Is this a US only phenomenon or is it happening in other countries too?
[1] in finnish: http://nyt.fi/a1305943609673
This stuff doesn't have to be the standard. This is a fad borne of the fact that most people who are SWATed find boots on their necks and cuffs on their wrists before they're capable of explaining themselves. If they're lucky.
Here's an example of a women with a knife making threats to kill people and ignoring police instruction where those police are clearly armed and prepared to kill.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/03/idaho-police-...
She was pregnant; the knife was a three inch blade; the police had less-lethal options available but chose not to use them; police did not just have their pistols - one of them had an AR15 rifle.
There were things the police could have done that would have avoided the death of the woman (and the risk of death or injury to bystanders). (I'm not talking about shoot to wound - I know enough to know that's misguided). The police could have used their tasers. They should have been given better training in de-escalation.
I'm doing my best to spare the diatribe about how the Oakland Police Department is essentially the worst police department in the US.
Let's just take a step back. In what world does someone who wants a ransom for a hostage call the police? This isn't something that happens, except in action movies. The entire narrative, including the police reaction, is straight out of a sophomore film student's twisted imagination.
The police, esp in the US, but in general, aren't designed to protect and serve, they're designed to eliminate threats to power. Right now Oakland has a new mayor who wants to make sure voters see that she is tough on crime.
This situation is an unfortunate collision of two worlds that know very little about each other. :/
Any witness can call and describe the situation, as well as victims that are in hiding.
If you were a 911 operator and got a call that was ordering a Pizza you would have hang up right?
There needs to be a high bar for using it (maybe even "don't").
To put it in a fire department metaphor, if someone anonymously calls in a fire, naturally you send out the trucks. But you need to check for smoke before you turn the hose on, right?
So FYI for other people nor unerstanding finnish: This is about some finns (probably teens) calling police to some address in another country, not police raiding homes swat style in Finland.
Article also states that KRP (national bureau of investigation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bureau_of_Investigatio...) is investigating the issue so finnish police is definitely not taking this lightly.
About half the people killed by police have mental health problems. This is an estimate because national data isn't collected. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/03/idaho-police-...
http://tacreports.org/storage/documents/2013-justifiable-hom...
But, for the UK, don't forget the several bad shootings of innocent or unarmed men. Wikipedia has a list of all killings involving a police officer in the UK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforce...
We don't shoot many people, America do. It's such a huge, cavernous gulf in magnitude that I have no idea what point you're trying to make with your last paragraph.
Also: yes, even those few deaths are totally unacceptable in the UK. People are shocked by police shootings; investigations are rigorous. Contrast that to the US where shootin a dog sparks mass outrage but shooting a drunk pregnant woman doesn't.
The classic example is if the police think that evidence could be destroyed very quickly, e.g., electronic records.
For one, you could detect these no-knocking individuals quite easily:
- Cameras on the exterior of the property
- Motion lights, motion sensors, motion bells are all quite cheap.
And re: destruction/obfuscation of electronic evidence-
-"One-click" destruction scripts, etc.
- TrueCrypt volumes, everywhere. Circuit breakers, power strips, etc. with switches. If you don't manage to destroy the volume, no aggressor will be able to access it.
- Degaussing setups for spinning disks, activated by similar mechanisms.
This stuff is pretty cheap, easily available. Anybody caught by these technically-incompetent police executing no-knock raids deserves to be caught.
Hell, if you don't have a few 6TB volumes full of random bits, labeled "Evidence," you aren't doing it right. Gotta tie up those investigative resources somehow.
Either someone is in danger, in which case no-knock isn't needed, or they're not, in which case why the hell is a SWAT raid being carried out on the basis of an anonymous tip?