Another day, another “wrong door,” no-knock raid by a SWAT team.

This one happened in the Milwaukee area.

Bully to the victim of the raid, though, who’s giving police and the whole paramilitary drug raid phenomenon the business.

“I said, ‘You guys are in the wrong place,;” Buerosse said. “All (the sergeant) would say is, “We have a valid search warrant.” I said, “You don’t have a valid search warrant, you dumb S.O.B., if you are in the wrong place?”

[...]

Despite identifying himself, Buerosse said, “they threw me on the ground, into a closet door, hit me in the head with a shield, not that it was that hard, but it was hard enough to knock me down.”

It took the arrival of a local sergeant who knew Buerosse for officers on the scene to accept that they had the wrong man, Buerosse said. The officers left without an apology, he said.

“I thought, “I’m 68 years old. What if I had a heart condition? What if I am one of those guys who sleeps with a gun under the pillow? What if I was one of those guys who keeps a large dog?’” Buerosse said.

Police then executed the raid on the correct address, and found what they expected to find — a small amount of marijuana. That got Buerosse even more pissed off:

“My question is, what are they doing using a SWAT team to execute a search warrant for a simple possession of marijuana?” Buerosse, a former Delafield city attorney, said.

“When I went to law school, I was taught the sanctity of your home was one of the greatest freedoms we have. If you don’t have the sanctity of your home in America, what have you got?”

[...]

Buerosse called into question what he said was “law enforcement running amok.”

“SWAT teams are not meant for simple pot possession cases. The purpose of SWAT teams is to give police departments a specially trained unit to react to a violent situation, not to create one,” he said. “This should not happen in America. To me you can’t justify carrying out simple, routine police work this way.”

Looks to me like libertarianism may have just happened to someone. This guy rocks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2006 at 6:08 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.