I doubt the police would have been so forgiving if the woman had been the one holding the gun when it “went off” all by itself. Odds are, every officer there would have opened fire, kept firing until their magazines ran out, then reloaded and kept firing. They certainly wouldn’t be withholding names.

http://news.yahoo.com/german-police-used-only-85-bullets-against-people-155155175.html

Also, from the other post, stop making me so sad with the threatening dogs, Radley, please. I really think we should set up a nationwide series of seminars in which UPS, FedEx and USPS workers train law enforcement officers in what to do with threatening dogs. They’ll teach techniques such as backing away from a clearly angry/scared dog, calling the owners to see if they will put the dog inside, and the ultra-secret “extending your hands to the dog so she can have a sniff and decide if you’re an OK person or not” strategy. I guess the cops would just get bitten at that point, though. Dogs can smell evil.

This is what they intend to do. The more chaotic it is, the greater the possibility that confused people will make mistakes–confess, for example. When the ICE agents came to my house, a bunch of them (8? 10? 12? I don’t know) burst through the door as soon as I opened it. They swarmed through the house, refusing to show me the search warrant until they had “secured the premises.” The premises, of course, were secure before the home invasion. They planned to execute the search at a time when the children were home, increasing my husband’s and my anxiety, increasing the likelihood that someone would misunderstand something, make a terrible mistake.

At some point, I realized that their jackets identified them as ICE agents, which made no sense. Homeland security? Immigrations and Customs Enforcement? They are simply the mercenaries the feds use to track down whatever the hot crime-of-the-day is. At my house that day, it was child porn. The DOJ has decided to crack down on child porn (because they don’t have enough prisoners in the system already?), and DHS/ICE is flooded with the money needed to do it.

Today drugs and child porn. Tomorrow, what will it be? Sooner or later, it will touch you.

He even appeared in court a week earlier and could have been arrested then, his parents said.

Of course, anyone following Radley’s work knows that there’s no (federal) money in merely arresting someone already in your possession. In a case like that, you have to play catch and release, and then send in the SWAT team, otherwise you’ll never pump up your department’s stats.

At the same time, if an officer is to be relied upon for his skills in observation, you can still use this against him. Pregnancy looks different from obesity, especially at 9 months. Cops also get extra deference in court because they can claim that they have special powers of observation based on their training and experience. If I can tell the difference, and a cop cannot, then where are his special powers.

In the end, we will never know the real facts because the department closed ranks behind him as “just following procedure.” If the police get to make things up to protect themselves, then there is also no record around to protect them.

Not that this excuses what happened in the slightest–during a verbal dispute a cop should not kick anyone in the stomach, male, female, pregnant, not pregnant.

They folded many of the old government agencies into DHS when it was created.
Here is a list of “Featured Componets”:

Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
Transportation Security Administration (TSA)
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
U.S. Coast Guard
U.S. Secret Service
Office of Inspector General

They also have a tab on their website about “cyber security”.

Defense attorney: “so Officer X, According to this news article, you have stated that you cannot tell a woman who is 9 months pregnant from any other person” and take it from there……

No Godwin. No Godwin. No Godwin…

It would appear that a certain Dekalb, Georgia “professional” does not have the temperment to be a law enforcement officer. When a chained dog and pregnant women appear as threats and you respond with use of force it only exposes you for the weak link in the chain that you are.

The “professional” in Dekalb should be fired ASAP before a human-being is killed in a wanton display of fear fueled state sponsored violence.

Note to the “professionals” playing SWAT dress-up (federal, state, local) there isn’t one special forces operator who would ever participate in a dynamic breach without actionable intelligence in hand.

SWAT for warrant service is a recipe for disaster, espeacially when the “professionals” apparently didn’t even know that there was a women residing in the home who worked the night shift and would be returning home in the early AM when their “raid” was set to begin.

What type of surveillance was conducted? (Rhetorical question)

Never mind opening fire and wounding your own in a close quarters battle (CQB) type of situtation, very “professional” cowboy posers.

Lighting off flash-bangs and conducting dynamic breach entries are nothing more than blatant attempts by the state to terrorize US citizens.

Violence is the first refuge of the incompetent.” ~ Issac Asimov

Of course these types of SWAT paramilitary actions continue full circle and the law of the instrument is re-confirmed daily.

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” ~ Abraham Maslow

I’m almost 100% with you, BUT. Long usage in international law holds that due process for spies caught in wartime (and operatives not in uniform satisfies the definition of spies nicely) is a secret military trial (transcripts made public after the war is over), followed (assuming conviction) with a bullet in the back of the head. That is the standard, by the rules of war. This isn’t new. This isn’t a fresh outbreak of fascism. This is what we were doing in WWII.

Thanks for the link to the accidental shooting story, but one quibble. “One officer’s gun went off” is not passive voice.

Your point, IME, is one of grammatical minutiae. Perhaps a valid point being directed at Radley, a professional writer. But the larger point is that a gun does not ‘go off’. A gun is fired, which expressly implies that there is someone that pulls the trigger. The phrasing used is a strange attempt to muddy this fact.

They already are and have been doing so for decades.