TheAgitator.com
Criminals Dressed as Cops, Ct’d…
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008Criminals are quickly learning that the quickest way to get into someone’s home is to pretend you’re police officers on a drug raid:
Three men — some armed with assault rifles — dressed in black T-shirts marked “Police” and said they were detectives with Operation UNITE when they burst into victims’ homes during the summer of 2006 to steal drugs, guns and money.
Then one of their victims called the real police.
George Clark, 37, of Leslie County, was convicted Friday in U.S. District Court in London of 21 related charges and could face a sentence of 170 years to life in prison, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger West, who prosecuted.
Four others involved in Clark’s crimes, including his wife, Diedre, pleaded guilty and will be sentenced next week. Clark was charged with being the ringleader in a series of seven home invasions in Perry, Leslie, Clay and Laurel counties.
Jeremy Brashear and James Bowling later told police they acted with Clark to target people they suspected of selling drugs — victims who might not have much recourse. Some authorities suspect there were additional victims.
“Your average drug dealer wouldn’t call police and say, ‘I’ve just been robbed,’” said Dan Smoot, law-enforcement director for UNITE.
Some people Clark and the others robbed were drug dealers, but several weren’t. The robbers were mistaken, West said.
All of which makes forced entry drug raids all the more perilous. Here’s another example. And my Overkill paper lays out about a dozen others. Shows that even when the police do properly announce themselves (by no means a given), why should you necessarily believe them?
Well at least we can rest assured that when a person open fires on an intruder marked police, who yells police but yet *happens to be* an actual criminal, the person will be charged with first degree murder.
I know this because we apply the laws equally in this great land of ours and police get no special protection under the laws.
Yeah either that, or the person will be viewed as a hero and any idea of charges will be done away with in a few days.
Some potential outcomes of your family’s home-invasion:
You risk death if you submit and it turns out they were only pretending to be cops
You still risk death if you submit and it turns out they actually were cops (they have a lot of accidents)
You’re a felon if you resist sucessfully and it turns out they were cops
You’re dead if you resist unsucessfully and it turns out they were cops
Why are those we pay to protect (and serve) us requiring we be defenseless and subjecting us to home invasions? Why do they still try to kill us after their bungles are over?
After considering the four possibilities above (death, death, felony, death) I’ll take the potential felony.
Does anyone else find the idea of a 170 year to life sentence very funny?
Another Attorneys site: http://www.tvojklik.com/attorney/
After considering the four possibilities above (death, death, felony, death) I’ll take the potential felony.
Agreed. How many innocents and police need to die or have lives destroyed before the LEOs committing these raids realize they are a bad idea?
Wait. Shouldn’t we be pleased that the guys who bust down our doors and terrorize us have at least standardized on the same uniform?
That’s something. The primary difference I see (and that Ryan Frederick is experiencing) is that when the criminals leave your house, the terrorizing is over.
Nathan, it doesn’t work that way. The drug warriors and SWAT cops only see more force as a response to force, because they figure at some point they’ll have ‘overwhelming’ force. It’s military thinking: “Our numbers are bigger than their numbers, so we’ll win.” And that’s true. The problem is that they then don’t count casualties the way the military does. To the police, 1 casualty from their side is losing, but no amount of casualties on the other side seem to matter. So to minimize their own casualties, they just keep ramping up the ‘overwhelming’ force.
So you have bigger raiding forces, you have more forceful entries, you have more ‘surprise’, more flimsy justifications for getting in the battle gear and pushing people around.
And as we’re seeing, ‘thuggy see, thuggy do’. The bad guys pretend to be cops. Doesn’t this kinda point out to the cops ‘hey, we’re acting like criminals?’ You’d think it would, but I doubt the connection is made.
By my reading of the Constitution, which seems pretty straightforward, the issuance of a legitimate search warrant requires that someone give testimony under oath or affirmation related to personal knowledge sufficient to indicate that both (1) a crime was probably committed, and (2) the indicated search would probably yield evidence of such crime.
While the Constitution doesn’t spell things out in such precise detail, I find it hard to imagine that the Founding Fathers would have meant anything else. James Madison et al. refrained from putting things into such explicit detail because (1) it was obvious that for the ‘oath’ requirement to be meaningful, the testimony must involve personal knowledge; (2) he probably didn’t predict that the government would try to distort the clear intended meanings of words; (3) if judges are willing to ignore the clear meanings of words, no level of linguistic precision will stop them.
This then leads to the questions: (1) If the Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, can a warrant which is issued contrary to it have any legitimacy? (2) If a government agent breaks into someone’s home, absent exigent circumstances, and absent what he reasonable believes to be a legitimate warrant (see above), how is that person not a burglar or robber?
This is a horrific, but entirely predictable occurrence. The average street thug may not be “book smart,” but many are quite sharp in the way that they read the street and spot vulnerable people and opportunities for crime. Actually, a good police officer needs to learn to think like a criminal, if he or she is going to be effective in combating the criminal element. Officers should not, of course, imitate criminal behavior, and herein lies the problem. Smashing into people’s homes with no real warning looks and sounds like a home invasion to a victim, no matter who’s doing it. Now the criminals have found a way to exploit the new drug war reality. If I don’t hear “police with a search warrant” and see marked police vehicles in the area, I might be confused too, and I’m pretty familiar with police operations. The need for radical reform is apparent.
I wonder what would have to happen to convince some legislators to pass laws to the effect of, e.g.:
-1- Violent searches are inherently unreasonable, unless one can demonstrate a reasonable belief that such tactics will reduce the risk of harm to innocents (e.g. in a hostage situation).
-2- Cops and government agents are required to act in such a fashion that no reasonable person could mistake them for criminals who threaten bodily harm. If a cop gets injured or killed because a person reasonably believed him to be a criminal who intended bodily harm, the cop would be to blame for his failure to avoid acting like a crook.
-3- All requests for searches, etc. by government agents shall be presumed coercive in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
It was canonical in the terrorist literature of the 1960′s-70′s that the way to cause a society to bend to the aims of the terrorists was to cause such unrest amongst the people, the people would clamor for greater ‘security and ‘protection’ from a government largely incapable of providing it against terrorist actions.
The government would, of course, oblige, in that doing so would give it more power to intrude into the daily lives of citizens while offering the excuse that it was trying to ‘protect’ them in doing so…as the terror escalates.
The increase in repressive laws and actions, combined with ineffectiveness of those laws and actions in halting the terrorism, would then become so odious that the people would themselves throw off the yoke of the present government and create a government more closely aligned to the original aims of the terrorists. Or so the thinking went.
One might also say something similar is happening with the DrugWar; the more detestable the actions of those engaged in fighting it become to the ‘beneficiaries’ of their efforts, the more there is a demand to finally give the DrugWar the honest appraisal it has thus far avoided because of the emotion-laden propaganda that shields it from that appraisal, which usually goes like this:
Drug law reformer: “Let’s debate the usefulness of the War on Drugs.”
Drug prohibitionist: (wild-eyed, screaming, hands raised to Heaven) “What about the chil-drunnnnnn? Don’t you care about the chil-drunnnnn?”
So…by using the concepts of terrorism as espoused by its’ original adherents, one could indeed say that the police are indeed acting in the role of terrorists. They will force the changes that are so badly needed…one wrong-house raid and one 2nd Amendment believing homeowner defending against such at a time. Ironic, no?
[I]Agreed. How many innocents and police need to die or have lives destroyed before the LEOs committing these raids realize they are a bad idea?[/I]
A whole lot more than there are now. As Mr. Tucille says, law enforcement is an army of occupation, it’s time we start playing our part in return. All Hail The Maquis.