Georgia police and FBI conduct Swat-style raids on 'Cop City' activists' homes
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
There should be consequences like job loss for police and agents and judges when their raids are not correlated with any accusation of a crime (ie, indictment).
In this case, 61 people have already been indicted under Georgia’s state RICO act along with various charges of domestic terrorism, arson, and money laundering (https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/06/us/cop-city-protesters-indict...). And just like any conspiracy or RICO case, it’s common to start by arresting some people at the bottom and see which of them is willing to inform on the people at the top who might be harder to catch. Its the same basic playbook the feds used to take down the Mafia.
Yes, they say they needed to search for a reason but I think we'll find none of these people ever have charges (related to the search warrant) filed against them. And that's the system: pretend the methods needed and used for real criminals need to be applied to people committing no crimes.
It's been a few days since this post and I've looked. There have been no more indictments. This was pure lashing out with indiscriminate violence by the Georgia police gang.
That’s not how these investigations work. You indict a few people, some of them snitch, now you have probable cause to expand the investigation.
> And now these unrelated, unindicted people, are having their lives ruined just because they went to a protest.
A “protest” that featured planned and premeditated acts of arson?
Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about the prosecution of people who participated in the January 6th protest? Or is that different because it doesn’t agree with your political ideology?
> It's been a few days since this post and I've looked. There have been no more indictments.
It takes more than “a few days” to indict people. Sometimes it takes months—in the example I already cited to you, it took the better part of a year.
Citation needed. That is certainly what the police are trying to claim to justify their lashing out but there's no indication it applies to this second group at all.
I will not respond to your second attempt to make this about unrelated flamewar politics instead.
That wasn’t my intention. I was genuinely curious whether or not you actually had a principled stance against protesters facing legal repercussions for being involved in a disorderly protest in which a minority of protesters committed acts of mayhem and destruction. If so, it should have been easy for you to apply that standard across the board.
Instead, it appears that you actually do apply a double standard based upon your personal sympathy with the cause being protested. Which has left you in a closed circle in which you hate the police, so when a “protest” is little more than an organized smokescreen for acts of domestic terrorism against the construction site for a police facility, it’s automatically the police who are the bad guys for investigating the incident and not the people trying to burn down a public facility.
And it is rather funny of you to accuse me of “flamewar politics” when you are the one advocating for people whose form of political protest entails literal flames.
NARA asked for return of the documents, then a long negotiation ensued, along with partial return of the records. After the criminal investigation started, the DOJ subpoenaed Trump, and after several weeks of back-and-forths went to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the subpoenaed documents. The DOJ believed there were more documents, and issued a subpoena for surveillance footage. Only then was a search warrant issued, and with a far higher level of scrutiny than usual. The search took place at 9am, the Secret Service were warned a few hours before, and two of Trump's lawyers were present.
Do you really think you can compare that to a 6am surprise raid where "This week alone saw Atlanta-area raids by law enforcement that took a woman out of her house with no shirt, left a naked photo of another woman on display after ransacking a room and dragged a man by his hair – while arresting none of them." or "person living at the house where Mazurek was arrested woke up on Thursday to a flashbang grenade"?
No.
> sounds like they were executing a search warrant
The problem is that people believe that a 6am surprise raid using flash grenades and dragging people out by their hair is equivalent to a 9am search warrant executed with warning at the residence of an ex-President, with his lawyers present.
Both are search warrants executed under color of law. That doesn't mean they have anywhere near equal respect for the occupants of the homes being searched.
It establishes that search warrants usually come before indictments in the investigation process, not after them.
> The problem is that people believe that a 6am surprise raid using flash grenades and dragging people out by their hair is equivalent to a 9am search warrant executed with warning at the residence of an ex-President, with his lawyers present.
Yes, that is the difference between a domestic terrorism investigation and a mishandling-classified-documents investigation.
My point is you prima facie should not compare them as the two search warrants are issued with a very different level of scrutiny, and with very different levels of potential physical and emotional harm.
A mishandling-classified-documents investigation does not require a higher level of scrutiny than a domestic terrorism investigation. Trump's search warrant had a higher level of scrutiny because he was President, not because of the type of case.
We can see what the government has done in other stolen document cases, like the Harold T. Martin III case: "The FBI originally believed Martin to be the source of the Shadow Brokers thefts of NSA hacking tools, and used the information provided by Kaspersky researchers to execute a search warrant on Martin's modest residence in suburban Glen Burnie, Maryland, deploying a SWAT team, setting up roadblocks, breaking down the front door with a battering ram, and deploying flash bangs inside the house before removing Martin at gunpoint". (Quoting Wikipedia.) Yes, he mishandled classified documents but no, he was not part of the Shadow Brokers. He may have been simply a data hoarder as "he appeared not to have ever accessed any of the files once he removed them from government facilities".
The level of force used in his search warrant does not seem much different than these Georgia raids.
Or a comparison with Jack Teixiera, also arrested on espionage charges, where the search warrant was executed by heavily armed police using an armored vehicle. At least that one took place in the afternoon when Teixiera and his family were awake and dressed. Here's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eMrlJUeBYU
Again, not much different, but showing it is possible to be a bit more humane in executing this sort of warrant.
We can also look at the Wen Ho Lee case to see what the government does to someone who they wrongly believe to be a spy, when the only evidence they had was his mishandling of "Protect As Restricted Data" work - which they retroactively classified to "Secret" so they could charge him.
Trump called the very calm and non-violent raid on Mar-a-Lago an act of political persecution. Surely these Georgia search warrants may also be viewed as an act of political persecution.
Because it was a recent, high profile example of a search warrant being executed against a residence prior to the indictment of a suspect. Though I should have anticipated that some people would struggle to decouple their strong feelings about the former president from the specific point I was trying to make.
> A mishandling-classified-documents investigation does not require a higher level of scrutiny than a domestic terrorism investigation.
It’s not about the “level of scrutiny” so much as the risk to the officers executing the search. If you’re investigating people for committing organized and premeditated acts of violence motivated by opposition to law enforcement, it’s reasonable to presume that those suspects pose a high level of danger to law enforcement.
They chose the most cop-like thing to do. Because they could.
This week alone saw Atlanta-area raids by law enforcement that took a woman out of her house with no shirt left a naked photo of another woman on display after ransacking a room and dragged a man by his hair – while arresting none of them.
Officers led her to a squad car, where she remained for “what seemed like hours” – while officers came in and out of the car, her top uncovered the whole time.
One took photos of her, insisting, “it’s only of your face”.
After some time, she was released.
Please show me the law, manual, protocol, training, regulation or fusion center directive that says dragging a topless woman out of her home - to kept available for hours for male police to observe and photograph - is an appropriate response to anything.
The police are entitled to take measures for their safety, but this is abusing that right. There is a line, but the fact they’re allowed to cross it without reproach is why there is so little public trust in the police. They’ve become oppressors in safety’s name.
Any raid that early must expect to find naked people sleeping as a lot of Americans sleep naked. (I see numbers including 8%, 12%, 17%, 28.5%, and "58 percent of Millennials"). The numbers are higher if you include partially clothed.
Why do the police have no procedures in place for what must surely be a common occurrence, like a blanket or robe they can provide to a detained half-naked woman?
I agree that it comes across like the psychological torment of the occupants of the residences is part of the reason for executing the search warrant this way.
Just because it's a domestic terrorism case does not mean the suspects - who may well be innocent - should be treated this way.
To minimize the danger to the officers executing the search. This is a case of organized, premeditated violence motivated by opposition to law enforcement; obviously a high risk situation.
The trend of cops being safer every year hasn't changed in generations. Militarizing police and treating citizens as armed combatants didn't budge the overall trend.
However, when war-grade policing rolled out, the officer-safety trend became spiker than it had been.
ref: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1070627/us-law-enforceme...
> This is a case of organized, premeditated violence motivated by opposition to law enforcement; obviously a high risk situation.
Fear-the-public mantra is super helpful to companies that sell gear to maximize civilian harm (and PDs who adore that gear). It doesn't serve the public well, however.
Actually, according to the data you shared, they’re safer, at least from gunfire and stabbing. This is probably a direct result of these precautions.
> Fear-the-public mantra is super helpful to companies that sell gear to maximize civilian harm
Are you seriously accusing me of being a shill for companies that make SWAT gear? Give me a break.
I don’t think every search warrant needs to be executed with a predawn raid and flashbangs, but those measures are clearly warranted if the search warrant is for a residence inhabited by suspected domestic terrorists with an animosity towards law enforcement.
What evidence do they have that this is the case, and that other approaches - like a 9am raid - don't have better outcomes for everyone involved?
How many raids like this result in a finding that such a raid was not necessary? How does that compare to raids carried out during normal working hours?
Even if a 6am raid is warranted, why didn't the authorities have gowns or robes or other means in place given the high likelihood that some of the people would be naked or half-naked, in order to protect the detainee's sense of decency and humanity?
If no guns or explosives are found, and these people are never arrested, never tried, or never convicted, can we retroactively say the raids was needlessly harsh, and thus casting doubt on the reasoning the police use to justify this sort of raid in the first place, or do we always give the benefit of doubt to the police? (In the same way we are told the police sniffer dogs are 100% trustworthy when they indicate drugs, and cannot be assumed to be following a signal from their handler.)
The point of raiding earlier in the morning is that if you catch the suspects by surprise while they’re asleep, they’re less likely to be tipped off and ambush the officers. This sort of thing happens more often than you think.
What’s more, we live in a country where people will literally make false 911 calls in order to lure random police into an ambush and kill them, like this incident in Bristol, CT in 2022. (https://apnews.com/article/shootings-connecticut-bristol-har...) So yes, it is absolutely reasonable for the police to consider the possibility that a suspect might just want to kill a cop for the sake of killing a cop—especially in a domestic terrorism case that is primarily motivated by hating cops in the first place!
> If no guns or explosives are found, and these people are never arrested, never tried, or never convicted, can we retroactively say the raids was needlessly harsh, and thus casting doubt on the reasoning the police use to justify this sort of raid in the first place
You can’t judge these things in hindsight. They made the decision they did with the information they had at the time, and in order to get a search warrant, they had to convince a judge that they had probable cause based on the evidence available to them already. And you continue to ignore the fact that dozens of people have been indicted in this same case already.
Where is the evidence to support that argument?
The US is also a country with SWATting, because people know the police come in with a huge amount of force, and the application of that force can be mentally and physically abusive to the targets of the SWATting - the side effect is the goal.
If the police are not prepared to handle something as simple as bringing in a robe or blanket to preserve a half-naked woman's sense of decency, then they are deliberately avoiding making these raids less abusive.
I’ve presented evidence that people actually do prepare ambushes for the police and that the basic threat isn’t purely hypothetical. It should be obvious that being taken by surprise prevents someone from preparing an ambush; if you think about the basic concepts of “surprise” and “preparing an ambush” for a few minutes I have faith you can figure out why!
> If the police are not prepared to handle something as simple as bringing in a robe or blanket to preserve a half-naked woman's sense of decency, then they are deliberately avoiding making these raids less abusive.
They probably did, but the “protesters” have a specific bias and a specific agenda so they likely added some lies and exaggerations to the story. This sort of thing happens all the time. And the Guardian took their word for it because of their biases.
Like I said (and you apparently didn't read) the trend (which you seem to not have studied) shows how cop-safety had increased for many years before cops declared war on citizens (and outfitted/trained accordingly) - at which point the trend sort of continued in the same direction but was now a lot less steady.
> Are you seriously accusing me of being a shill for companies that make SWAT gear? Give me a break.
No. You introduced that twist into the conversation. I don't know why you did.
I was introducing the mantra and where it's found useful. But since you've raised the notion of shilling, I could agree that police fans would also find it a useful chant.
> suspected domestic terrorists with an animosity towards law enforcement.
As far as incidents that resemble domestic terrorism go, no-knock raids come as close as they can. That would seem to make police a major (if not the largest) domestic source of attack-driven fear and terror.
You went back and edited your comment after I replied to it.
Most of the changes in police tactics are motivated by specific incidents, many of which involved officer deaths. You’re positing some imaginary world where the police adopted SWAT tactics and gear for literally no reason when in reality, it was because of deadly incidents such as the 1970 Newhall shooting, 1980 Norco shootout, 1986 Miami Dade shootout, and the 1997 North Hollywood shootout—all instances of law enforcement being outgunned by violent criminals, and in all but the last of these cases, getting killed as a result. Each of these incidents resulted in changes in equipment, training, and procedures.
After editing and posting I saw no replies. I left for work.
> Most of the changes in police tactics are motivated by specific incidents, many of which involved officer deaths.
This is indeed a selling point of militarizing cops but the justification doesn't jibe well with generations of decreasing police death rates.
> You’re positing some imaginary world where the police adopted SWAT tactics and gear for literally no reason...
Not for no reason. Unions, agencies/depts, pols and police industries have crafted many reasons. Universally those reasons exclude the super critical part about generations of decreasing police deaths.
> in reality, it was because of deadly incidents [cites incidents that long, long predate the spikey part of decreasing police deaths].
It's kind of hard to draw a parallel between widely disparate events - some so historical that people involved in them have died of old age - and the much more recent amping up of police aggression.
> Each of these incidents resulted in changes in equipment, training, and procedures.
I would agree that LEO events from 50 years ago eventually contributed to the 40 year decline in police deaths that continues today. A big one is the Church committee's exposure of FBI domestic surveillance. That pressured the agency to refocus on it's law enforcement duties. And that coincides with the sharp reduction of domestic terror attacks, from the historical 1970 high of ~400/year to decades of much, much lower DT rates.
Your argument still makes no sense. Law enforcement is just like any other job—the death rate goes down over time as more and more safety measures are adopted. They went down, in part, because of the safety measures.
> It's kind of hard to draw a parallel between widely disparate events - some so historical that people involved in them have died of old age - and the much more recent amping up of police aggression.
More recent? Most of the SWAT stuff dates back to the 1980’s and 1990’s at the very latest, the “War on Drugs” era. And I’d be sympathetic to the argument that these measures are excessive when it comes to drug trafficking, but this is a domestic terrorism case.
Yes, that's how a police state justifies the primacy of the needs of police over the rest of the civilian population.
We know executing search warrants like this are risky, because people have died in these sorts of raids, and flash grenades have severely injured babies like https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/supreme-court-ga... or https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-toddler-georgia/toddl... in Atlanta. Including on raids that were sent to the wrong address, or where the person they were looking for was not home.
We know people are woken up, surprised, think they are being robbed by an armed gang and shot to defend themselves, only to be killed by the police.
And we know the police exaggerate and hype up the danger level, to justify the use of drastic techniques which are dangerous to the people being investigated.
In https://www.wkrg.com/mobile-county/family-of-teen-killed-dur... the police did a surprise raid at 5:30am. A 16-year old pointed a laser-sighted handgun at the officers, likely thinking they were criminals attacking, and the cops shot and killed him.
To make it worse, the person they were seeking wasn't there.
To make it even more worse, person they were seeking was later arrested on a marijuana warrant after turning himself in.
We know the police ALWAYS justify the tactics used in their early morning raid as "To minimize the danger to the officers executing the search", and there's no way to refute them because they always argue it could have been worse.
Why should we believe the police in Georgia were any more correct in their assessment? Where is their experimental evidence which supports pre-dawn raids over other approaches, like even a 9am raid?
Why should we believe there was no other reasonable way to conduct the raid which would have been just as safe for the police while showing much more respect to the people being raided?
Why should we trust what they say when we know there's a long history of them exaggerating the danger?
I questioned how you can tell if the cops are telling the truth for this case when you know the cops have a long history of exaggerating the danger they face, and have long used identical tactics on cases which did not involve domestic terrorism (like a marijuana warrant).
Experience tells us these regulations are not being written with the blood of innocent babies in mind, because it's easy to find news reports where babies were injured by flash grenades in early morning raids, when you would think the regulations should change after the first one .. or three.
Nor is experience written with the blood the other residents of these households, like the death of Breonna Taylor during a midnight raid when her boyfriend thought the police were robbers, and the actual suspect was her ex-boyfriend who hadn't been there for a long time.
Why should it change when the officers involved face very few consequences for their actions?
No, it's only written with blood - often imaginary - of the police in mind, because they are the ones who write the regulations.
Plus, they face almost no consequences for fabricating the severity of the dangers they face.
Plus, they get more funding if they exaggerate the danger - a "safe" warrant execution justifies that that amount of force was needed to keep things safe, so we need to keep pouring money into our militarized police force.