A lot of it has been covered already, but I am so angry that I'm going to go over it again:
the officer didn't realize that there was a delay on the grenade when he tried to detonate it.
Then why is he allowed to play with it?
St. John said investigators did plenty of homework on the residence before deciding to launch the raid but didn't know children were inside.
I guess your homework was not plenty enough. You need a real good explanation of how you missed the presence of two kids, as well as some real good documentation of how long you studied the residence.
"The information that we had did not have any juveniles in the house and did not have any juveniles in the room," he said. "We generally do not introduce these disorienting devices when they're present."
You "generally do not" set off flash-bangs if kids are present? That means that on ocassion (like this one) you in fact do set them off even when your homework has shown that there are kids present in the residence. I would really like to see the grappling hook they use to climb out of that hole.
"Every bit of information and intelligence that we have comes together and we determine what kind of risk is there," St. John said. "The warrant was based on some hard evidence and everything we knew at the time."
Based on "some" hard evidence - and the rest of what you based it on is - what? Are they going to use the same grappling hook, or get a new one, to climb out of this hole?
No arrests were made during the raid and no charges have been filed, although a police spokesman said afterward that some evidence was recovered during the search. St. John declined to release specifics of the drug case, citing the active investigation, but did say that "activity was significant enough where our drug unit requested a search warrant."
"Activity was significant enough where our drug unit requested a search warrant" does not have anything to do with actual, real, honest-to-goodness evidence seized at the scene. If they thought it was necessary to use a dynamic SWAT entry to serve the warrant, the evidence they recovered should have been sufficient to be the basis of an arrest at the scence. Just how long does it take to review "some evidence [that] was recovered during the search" and determine that based on that evidence charges should be filed? Or are they letting a family that was running a meth lab in the middle of a residential neighborhood walk around free to destroy/dispose of any potential evidence that was not recovered at the scene, or to move assets that the cops have not yet discovered?
In other words - Barney Miller and his squad, Precient 54's Officer Tooty, or even the Keystone Kops could have done a better job.
stay safe.
