Wrong Door Drug Raid Disrupts Family Dinner
Q: What's more annoying than solicitors ringing your doorbell during dinner?
A: Cops busting your door down, pointing guns at you, and then realizing they're in the wrong place.
Diana El-Bynum says both she and her husband were handcuffed and were humiliated in front of their neighbors. She says she can't believe the police could have made a mistake like this. Inspector Horne says this type of mistake doesn't happen often and accounts for a small percentage of the thousands of operations they do a year. In this case, he says surveillance officers didn't give an address of the home they were targeting. [FOX Philadelphia]
What kind of excuse is that? If you don’t have an address, don't do the raid, silly.
"They gave a physical description, house with a black storm door, in front of the residence was a pick up truck. Unfortunately there was a house 5 doors away that had a black storm door with pick up in front. The officers didn't have time to determine which house was which," said Inspector Horne.
Considering how many people die in these raids, maybe they should make time. But at least they made a half-assed apology:
Inspector Horne said "On behalf of the Philadelphia Police Department and the Narcotics Strike Force, I'm totally willing to apologize for the efforts, the mistake. The overall intent was to eradicate drugs from the neighborhood."
So because the intent was to eradicate drugs, should we be tolerant of this sort of incompetence? Is that what he's saying? Again, people get killed when police raid the wrong house, so it's actually a really big deal. I just don't know what else to say about this. They didn't even have an address this time.
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Come on now...
Comment posted by Matt_Potter on Fri, 09/14/2007 - 2:01pma few deaths are acceptable. Rember it's for the children, as long as they're 18 when we accidentally kill it's ok.....
Police raids make me a sad panda
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Comment posted by Giordano on Mon, 09/17/2007 - 10:28pmI suppose it’s too much to ask that a judge demand an actual street address as they rubberstamp the warrants?
Police raids in drug-war-America display a classic problem of totalitarian societies. One tiny bureaucratic snafu can be lethal. The topic was portrayed in the prescient film-classic Brazil, in which a typo results in Buttle being arrested and tortured to death instead of Tuttle.
Military style raids on citizen’s homes should be a last resort carried out only under very well-defined circumstances. Instead, particularly in Las Vegas, the SWAT team is sent in on drug warrants just to give the SWAT officers something to do in addition to sometimes having to deal with hostage situations or snipers. While the police claim military-style raid tactics enhance their personal safety, the same cannot be said for the victims of botched drug raids.
Far from being an effective means to serve a search warrant or make an arrest, the military-style drug raid elevates the perceived level of violence in American society. The heightened emotional state of the raids leads to desperate and sometimes fatal reactions by those targeted by the police. The raids give law abiding citizens the impression they are living in a police state, complete with nameless, faceless cops dressed like Darth Vader who are ready to pounce on them over some clerical error. And politically, these raids become a means of grandstanding for any police department seeking publicity to get more funding, or to achieve some political goal.
Perhaps if police grandstanding of this sort had been outlawed, Waco and its consequences could have been avoided. Certain innocent people killed in botched drug raids would be alive. And, of course, American citizens would not be living in fear of being gunned down in their own homes by cops making a simple marijuana bust.
Giordano