Showing posts with label SWAT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SWAT. Show all posts
Police State Update: Did SWAT Burn A Man Alive?
from the Antelope Valley Times. A convicted felon, whose body was found after a SWAT team fired in tear gas into a Lancaster home, and a fire broke out, was publicly identified Saturday by the Coroner’s Office. The man was identified as Michael Leroy Soares, 35, of Lancaster, said Coroner’s Lt. David Smith. It was still not clear how he died, ... MOREMichael Heise: 22 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Trust Police
The police aren't making too many friends these days. It seems like there isn't a day that goes by where some tragic and outrageous story doesn't come out involving the cops somehow violating someone's rights, or even killing them. But, no matter how much we see this behavior, no matter how frequent it becomes, there seems to be ... MOREMasked SWAT Team Raids Poker Game, Terrorizes Players
by Tom Jackman. Militarized cops seek to protect society from gamblers. On a quiet weeknight among the stately manors of Great Falls, ten men sat around a table in the basement of a private home last November playing high stakes poker. Suddenly, masked and heavily armed SWAT team officers from the Fairfax County Police Department ... MOREPolice Union: Don't Mess With No-Knock Warrants
by Bernard Watson. Carrie Mills is a retired Atlanta Police officer with 30 years on the job - primarily in APD's drug unit. Mills is now a union rep for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers. She considers herself an expert on search warrants, particularly no knock warrants, which allows officers to enter a structure without knocking first. Mills says ... MORERadley Balko: The Flashbang Menace
Officer safety always trumps citizen safety. ProPublica has just published a long investigation of the use of flashbang grenades, an issue I’ve written about quite a bit, including here at The Watch. These
are the incendiary devices intended to temporarily stun, blind and
deafen everyone within range. They have some limited appropriate ... MORE
John W. Whitehead: From Neighborhood Cops to Robocops
The changing face of American police. “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means If 2014 was the year of militarized police, armored tanks, and stop-and-frisk searches, 2015 may well be the year of technologized police, surveillance blimps and ... MORESWAT Kills Man In ‘Drug Raid’ That Finds $2 Of Marijuana
One less pot smoker, America is safe! Original story. Jason Westcott had no criminal record to speak of, and yet he died in a SWAT “drug raid” on his house which yielded only $2.00 in marijuana. It all started when a confidential informant lied to police about Westcott. That informant, who approached the Tampa Bay Times in July using ... MOREJohn W. Whitehead: Welcome To The Matrix
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Enslaved by technology and the Internet of things. If ever Americans sell their birthright, it will be for the promise of expediency and comfort delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and ... MOREJohn W. Whitehead : You’re Either a Cop or Little People
A bad year for the little people. For those of us who have managed to survive 2014 with our lives intact and our freedoms hanging by a thread, it has been a year of crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and ... MOREMassachusetts SWAT Teams Claim Private Corporations Status; Contend They're Immune From Open Records Laws
by Radley Balko. So they're NOT public servants. That explains a lot. As part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent report on police militarization,
the Massachusetts chapter of the organization sent open records
requests to SWAT teams across that state. It received an interesting
response. As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in ... MORERadley Balko: A Drug Informant Lies, An Innocent Man Dies
When home invaders are from the government. Back in July, we looked at the case of Jason Wescott, a Florida man shot and killed by a police SWAT team during a drug raid over an alleged sale of $200 worth of pot to a police informant. The tragedy was exacerbated by the fact that according to friends and relatives, Wescott had been ... MOREDon't Blame Me - The Year's Highlights In Buck Passing
by Jacob Sullum. For years New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has
insisted that people who pay for sex and the
intermediaries who facilitate that exchange are responsible for
violence against women. Hence his February 26
column celebrating the arrests of men who were guilty of
nothing but negotiating terms with cops posing as ... MOREChris Cassidy: The High Cost Of Drug War Mistakes
Wrongful death suit results from botched SWAT raid. A federal wrongful death suit against a Framingham police officer who accidentally shot to death an unarmed elderly man during a SWAT raid in 2011 was allowed to continue by a judge yesterday. U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV ruled that the constitutional rights of Eurie ... MOREVIDEO: Police State America - Missouri SWAT Tactics
Would this get mainstream media coverage had the victim been black?
Why Americans Keep Losing To The Police State
by John W. Whitehead. The game is rigged. Being a citizen in the American police state is much like playing a game of cards against a stacked deck: you’re always going to lose. The game is rigged, and “we the people” keep getting dealt the same losing hand. Even so, we stay in the game, against all odds, trusting that our luck will change. ... MOREThe Trials of Growing Up in a Police State
by John W. Whitehead. After a year dominated with news of police shootings of unarmed citizens (including children), SWAT team raids gone awry, photo ops of militarized police shouldering assault rifles while perched on top of armored vehicles, and reports on how the police are using asset forfeiture laws to pad their pockets with luxury cars, ... MORE4 Members of Congress Put Their Hands Up in Solidarity With Protesters But 0 Voted to Limit Police Militarization
by Ed Krayewski. Symbolism without subbstance. Michael
Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson,
Missouri, in August. Protests over the shooting yielded a
militarized response from police. Renewed protests continued in
October and again after a grand jury declined to indict Darren
Wilson, the officer who shot Brown. ... MORE
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