Innocent St. Louis family terrorized in SWAT raid over stolen AirPods
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
You want to exercise power over others, punish people for treating you impolitely, ruin the day of people you dislike without consequence? Join the police!
Why not ring the bell and ask? Why not first walk around the house to get a more accurate bearing on the airpods? And why even wreck an entire house over some airpods? There's no sense in any of this, and people should definitely be held accountable.
I'm starting to think that the modern, loose usage of SWAT is cruel and unusual punishment without a proper conviction. The punishment for actually stealing the air pods is likely less than the trauma of being SWATed and the fines are likely less than it cost to replace windows/doors/whatever.
Have the warrants specify where, when, and how the search should be executed. Whether they're allowed to break the door down, whether they're allowed to be fully SWATted up, etc. Make it clear that any actions taken outside of the warrant's directions are done as a citizen, not an officer.
Then penalize officers for poor execution of warrants, and judges for poor issuance of warrants.
This problem has nothing to do with the police. This problem has something to do with whoever is giving the police the ability to get away with (sometimes literally) murder and not face any consequences even for obvious, blatant misbehavior. Qualified immunity and all that bullshit.
They should be “defunded”.
Local candidates generally can exert no control over the police, even in large cities. If you piss off the police too much, they just stop arresting people, and then organized crime moves in.
I think the grimmest timeline there is the city needing to fire their entire police department and using the state's National Guard as police for an interim period while they find new officers.
They are not legally allowed to strike, but they can just really slow things down.
> Democracy doesn't work if the police can just strike and let society collapse if we vote for something they don't like.
I don't feel democracy is really working, where the police are concerned.
Then fire them for performance? I also don't think a judge would be hoodwinked that easily. They aren't generally that stupid, and the law isn't generally that inflexible.
As terrible of an idea as it would be, I get a perverse sense of glee out of imagining replacing the police with the National Guard and then having them harass the FOP until they drop the inevitable lawsuits, like the FOP has done to many others. Terrible idea, but fantastic daydream.
> I don't feel democracy is really working, where the police are concerned.
This is going to be the police's downfall, though they appear to be too dense to realize it yet. The only difference between the police and a street gang is that the police are ostensibly directed by and accountable to the people. The whole monopoly on violence, except now the people are no longer the ones wielding that monopoly.
The system will respond with the only reaction it knows when faced with a perceived existential threat: massive, overwhelming force and the abandonment of core principles like innocent until proven guilty. Guilt will be presumed by association until the traditional systems feel in control again.
To be clear, I think that's a bad thing, and literally everyone would be better off if we didn't get there, but I don't see any indications of that happening this far. The citizens keep getting more pissed, and the police keep convincing themselves they're invulnerable.
I'm guessing autocorrect got you here, but I like this moniker. I'm going to start calling it 'probably cause' when police get sketchy warrants.
This problem also has to do with the police:
>> One SWAT team member punched a basketball-sized hole in the drywall. Another broke through a drop ceiling. They turned over drawers and left what had been an orderly house in disarray.
This sentiment is why this happens. We're talking about stolen AirPods and carjacking. Not a terrorist cell or cartel operation. This statement essentially argues that they didn't deserve it because it's a nice home in a good neighborhood but living in a trashy home in a bad neighborhood doesn't justify this kind of violence either. Unless there's an imminent threat (and there almost never is) you should expect the police to be required to do at least a modicum of reconnaissance work before sending in the big guns.
We already have constitutional due process. Let’s use that instead of pretending we’re in country on deployment and fighting terrorists because we never got to murder anyone when we joined the national guard at 18.
But it's really a problem of policing approach, which includes accountability. I've experienced a similar problem, but the police didn't tear my home down. I use tracking devices (Airpods) and I accept the side effects, as long as they're not extreme.
It wasn't on their premises, though—it was outside, in the street.
Which was entirely preventable by not having any device leaking personal location information inside your premises.
Have fun with your moat.
The problem is the police. Any conversation otherwise just simps for a police / military state that will, eventually, get you, too.