a man exhibiting a normal response to confusing and terrifying situation. Maybe if the gunman doesn’t want blood on his hands he should have been the kind of person to learn to do his job right, and not freakout and blow away individuals who didn’t pose a threat.
Why did they choose the no knock method? Maybe a signal needs to be sent if you go barging in a place all trigger happy with no warning, than you’re responsible for how your choices unfold.
I’m assuming no such post by Czarcasm exists and that you believe this proves something. At the same time, I’ll assume you believe that a “wearing a halo” post does exist and this also proves something. I mean, they’re both such convenient clams for you, aren’t they, because they sound relevant but aren’t, really.
What difference does it make if the guy has a halo or not? Shouldn’t the more relevant criterion be if he has a criminal record suggesting violence that might justify a smash-in entry with the intent of overwhelming him?
Besides, even a saintly person with no criminal record, confronted with shouting men in their home in the middle of the night might behave as he did and be shot for it. You yourself admit that you’d probably be dead under these circumstances too. Do you have a halo? Would it matter if you did or not?
Sure, being a criminal increases the odds that one day police will come smashing into your house to serve a no-knock entry, but:
-This is not guaranteed, since the majority of criminals don’t have this happen to them; and
-This occasionally does happen to people with no criminal records at all.
I figure anybody might behave as the dead man did - you, me, some random guy in some random house - so his record (or halo-status) is of no relevance, but you bring it up anyway because you seem to think you can claim it does. I’m not sure why - I don’t think anybody here is stupid enough to fall for it.
Well, nobody that matters, anyway.
Add to this, the police were INVESTIGATING. At that particular point in time, he wasn’t a criminal, he wasn’t KNOWN to be drug trafficing.
The police were breaking in to investigate that suspicion.
They weren’t breaking in–they had a warrant.
They merely kicked down the door of a sleeping citizen, yelling gibbish, then gunned him down.
Signed by Earl Warren?
I see you have deftly stepped away from the point concerning the multiple claims that the police acted criminally.
If your point NOW is that the police acted poorly, I agree, as I have from the beginning, The police had legal justification to shoot, but their actions cannot be called perfect.
But when you ask, indignantly, “What could this man have done?” you ask the reader to infer that he was entirely blameless. That’s not true either.
Your mindset seems unable to grasp the concept that both parties could have some culpability here. If the police acted poorly, then the victim must have been without blame, abd if someone dares to argue that the police were not criminally culpable, then he must be arguing that the victim had it coming.
Were you dropped on the head as a child? Or perhaps suffered a more recent brain injury?
Yes, that’s true, except for the part about not posing a threat.
If you mean “criminally responsible,” no one in the real world seems to agree that any such signal needs to be sent.
So, good luck with that. The chief support for your position seems to the reading comprehension disabled crowd in this thread. Across the country, in real life, among real politicians responding to real voters, there is very little interest in imposing criminal liability for these kinds of incidents. I’d suggest some sort of a campaign, but the reading comprehension problems you exhibit are going to make it an uphill battle at best. Perhaps you should content yourself with impotent sputtering on a message board that’s friendly to your brand of idiocy.
If you mean “responsible” in some other way, I invite you to define it.
Actually, on second thought, maybe someone else could help you with the big words. You’ve done enough.
Yes. In much the same way, driving drunk increases the odds you’ll die in your car, but it’s not guaranteed. Indeed, the majority of drunk drivers don’t have this happen to them. And it occasionally happens to people who haven’t had a drop to drink.
Nonetheless, when discussing the tragedy of someone killed while driving drunk, we don’t quail from pointing out the possible effect of his life choices.
Let me offer a speculation that I never would in GD, because it’s just a theory; no proof.
In your little liberal heart of hearts, you don’t really regard Blair’s drug use or selling as a real crime, So you frantically look for ways to forget it, or minimize it, in this discussion. But you readily accept drunk driving as a crime, and so you don’t object when then drunk driver’s death is leavened with discussions about how his drunkeness might be relevant to his death… even if the particular acciddent in which he died was not his fault.
How close am I?
Bricker, I am very ready to admit that this is not murder, and I think that manslaughter is a bit of a stretch given that he is a policeman, (and I believe that the nature of the job should offer some protection as much as it imposes additional obligations).
Now, with that as a given, and also as you have agreed the guy acted inappropriately, if you cast your mind about what charges would it be POSSIBLE to bring to court?
If (yes a big if) you think this yahoo should be punished, as a prosecuter, do you think you could find a charge to bring?
Do you think that this particular policeman is getting too much protection from his union and the thin blue line?
Not especially. I only “know” Blair’s history from what’s been described in this thread - I never researched it to find out what he’d actually done (let alone to build up sympathy for him) because I never thought it was relevant unless there something in his record that suggested he posed a particular danger to the police, i.e. he had a record of violence, requiring a no-knock entry with guns drawn.
I haven’t seen anything in this thread that paints Blair as violent, so why take such a violent and risky approach in serving a search warrant? And of course, it seems Blair wasn’t even the target of the warrant - his former roommate was. Does she have a violent history suggesting a smash-entry with weapons drawn was a good idea?
I guess I am a liberal (or arguably a libertarian) in the sense that I’d rather see more restrictions on the agents of the state than on the citizens of the state, and when a situation is created by those agents that puts citizens (and the agents themselves) at risk for no good reason… yes, I object. What benefit does a nighttime no-knock entry promise that a daytime entry when the resident isn’t home? Clearly an more controlled entry was attempted (detaining the resident outside the house), but screwed up, and rather than try something comparable again, the police jumped to the riskier choice for reasons that are unclear to me. Impatience? Quotas? Boredom? I honestly don’t know why the nighttime no-knock entry was considered a good idea. What were they expecting to find?
As a matter of cost-benefit analysis… yes, I have to wonder why some drugs are banned and why such efforts are made to restrict them. I don’t know that this is a product of a “liberal heart of hearts”, rather than just questioning the need for governments to have these powers. Is it possible to suggest drugs should be legalized and yet not be motivated by a “liberal heart of hearts”, whatever that means?
And it not relevant anyway. I’m prepared to assume that the sale of contraband of some kind is what interested the police. That it was drugs doesn’t particularly matter. If it was guns or explosives or chemical weapons or something else of immediate lethal potential … then sure, take a paramilitary shock-and-awe approach in hope of overpowering the resident before he can put the contraband to use. That danger element is missing here, of at least I haven’t seen it explained.
Your drunk driving analogy is a bit odd. It’s not like Blair was unilaterally creating a dangerous situation (to himself or others) at the moment of his death. He certainly posed no immediate risk to himself or anyone else while sleeping in his home. The risky situation was only created after the police entered, and it’s unclear (to be generous) that they identified themselves or gave Blair a chance to comply. The explicit purpose of the no-knock entry was, I thought, to overwhelm and confuse the residents. Thus, when a resident acts in a manner that looks confused (standing there with a raised golf club), I’m not sure why this is apparently confusing or surprising to the officers leading them to open fire out of fear for their own safety. Sure, the officer says after the fact that he thought it was a sword. There’s no corroboration on the tape (i.e. hearing him say “drop the sword!”, and indeed there’s no command to Blair to drop or do anything before the shooting starts). At that moment, Blair could have been a drug user and dealer. He could also be a guy who just happened to be in the house. He could also be a guy who just happened to be in the house which was raided by the police in error or based on bad information. Above all, he’s a guy standing there with a golf club and he didn’t have to be. And that guy could be me, standing there in sleepy-eyed defense of my home only to be killed by men whose job is ostensibly to serve and protect. That guy could be you. That guy could be anyone.
Given that we need armed police forces, and we occasionally need them to serve no-knock warrants, I don’t see anything wrong with requiring high standards for their execution, no pun intended. Based on the videotape and the backstory, the standards applied by this department and this officer are shockingly low.
Doers any of this sound all “liberal hearts of hearts” to you? I get that you want to find a label you can slap on me as means of dismissal, but I don’t think I can accommodate you by meeting your simplicity stereotypes. May I offer a most insincere apology.
There are all sorts of charges that are possible to bring to court, since it only requires probable cause to indict and try someone for a crime.
And undoubtedly there are a few prosecutors that would, reasoning that the guy needs to be punished, and since the criminal law can’t otherwise touch him, I’ll “punish” him by forcing him to defend himself at an expensive trial, even though I have no good faith belief in the possibility of a guilty verdict.
Personally, though, I feel that’s a poor precedent to set with prosecutors’ powers.
Unless the record develops differently (for example, if someone heard him say, “I don’t know what happened; the gun just went off!”) there really isn’t a basis for criminal charges.
Whenever drugs are being stored or sold in quantity, there is a strong potential for guns to be present, because drug dealers realize that their clientele are (a) not much inclined to follow the niceties of law; (b) highly motivated to secure the product for themselves; (c) not especially adept at calculating risk-reward ratios.
In addition, drug dealing often means that lots of cash will be present, another motive for other criminals to indulge in a little self-help. Unlike robbing the local bank or the corner bodega, stealing from a drug dealer means that the police won’t likely get involved.
So any time you have probable cause to believe there are large quantities of drugs involved, you almost automatically have probable cause to believe there may be firearms involved.
Hopefully, now you have.
Yes. And I firmly believe that if the police had done the usual briefing, and assigned fire zones of responsibility to each section of the floorplan before they entered, then each officer could have concentrated on his own little area, not had to look everywhere, and there would have been an extra three seconds available to avert this tragedy. In that regard, the police should have done better. And the sanction should be that whoever was running that team is fired, because the police shouldn’t want that kind of careless approach to the serving of warrants.
I don’t know if I agree the officer was at any fault at all, although I certainly agree finding out the details of what he was told ahead of time would be key to making that determination. He wasn’t the guy who planned it. But if he was, if he had some planning role in the operation, sure, fire him too. Right there with you.
No, I’ll admit that what you’ve said here sounds pretty reasonable – except for your dismissal of the potential for violence, but I’ve now explained that.
I daresay there’s quite a potential for significant abuse of police powers in a situation like this. Say there’s a really bad criminal out there (somebody worse than Blair, I’ll assume) but the police can’t get enough to charge him. So they get a no-knock search warrant and bust in at three a.m. Now, by the standards shown in the tape, if the criminal stands still in a hostile-looking posture, he can be shot within seconds. By other, similar cases, he can be shot even if he is moving, if officers later claim he appeared to be moving in a dangerous manner. He can be shot while lying prone on the floor, if it can be labelled accidental.
Thus the police (or even one rogue officer) can pretty much kill anyone and claim noncompliance with the serving of a warrant.
And even if the intent isn’t to kill, are police responsible for the damages they cause in breaking down doors? In tipping over and searching furniture? Tearing up floors, breaking open walls? Can a warrant (and even more so, a nighttime no-knock warrant) be used as a tool of harassment? I know it’s not supposed to be, but you admit the existence of a few abusive prosecutors, why not abusive cops and compliant judges?
One major difference, of course, is that police have guns and prosecutors generally do not. Should only people with “liberal heart of hearts” be concerned about this?
Then why aren’t no-knock warrants far more common, if not routine (or are they?) for all cases involving drug dealing? The standard you’re describing is so generic and loose that the police can essentially no-knock raid any drug suspect, with no need to be selective for only the cases when the threat or stakes are particularly high, ands there’s nothing I’m aware of about this particular case that suggests so.
I love your optimism, but you’re basically arguing that the police have a free hand to no-knock raid as they choose, and I’m not convinced they should have (or that they need) that much freedom.
Well, it sounds like they do want that degree of carelessness (or more accurately, they don’t the degree of oversight that will punish carelessness), and without criminal charges of some kind, or administrative sanctions (I don’t know that anyone was fired or disciplined for this incident), there’s only the pending civil suit to provide a disincentive to the police, and I’m not sure that any individual officer, let alone the one who fired the fatal shots or the ones that planned the raid or asked for the no-knock warrant in the first place will suffer any direct consequences or modify their behaviour.
Well, good. If the agents of the state are incompetent, fire them.
Not really, no. If anything, your “explanation” raises the question of why don’t officers take more precautions, such as smashing in the side of the house with a tank first, or throwing in stun grenades, or pre-emptively tasing (or for that matter, shooting) everyone in the residence. After all, anyone might be a drug user, and any drug user might be a dealer, and any drug dealer might have guns, therefore assume everyone has guns.
Wow, I’m missing verbs, using wrong tenses, forgetting to spell check and such… I gotta take a nap.
Does this kind of use of reductio ad absurdum work in your real-life discussions? Do your friends hear you say this kind of thing and think, “Wow, good point?”
The answer is that there’s a close nexus between drug dealing and the presence of guns, and a cost and risk benefit analysis in the sorts of countermeasures that are used. Obviously that equation will change based on the weight assigned to the various factors in play, but in this country, today, the use of a no-knock warrant in the circumstances of this case is unremarkable. The decision to use a tank to enter the home would be, conversely, quite remarkable.
So why don’t we use tanks? Because no one who is responsible for the cost and risk benefit analysis believes that’s appropriate. Why DO we routinely issue no-knock warrants and serve them with an armed SWAT team? Because almost everyone who is responsible for the cost and risk benefit analysis believes that’s appropriate.
Your complaint amounts to the fact that you don’t agree.
That’s great. But you’re not the person elected to lead jurisdictions by crafting policy to implement the law. Oddly enough, in general, the people that ARE elected don’t agree with you.
I remain deeply disturbed by this rationalization for a human death. I note (as others have before me) that the deceased was not the target of the “investigation”. He was a roommate who arguably may or may not have shared in the actual target’s criminal enterprise. There has been no offer of evidence against him that I have seen in this regard.
Further, the members of the raiding squad knew (per their own testimony) that the actual target was not present at all (although there was apparently no direct evidence that the individual officer responsible for obtaining the warrant had that knowledge – but no special reason to expect him to have remained ignorant of that fact, either). They knew, or should have known, that anyone present would be someone who could be at most only tangentially related to the suspected criminal enterprise that was under investigation.
So although you impute some nefarious life style upon the deceased, we have no actual evidence for such, other than his presence in a house that had been occupied, but was not presently occupied, by a suspected drug dealer.
Finally, you accept his death as the direct “consequences” of a long term illicit lifestyle involving “selling drugs”. Not murder—there is no evidence that he was a murderer. Not rape—no reason to believe he was a rapist. Not treason, not kidnapping, nor child molestation. Not even actually attacking a police officer with his “sword”, but merely being a rather distant and (at least to an actual sword master who opined earlier), not terribly credible threat. Simply “selling drugs”. And no evidence offered that even this criminal background was actually the case. Maybe he was present because he was delivering religious tracts, or trying to talk the actual target of the investigation out of her criminal ways. Or maybe it was just a convenient pad to crash in.
But even accepting for sake of discussion that the man had spent his life in the subculture of petty criminals who dispense street pharmaceuticals, please tell me where in our criminal code does the death penalty apply for that offense? For that is what you are suggesting here-- that it is somehow less than criminal for a citizen to be deprived of his most basic right, that of life itself, by agents of the state, simply because of the rather pathetic but clearly not Capital Offense-level “decisions” he had made during that life.
By that standard, a whole lot of us should be concerned that in fumbling our way through life, we do not make too many unfortunate choices. Or happen to occupy the wrong house.
Then you didn’t read any of the cites offered up earlier in the thread.
How does that follow? Why would drug dealers permit people " only tangentially related to the criminal enterprise" to roam around?