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Another Isolated Incident
Friday, March 5th, 2010Police in Tennessee raid wrong side of a duplex, throw residents to the floor at gunpoint, manage to handcuff a recovering cancer patient. According to the residents and their neighbors, they then scratched off part of the address on the duplex to cover their mistake. They did get their guy in the end, though. He was selling pot.
(Via Pete Guither.)
Is the dog OK?
Blithering idiots with guns. What could go wrong?
I always assume they shot the dog(s), or the people didn’t have any dogs, unless the article says “the police did not shoot or kill any dogs” or something like that.
Offended by comparison.
See “So easy a caveman can do it.”
I’m heading up a group to pull our community out of Cincinnati for safety reasons. I’ve been looking at the Ohio Constitution amendment process about requiring the state to reject unfunded federal requirements.
I’m now tempted to look at an amendment requiring law enforcement personal to be held to the same standard as the general population and having prosecutors disbarred for violating the standard.
At least the Sheriff is going to conduct an investigation. I’m on the edge of my seat wondering what he’s going to turn up!
@6 Brian,
“The officers acted appropriately and according to departmental policy.” What else????
They probably deserved it… I mean, the cancer patient was probably smoking pot and had it coming. This could never happen to me.
Stories like these make living in a lower middle class condo complex terrifying. 100+ units is 100+ chances for these idiots to mistakenly raid my place and blow away my pug.
I completely fail to understand police tactics here – and in most of these cases. This is obviously a small time dealer – at best. If you had him under surveillance for days, why not just wait until he drives out of the house and pull him over. Then serve the warrant and do your search. How eff-ing hard is that to figure out.
You almost completely mitigate the risk of violence, completely remove the possibility of destruction of evidence and don’t need a 10 man team to do the raid.
Cyto,
“mitigate the risk of violence”. HA
If only that was the goal.
@Cyto: The big problem is that doing it the smart way doesn’t get your SWAT team in the paper and on the news, and doesn’t clearly demonstrate a need to increase SWAT spending because of the number of times they get called out. That results in it being harder and hard to get federal dollars destined to help stamp out whatever pet peeve is highest up on the list. Drug busts are a favorite fall-back, if there’s nothing flashier to go after.
Wow, I know y’all are gonna be surprised and shocked to hear this but our legislators and the mainstream press still don’t care.
JS: The appalling thing is that we are no longer surprised & shocked.
Cyto: What Jay said @ 2:38, plus doing it the sensible way means they don’t get to dress up and play commando and fire off stun grenades and break things.
This one hits very close to home. This is the next county over from my home town. Even worse, the local radio station just defers to the sherrif instead of doing any actual reporting (not that they ever do) – http://www.wksr.com/wksr.php?rfc=src/article.html&id=23439
“According to an article on the WDXE website, Chief Deputy Terry Beecham said the department has admitted the mistake and apologized to the person involved. “We apologized, Beecham said, because we were in the wrong.“ Beecham is strongly denying any cover up, or any attempt to hide what happened from local media. A story of the alleged cover up was on a Nashville television station.”
So of course there was no cover up, because the deputy says there was no cover up…
Thank God- That’s FIFTEEN OUNCES!!!! of demon weed that will not traumatize our children. Those police officers are my heroes! Hopefully, the taxpayers buy them a more detailed mapbook, so they won’t have any more of these misunderstandings…
@Cyto
Also, if police serve the arrest warrant at the house, they can avoid the need for a search warrant. The Supreme Court court has identified a few 4th amendment exceptions based on officer safety and protecting evidence but they require a reasonable belief that there is a danger and need to be narrowly tailored. In practice they are conducted as a matter of course.
@#16
No way, Marty! If they keep going to the wrong addresses, think of all the ‘plain view’ opportunities they’ll have to find even more stuff wrong, stuff totally independent of whatever warrant they were operating under or about to call and ask for after they knew what to put on it!
Meanwhile, back in Indiana, cops are using their resources wisely, as evidenced by this http://www.greensburgdailynews.com/local/local_story_062120702.html
It’s not so much the massive waste of time that gets me, it’s that the arrestees were ratted out by their own neighbors.
Wow, so much cynicism, at least that made me laugh.
Seriously, though. I’m looking into moving into a multi-family home soon because it’s what I can afford, all these wrong side of the duplex stories scare the crap out of me, too.
@#19 Steamed McQueen
Money quote from that article:
“Another tip from a watchful citizen early Tuesday morning brought the Greensburg Police Department closer to exterminating the drug problem in the city.”
LOL. Yeah maybe a couple more decades and a few more million dollars, and you’ll have exterminated the menace posed by recreational marijuana.
Should read some of the other Greensburg Daily News criminal justice articles. Someone in charge of this rag is a massive badge licker.
Tennessee.
Don’t care.
paranoiastrksdp | March 5th, 2010 at 4:20 pm
Loved that quote. One could add that a journey of 10 billion light years begins with a single step. Of course, the fact that the universe is expanding does create some problems.
So, who exactly gets the pension? Just the former employee, or are there benefits for the spouse after the former employee, um, you know, expires?
Crap, wrong thread.
“Give him the chair! Heh, heh! Yeah!”–Beavis
The scary part is, of course, that in that part of the US they may do just that. And the murderer in the next cell is up for parole this year, after serving less than 5 years.
Or something like that.
#3 “I always assume they shot the dog(s), or the people didn’t have any dogs, unless the article says ‘the police did not shoot or kill any dogs’ or something like that.”
And even then, who knows? Unless you talk to one or more of the people involved.
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Marc: LED numberplate? Embedded in polycarbonate so they can’t smash it after they kick in the wrong door?
@29 No, then they’d just burn down the house.
I smell a built to spill reference.
@steamed mcqueen
It’s not the fact that they house was narced on that gets me it’s the first sentence in the article- is this sarcasm? It’s got to be.
“Another tip from a watchful citizen early Tuesday morning brought the Greensburg Police Department closer to exterminating the drug problem in the city”
and all to supply something the people want.
@Steamed McQueen
Justin Roy Johnson, 26, 903 W. 24th Street, Connersville, was arrested on charges of visiting a common nuisance.
WTF is that?