The first comes from reader Peter Yunis:
…if Jones did any investigation wouldn’t he have known there was a baby in the house? If so, should a judge really allow a no-knock raid at 11:30 pm under that circumstance?
The common sense answer: You’d think. The actual answer: Not in practice. SWAT teams are deployed pretty regularly even when children are present in the home. And of course, if you have the wrong address, are acting on bad information, or didn’t do any corroborating investigation, you simply don’t know. You might read about the Olveda family in Wisconsin, for example. Or about 11-year old Alberto Sepulveda, who was shot in the head during a botched SWAT raid on his home.
The second question occured to me while rereading early media reports of the raid. Officer Jones wasn’t a member of the narcotics task force team. He was a K9 officer, and a member of the Prentiss police department. It appears that he was asked to come along on the raid because it was his investigation that triggered the raids in the first place. That’s troubling enough. An officer with only four years experience on the force, and no experience on the paramilitary task force. gets brought along on a highly-volatile raid that involves breaking down doors? But we later learn that Jones was the first officer into Maye’s home. Why was the least experienced cop on the raid, a cop who really shouldn’t have even been there, the first one to burst into Maye’s apartment?
Maybe the question answers itself.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 9:58 am by Radley Balko
and is filed under Cory Maye.
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