Wednesday, June 25, 2014

uptight chickenshits playing soldier the most dangerous drug of all...,

Just look at that face - any more puckered and he'd burst a vein!

WaPo |  The American Civil Liberties Union has released the results of its year-long study of police militarization. The study looked at 800 deployments of SWAT teams among 20 local, state and federal police agencies in 2011-2012. Among the notable findings:
  • 62 percent of the SWAT raids surveyed were to conduct searches for drugs.
  • Just under 80 percent were to serve a search warrant, meaning eight in 10 SWAT raids were not initiated to apprehend a school shooter, hostage taker, or escaped felon (the common justification for these tactics), but to investigate someone still only suspected of committing a crime.
  • In fact, just 7 percent of SWAT raids were “for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.”
  • In at least 36 percent of the SWAT raids studies, no contraband of any kind was found. The report notes that due to incomplete police reports on these raids this figure could be as high as 65 percent.
  • SWAT tactics are disproportionately used on people of color.
  • 65 percent of SWAT deployments resulted in some sort of forced entry into a private home, by way of a battering ram, boot, or some sort of explosive device. In over half those raids, the police failed to find any sort of weapon, the presence of which was cited as the reason for the violent tactics.
  • Ironically (or perhaps not), searches to serve warrants on people suspected of drug crimes were more likely to result in forced entry than raids conducted for other purposes.
  • Though often justified for rare incidents like school shootings or terrorist situations, the armored personnel vehicles police departments are getting from the Pentagon and through grants from the Department of Homeland Security are commonly used on drug raids.
In other words, where violent, volatile SWAT tactics were once used only in limited situations where someone was in the process of or about to commit a violent crime — where the police were using violence only to defuse an already violent situation — SWAT teams today are overwhelmingly used to investigate people who are still only suspected of committing nonviolent consensual crimes. And because these raids often involve forced entry into homes, often at night, they’re actually creating violence and confrontation where there was none before.

When SWAT teams are used in a way that’s consistent with their original purpose, they’re used carefully and cautiously. The ACLU report finds that, “In nearly every deployment involving a barricade, hostage, or active shooter, the SWAT report provided specific facts that gave the SWAT team reason to believe there was an armed and often dangerous suspect.” By contrast . . .
 . . . incident reports for search warrant executions, especially in drug investigations, often contained no information about why the SWAT team was being sent in, other than to note that the warrant was “high risk,” or else provided otherwise unsubstantiated information such as “suspect is believed to be armed.” In case after case that the ACLU examined, when a SWAT team was deployed to search a person’s home for drugs, officers determined that a person was “likely to be armed” on the basis of suspected but unfounded gang affiliations, past weapons convictions, or some other factor that did not truly indicate a basis for believing that the person in question was likely to be armed at the moment of the SWAT deployment. Of course, a reasonable belief that weapons are present should not by itself justify a SWAT deployment. Given that almost half of American households have guns, use of a SWAT team could almost always be justified if this were the sole factor.
But we’ve already seen cases in which the mere factor that the resident of a home was a legal gun owner — in some cases by virtue of the fact that the owner had obtained some sort of state license — was used as an excuse to execute a full-on SWAT raid to serve a warrant for an otherwise nonviolent crime.

5 comments:

Vic78 said...

They don't have the skill, sense, or training that the Special Forces have. The military specialists are always training for those situations. When they have to kick a door in, it's going to go as smoothly as the drills for the most part. These SWAT guys are just incompetent. Why isn't that Homeland Security money spent on training and people skills? It looks like every dollar they get is used for weapons. They're like children at Christmas with those guns.

CNu said...

Dood, they don't have the skill, sense, training, or testicular fortitude of the ex-military police officers who originally organized special weapons and tactics for extreme situations requiring those measures. These are a bunch of sorry punks good for little more than rousting non-violent suspects in the middle of the night.

Constructive_Feedback said...

Brother CNu:


Can an "American Civil Libertarian" get up in arms about American police raids domestically but stay silent regarding AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY in which in "Nations Of Color" - NOT ONLY do they NOT NEED a "Search Warrant" because the American Intelligence and Military operatives CAN DO WHAT THE HELL THEY WANT TO...................


and then, worse, the Civil Libertarians and the "Black Civil Rights Pharisees" who live vicariously through Obama are NOT protesting against:


* The Libyan Benghazi suspect snatched off of the streets of Libya and put on an American warship to stand trial in America
* Drone bombings in Yemen and Pakistan - despite their sovereign governments demanded that they stop?




We are at the point where after years of people pointing to "Dr King's morality" regarding him choosing "Injustice Anywhere Is A Threat To Justice Everywhere" and instead they do a REVERSE DR KING as they focus their advocacy against DOMESTIC POLICE FORCES so that the PROGRESSIVE AGENDA and fight against the domestic right wing is not derailed by their focus on the "Inferior Africans" and Middle Easterners.

CNu said...

The answer is YES.

Civil liberties and Civil rights are not the same as the fiction of "Human" liberties and "Human" rights. In the former, there is the small matter of legality and standing under the law entitling one to enforcement - up to and including application of the violence monopoly - to uphold your status as a "citizen"

In the latter, there's no legal standing or institutional enforcement of the sovereign rights and liberties you declare as your own except for you. So Bro. Feed, an argument from law matters in the real world, an argument from morality is merely conversation....,

Vic78 said...

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-sanders-amendment-passesin-manner.html

The Russian People Have Given The Kremlin Carte Blanche To Get Even

strategic culture |   Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as...