Schenectady, New York:

A police strike team raided a woman’s Prospect Street apartment and handcuffed her children and killed her dog early Tuesday in a $60 pot bust.

[...]

“I heard a big boom. My first reaction was to jump out of bed. We were trying to find where our kids were at and all of a sudden we had guns in our faces,” said 40-year-old Anita Woodyear, who rents the second-floor flat.

During the ensuing chaos, police handcuffed two of the woman’s children, Elijah Bradley, 11, and 12-year-old Victoria Perez, and shot at her dog in the kitchen before killing it in the bathroom, Woodyear said.

[...]

Woodyear said she suspected police had intended to search a neighboring home, but had the wrong address on the search warrant. Neighbors said they suspect illicit drugs are dealt at other homes on the block.

Of course, the police aren’t going to admit that if they can help it. They did find $60 worth of pot, after all. So let’s go ahead and justify the raid.

“The moral of the story is: If you don’t want officers barging into your house with their guns drawn, don’t let drug dealers stay with you and deal drugs out of your apartment,” Frisoni said.

Woodyear said she is appalled about the way her children were treated — and said her 12-year-old daughter was hit with pepper spray.

The dog, a pit bull terrier named Precious, urinated on the floor in fear and tried to run from the police before it was killed, Woodyear said.

Why the aggressive tactics for such a low-level crime? Those phantoms AK-47s that seem to be present in every search warrant, but rarely actually show up.

Police said they had reason to have weapons drawn. Their search warrant noted that among the things they planned to search for were firearms, although no handguns were found.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 3:34 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.