Your tax dollars at work. Reason’s Radley Balko:
In February, I wrote the following about a drug raid in Missouri:
SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.
They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.
So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.
Just so we’re clear.
Now there’s video, which you can watch below. It’s horrifying, but I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.
But they did prevent Jonathan Whitworth from smoking the pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.
Police State, anyone?
surprised anyone?
Reminds me of Iraq and Afganistan.
I’ve read about this video on FL and I’ve been afraid to watch it. I still get flashes on the cries of the dogs who had been shot in NOLA after Katrina. Guys with rifles in trucks riding around on seek and destroy missions against lost dogs…. I’m not up for more terrified, dying dogs screaming in pain.
And I’m a cat person!
Absolute scumbags. Equipping and training police units as “swat” teams was a spectacular idea. The proliferation of military weapons and tactics to police units must stop. This is utterly ridiculous, not to mention sickening.