Raids
Radley is tracking botched police raids so I don’t have to.
Polcie in Arizona raided the home of a 73-year-old man with Alzheimers this week. The flash grenade they deployed during the raid set the home on fire, and burned it down. No one inside heard a police announcement, though the police of course insist they made one. They claim they were looking for a wanted burglar, and insist they had the right house. But they found none of the evidence they claimed they would find on the search warrant.
Then what is a botched raid?
About 30 police officers, narcotics detectives and five drug-sniffing dogs descended on Bonneville High School in Washington Terrace on Tuesday in a search for drugs being dealt out of lockers and hallways.
The officers walked away empty handed.
Meanwhile, on another famous botched raid:
Some of the worst abuses of government force in recent years were precipitated by technical and victimless gun-law violations. For example, the BATF claimed that the Branch Davidians possessed machine guns without paying the required federal tax and filling in the proper registration forms. So a tax case worth less than $10,000 led to a 76-man helicopter, machine gun, and grenade assault on a home in which 2/3 of the occupants were women and children.
December 26th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
I’m not sure what they were hoping to find at Bonneville HS. It’s about as Mormon middle-class as you can get; I’d be surprised if 5% of the studentbody was even using alcohol.
It makes me wonder if the cops weren’t suffering from “scenario fulfillment”, meaning that they the cops were so convinced that drugs were there they saw every piece of contrary evidence as proof of drug use. You’d have to be really paranoid to believe a relatively squeaky-clean place like BHS was full of junkies.