In Jefferson, Iowa.

Matthew Spaulding says he and his family were terrorized at their own home by police who slammed his grandmother to the ground and shot his dogs– missing his head by less than an inch. “Told us to get on the ground. I got on the ground they put me in handcuffs,” Spaulding recalls, “Then they threw my dad to the ground and my dog Sadie was right here sniffing my head. She was next to me. They shot her. The blood got on my face and then she took off running behind me and they shot her like three more times.”

Tuesday morning, Greene County Sheriffs Deputies and Perry Police officers arrived at Spaulding’s Jefferson farmhouse to deliver a search warrant. The Spauldings say they were immediately ordered to the ground.. even Matthew Spauldings’ disabled father, Chris. “My son hit the ground I hit the ground but I didn’t make it too fast so (the officer) jumped on the middle of my back, shoved his knee in and held a gun to the back of my head and handcuffed me. After they shot my first dog my mom come out”…

The Spauldings say after the first dog was killed, a second dog running away from the shots — and away from police— was also shot. “They weren’t barking. They weren’t attacking nobody.” Matthew Spaulding says, “They didn’t even give us a chance to put them in the kennel. We have a big kennel outside our house we could have put them in but they wouldn’t give us a chance.”

Perry Police are not commenting. And they’re refusing to turn over any paperwork or reports about the incident saying it’s part of an ongoing investigation. But we were able to get copies of the search warrants. One warrant shows police were looking for any kind of legal or illegal drugs. The other shows police were looking for a stolen X-Box video game system. No drugs and no stolen games were found–and no one was arrested.

I can’t think of a scenario in which what you see in this video would be justified. Even if the students were ordered to move, there are other ways to move them. And the cop’s nonchalant body language is chilling. It’s egregious brutality, and he looks to be enjoying it.

Here’s the story.

• More feuding over “professional courtesy” between Miami police and Florida state troopers.
• Massachusetts to keep health care costs down with  . . . price controls.
• Coca-Cola gets a ban on plastic bottles at national parks overturned. And somehow . . . the Koch brothers and libertarianism are to blame.
• I’m not sure I understand the point of handing out annual awards for classic rock.
• A nation asks: Who, if not government, will count our goats?
• I don’t see how this could possibly go wrong.

• Study: Black youth less likely to do illicit drugs than all ethnic groups but Asians. And yet they’re arrested at a far, far higher rate.
• The Atlantic on police militarization.
• Correction of the day.
• Supreme Court will hear arguments today on whether police should have the power to track your car without a warrant.
• Here’s another violent incident from the Occupy D.C. protests over the weekend.
• Headline of the day.
• Surprise inspection of Mexican prison turns up 100 plasma TVs, 19 prostitutes.

• William Niskanen, RIP.
• Robbing the cradle.
• What could possibly go wrong?
• Winner of this week’s “Get Over Yourself” award.
• Runner-up.
• Bovine-cide.
• “Because this was a gathering of people invited to our farm for dinner, I had no idea that the Health Department would become involved.”
• Best “We the People” petition yet.
• Dog tucks himself in.

From Chicago.

A group of Chicago police officers armed with weapons and a warrant violated the Constitution and may face sanctions for barging into the wrong house and threatening to shoot a mother and her kids, a federal judge ruled.

On June 7, 2009, Officer Billy Gonzales applied for a warrant to search the first floor of 3811 West Diversey Ave., based on the tip that it was a Chicago crack house. The application was granted.

The next day, the police executed their search at 3815 West Diversey, the building next door to 3811. The officers approached the building through the alley in the rear and broke down the back door with a sledgehammer. Two officers stayed outside to watch the building entrance.

Startled by the noise, Nancy Simental walked upstairs from her basement apartment with her two children. She claimed to find police pointed their guns at her and saying, “Don’t move or I’ll shoot you.” When she asked the police to put their guns away because children were present, a policeman repeated that he would shoot Simental and another pointed a gun at the children.

Officers also walked in on first-floor resident Francisca Nava as she was in the bathroom and told her not to move. The court said officers also pointed guns at Guadalupe Simental and Cesar Leon.

Sometime after the police entered the building, one of the officers stationed outside informed the team leader that the address on the front door did not match the warrant. All the officers then exited the building, leaving furniture overturned and the residents’ belongings strewn across the floor…

Not only did defendants provide the court with innumerable improper and unsupported claims about Gonzales’s purported intentions regarding the warrant in question, defendants audaciously claimed that plaintiffs actually admitted that their home was the intended target of the warrant.”

“There is no evidence in this case that the warrant contained any errors,” he wrote. “Instead, the evidence shows that officers erred by searching the wrong house.”

Such a mistake might not be a constitutional violation if the officers made a reasonable effort to ensure they searched the correct building, the court explained.

But Hibbler said “the officers did not even make the effort to look at the prominently displayed address on the front of the house. The fact that they approached the house from the rear does not excuse the mistake.”

This one is from Richland County, South Carolina, home of Sheriff Leon Lott and his “Peacemaker” tank.

A Gibbs Road couple came home from work Thursday to find their home surrounded by Richland County sheriff’s deputies, their front door kicked in and their home ransacked.

Deputies were executing a search warrant at Wanda and Reginald Blanding’s home Thursday, after drug agents said a confidential informant “made a controlled purchase of crack cocaine from an unknown black male at the location,” according to the search warrant.

“He hit the door right here with it,” explained Wanda. “He still had the ram jack in his hand when I walked up.”

The informant told investigators the drug buy was made at 402 Gibbs Road. That’s where the sheriff’s drug unit staged its raid, looking into the one drug purchase the informant alleges happened there.

“They told me why they were here and I was like, ‘Okay, no one is supposed to be here. No one sells drugs out of this house,’” said Wanda.

Reginald is the only black male that lives at the home. He says when he arrived after the raid, deputies never searched him for drugs and never asked to look through his two cell phones even though the search warrant states that’s one of the things deputies were after.

Reginald says deputies told him they had his house under surveillance and know the drug buy went down.

The Blandings deny there ever was a drug buy at their home and think deputies got bad information from their informant.

Wanda says deputies emptied nearly every drawer in the home, searched through the attic and their daughter’s bedrooms.

Sheriff’s Capt. Chris Cowan says deputies made a purchase from the home and had every right to search it. “The drugs that we purchase were out of that home, we purchased from a family member of that home,” said Cowan. “We purchased the drugs out of that home.”

The only people who live there are the Blandings and their three high school-aged daughters.

When asked if enough due diligence was done in preparation for the raid, Cowan said the officers did everything they were supposed to do.

Meanwhile, the Blandings, who have been married for 20 years, say they both have clean records. Wanda has been a corrections employee for 21 years and Reginald has worked for Pepsi for just as long. Both say they have never gone near drugs and don’t allow them in their home.

“This is humiliation,” said Wanda. “I mean, come in, I can see the door, go through my room, clothes and everything all over the place. I mean, they went through every room in the house and just tore it up.”….

The sheriff’s office says an apology is just not happening, and they’ll continue investigating this case until they make an arrest.

Maybe the Blandings have some connection to Michael Phelps.

Over at The Daily Beast, Eli Lake looks at how defense contractors are shopping war on terror technology to local police departments.

It’s known as IBISS, the acronym for the Integrated Building Interior Surveillance System. Like its name suggests, it can see through the walls of buildings and sketch out images of what’s inside.

ntil this year, IBISS was a classified system, a piece of high-tech wizardry the military used to fight the war on terrorism. The contractor that made the system, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), couldn’t talk about it in public, but that’s changing. IBISS is one of the new products SAIC is hoping to sell to local police stations and fire departments as the defense contractor explores what is known in the industry as “adjacent markets.”

The only thing preventing more widespread implementation of this stuff at the moment are strained state and local budgets.

“In some ways this is the entire trend we’ve been seeing since 9/11. All kinds of capabilities that were developed with an eye to foreign countries are being turned inward upon the American people,” Stanley said. “We’ve seen this with everything from the NSA to spy satellites even to a lot of the technologies that are moving through what is called the green to blue pipeline, which is to say the military to the police.”

The trend goes back quite a bit farther than 9/11.

• Headline of the day.
• Another isolated incident.
• What the hell, here are two more.
• California Medical Association calls for legalization of pot.
• A catalog of strange sex injuries.
• Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street? A quiz.

• Scalia is apparently concerned that capital defense attorneys who screw up their clients’ cases don’t face any professional sanction. Maybe he’s right. But it would also be nice to see some concern over the lack of discipline for misbehaving prosecutors, too.
• “When the officers showed up at the city jail to book Hill a short time later and turn in their evidence, the five pounds of marijuana they bragged about an hour earlier somehow had become a pound and a half.”
• Obama administration cracks down on medical marijuana marijuana dispensaries. Again. At this point, his campaign promises on this issue amount to damnable lies.
• Another isolated incident. What the hell is going on Fullerton?
• California appeals court upholds warrantless cell phone searches during a traffic stop.

• Police raid suspected meth lab . . . that turns out to be a guy making his own beer.
• Colorado man makes last-ditch effort to overturn his 145-year sentence for a sex crime his alleged victim says never took place.
• The Milky Way, taken near the North Sea.
• Wisconsin judge says you have no right to drink the milk from your own cow.
• The FTC goes after Four Loko again, this time for packaging the drink in cans that are apparently too large.
• CBS reporter says White House “screamed” at her over Fast & Furious story.
• Speaking of which, the Obama administration apparently thinks it’s fine to sell guns to murderous Mexican drug cartels, but they draw the line at pot-smoking cancer patients.

• I for one am shocked to learn that governments around the world fear and want to rein in something beyond their control that gives power to citizens makes governments themselves more transparent and accountable.
• Something new to worry about.
• California makes it illegal to make circumcisions illegal.
• “This is an excellent example of the police and citizens working together.”
• Yet more problems for the Fullerton, California police department.
• Dick Cheney praises Obama, demands apology for suggesting they’re all that different. He probably has a point on the second part.
• What’s that? You’d like to see a photo of Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg? And you’d like for them to be riding an elephant? Lemme see what I can do.

• Jonathan Turley: Obama “prove the most disastrous president in our history in terms of civil liberties.”
• Couple refuses entry to DEA agents who got the wrong house.
• University of Wisconsin-Stout targets faculty member with “threats” for Firefly posters on his door.
• Michigan police chief, five cops charged with using asset forfeiture money to purchase drugs, prostitutes.
• This seems like a bad idea.
• Incredible story of a false confession and wrongful conviction.
• TSA/airport police in Indianapolis seize a breast cancer patient’s medical marijuana. I feel safer.
• Other things that make me feel safer: That we’re about to deport a star student because she was brought to America illegally when she was 20 months old.
• An interview with the great Idris Elba.

• NYPD chief claims his department has the ability to take down an airplane.
• Actually, the First Amendment does protect anonymity.
• For the look on Michelle Bachmann’s face alone, I would donate to help establish the gay, nudist Tea party of San Francisco.
• Chomp.
• Bridal party sinks into lake.
• Terrifying headline of the day.
• “Senator Santorum is certainly an advocate for states’ rights, but he believes as Abraham Lincoln – that states do not have the right to legalize moral wrongs.” Moral wrongs such as letting people with cancer smoke marijuana so they can keep down their medication. Federalism! How does it work?
• You know, this is a very good point.
• CNN to Gary Johnson: You can’t be in our debate unless you’re supported by at least 2% of the people in this poll we conducted in which we didn’t give people the option to support you.
• Good news.
• Obama reps bar reporters from covering Silicon Valley fundraisers.

• Ethics trial of former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas begins.
• Calderón again hints at drug legalization.
• Obama Justice Department ramping up civil rights investigations into bad cops. They deserve credit for this.
• Greenwood, Indiana police chief turns down package of “machine pistols.” He deserves credit for this.
• Headline of the day.
• This isn’t encouraging.
• DOJ spent $120 million on conferences over two years, including expenses like $16 muffins and afternoon snacks that ran $32 per person. But no worries! Government thrift will bring down the cost of health care!
• In defense of media bias.
• Awing astronomy photo. Here’s another one.
• The photos that go with this slide show are completely random and hilarious. Quick, give me a photo that says “New Orleans!” and “miserable!” Okay, now Coral Gables, Florida! What? Nothing? Then give me a stock photo of old people! Also, tornadoes!
• “It was misleading.” That’s putting it mildly.

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

It was difficult not to feel safe Monday inside the main exhibition hall at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.

Hundreds of armed police officers — many looking like professional bodybuilders with badges, skin-tight T-shirts, camouflage fatigue pants and combat boots — crowded the aisles of the sprawling hall for the vendor show of the National Tactical Operations Conference.

Tactical robots whirred across the hall’s floor, competing for space with the conventioneers — in this case some 1,000 members of Special Weapons and Tactics teams from police agencies across the nation. The officers were drawn to row after row of exhibits of everything from firearms to body armor and the latest in night-vision equipment.

At every booth, the officers were encouraged to check out the wares, as evidenced by the red laser beams from high-tech rifle scopes constantly dancing across the ceiling.

Wonder what the family of Christie Green would make of all this.

Here’s some video:

So this seems pretty blatant.

A woman testifies against Tulsa cops in a corruption case, and is expected to testify in her family’s related civil suit against the city. In the weeks after the criminal trial, police get warrants on outstanding traffic violations, all misdemeanors, going back to 2007. Naturally, the police serve these warrants by forcing their way into her home.

No intimidation there at all, right? I mean, I’m sure Tulsa PD serves misdemeanor traffic warrants by breaking into citizens’ homes all the time.

Once they were inside her home, Tulsa PD says one officer also accidentally fired his gun. They won’t release that officer’s name.

Wrong-door drug raid on the home of a CBS News correspondent.

Some new parents got an unexpected scare Wednesday morning when they awoke to a team of armed Federal Bureau of Investigation agents attempting to raid their home.

CBS News correspondent Priya David and her husband Alex Clemens were at their home with their newborn child on Lina Avenue when they heard a banging on the door just after 7 a.m.

“Our first thought was the neighborhood is on fire,” resident Alex Clemens said. “I see what turns out to be eight uniformed, armored, armed officers – four of which are pointing guns through the window at my face.”

Just as officers were about to cuff Clemens he warned them that they had the wrong guy.

“They yelled at me ‘Is anyone else in the house,’” Clemens recalled. “I did say ‘yes, my wife is a CBS News correspondent. She’s upstairs nursing our infant baby.’ That seemed to de-escalate things a little bit.”

The suspect apparently lived across the street.

A reader sends this incredible column from Tactical Response magazine, which I gather is a periodical for SWAT types.

Team commanders must raise the profile of their teams. Stay active. Yes, I mean do warrant service and drug raids even if you have to poach the work. First, your team needs the training time under true callout conditions. If all your team does is train, but seldom deploy, you will end up training just to train. You need to train to fight. You already know that.

Second, make SWAT familiar to senior police staff. Everyone fears the unknown. Don’t let SWAT be that unknown. Make deploying SWAT something that is routine, not something only done after much hand-wringing. “Oh, no! You mean we have to call SWAT? Oh, I don’t know, I just don’t know. Really? Call SWAT? Really?”

Yes, you should have clear guidelines for activating the team. But how many times has the callout of a part-time team been delayed or denied when those callout criteria were met? We really do need to explain that SWAT is less of a threat than the people in the calls we are responding to—you know, those vewy, vewy bad people.

The column actually makes some good points about a SWAT commander knowing his team’s limitations.

But note the complete disregard for the rights of the people being raided in the excerpt above. The author is actually suggesting SWAT commanders lobby to have their teams deployed in situations for which they normally wouldn’t be to ensure they’re in good practice. Put another way, he suggests they practice their door smashing, room-clearing, flash-grenade deploying, and other paramilitary tactics on less-than-violent people, so they’re in better form when a real threat arises. Never mind that there are going to be living, breathing, probably bleeding people on the receiving end of these “practice” raids. There’s officer safety and “SWAT team profile” to think about. It’s just an appalling mindset.

That’s the topic of my new piece at HuffPost.

• Renton, Washington police just don’t know when to quit.
• Chicago man charged with attempted murder for shooting at police during a drug raid. Ready for this? Jury acquits.
• Wendy McElroy on war, peace, and passport control.
• Headline of the day.
• Hank Skinner once again files for DNA testing.
• Colorado cops fired after beating a man outside a bar, and after video showed they had lied on their police reports about the incident . . . have been reinstated. With back pay. Full video of the incident here.

First, in Memphis:

Memphis Police have raided the wrong house, slightly injuring a mentally disabled resident.

Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong said officers went to the wrong address to make a drug raid and will be disciplined.

Neighbors told WMC-TV on Wednesday they watched undercover police officers break down the door of the home and rush in. The disabled man and his mother were inside.

Armstrong said such mistakes are rare, but acknowledged they have occurred before in the city. He said he’s thankful no one was seriously injured or killed. Armstrong said police execute a lot of search warrants and “accidents happen.”

The chief apologized to the homeowner and said the city will pay for damages.

In California:

An immigrant family claimed on Monday that immigration agents roughed up their grandmother during a raid in Norco.

The family said dozens of immigration agents swarmed their Norco home around 3:30 p.m. 2 weeks ago.

Josephina Martinez said her 46 year-old mother-in-law sustained bruises when gun-toting agents threw her to the ground as they searched for drugs and guns.

“These officers should have realized that these 5 people were women and children and needed to treat them as such,” said Jorge Mario Cabrera, spokesperson for the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights. “Instead they treated them like criminals.”

Cabrera said a 2 year-old girl and a 16 year-old boy were also in the house at the time, and added that it appears that agents raided the wrong house.

Also in California:

Hey, San Luis Obispo County. You’re about to buy 43 dead marijuana plants. Rather than go to trial in federal court and fight a civil rights lawsuit brought by Los Osos resident Richard Steenken, the county and Sheriff’s Department agreed to settle the case for $25,000, roughly the cash value of Steenken’s marijuana plants, which were seized in a botched drug raid on a medical marijuana card holder.

“I guess it could have been more,” Steenken said of the settlement. “But it’s a long time coming.”

Steenken, a 45-year-old addiction specialist, was arrested on Oct. 15, 2008, and two days later charged with a felony for cultivating marijuana and possessing concentrated cannabis (among other charges). With a $40,000 bail set, Steenken opted to stay in jail, where he remained until Nov. 3 when the District Attorney’s Office dismissed all charges. The judge abided, Steenken was released, and he then fought to have his property returned; it eventually was, after a court order. By the time Steenken reclaimed his property, his 43 plants—which he was allowed to cultivate under state law as a medical marijuana patient—had died.

“Basically they told us, ‘We’re going to enforce federal law,’” said Steenken’s attorney, Dana Rosenburg, who specializes in police misconduct cases. “So they’re using state money … to enforce federal law, and that’s unconstitutional.”

Steenken came home in the middle of the raid and found armed deputies at his home. They raided the home of his then-girlfriend three hours later.

• This looks like a case we’ll be hearing more about. From the article, it isn’t clear why a 20-man SWAT team (allegedly) would have been necessary.
• Woman punches bear in the face, saves dog.
• I’ll be giving a “webinar” for the Students for Liberty on Wednesday, September 14th.
• Will Saletan wants to know how anyone could possibly oppose Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I don’t even know where to begin.
• Good piece on Jon Huntsman, who I’m starting to think would be someone worth rooting for should the GOP nominate him to run against Obama. Which of course is a good sign that the GOP will never nominate him.
• Feds tell trucking company they aren’t allowed to fire an alcoholic driver. But they’re still liable if he drives drunk and kills someone.

• Tennessee woman threatened with arrest for allowing her daughter to ride her bike to school.
• Rob Delaney is funny. (Possibly NSFW.)
• Last three speakers of the Massachusetts House have felony convictions.
•  Gawker says Bill O’Reilly pulled some strings to have his his wife’s boyfriend investigated by cops.
• D.C. cop who shot at a car full of people had prior history of alcohol-related incidents. He had also pulled a gun on one of the victims earlier the same night, but was given a pass when another cop determined he was an off-duty cop.
• Steven Seagal sued for driving tank into house, killing puppy and more than a hundred chickens.
• Headline of the day.
• State of Illinois runs a dating services for pedophiles.

A. Barton Hinkle has a good column on police militarization today, and not just because he quotes me (though that helps!).

There is one point Hinkle concedes that I’m not sure he should: I’ve still yet to see any empirical data to support the contention that criminals in the U.S. are arming themselves with more powerful weapons—at least in significant numbers. I’ve heard plenty of anecdotes to that effect from police officials while justifying their new APV or armament of military-grade machine guns. But nothing in the way of data.

In fact, in Overkill (see pages 27-28), I noted that the only two studies available at the time—one done in 1995 by the National Institute for Justice and one published in 1991 by Dave Kopel and Eric Morgan—came to the opposite conclusion. Both those studies are pretty dated now, but I’ve yet to see anything newer to support the broad contention that criminals in the U.S. are moving toward higher-powered weapons. But I also haven’t tracked the issue as closely as I did while I was researching that paper.  If anyone knows of something more recent, please send it my way, or throw up a link in the comments.