Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Tallpine on October 12, 2012, 11:00:16 AM
-
http://billingsgazette.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/grenade-burns-sleeping-girl-as-swat-team-raids-home/article_8bc67054-464d-5951-a5a1-003d4ed02d99.html
Police state now in Montana.
Looking for a non-existent meth lab. No arrests and no charges, but "some evidence" collected. ;/
I am furious, and I've just lost what little respect that I had left for cops.
-
<C&SD> good. she shouldnt have been in that house. god bless those police for taking care of that dangerous criminal. aybe next time she'll watch who she assiciates with </C&SD>
-
You go to a house where you "suspect" there's a meth lab (just skip all that surveillance stuff, that's too time consuming and expensive) and you toss in . . . a FLASH BANG! grenade, because that's absolutely how you roll around famously inflammable chemicals and stuff like that.
Inconceivable!
-
Quiet, citizen
-
The police have reached the point where they no longer want or need our support. They *want* to be hated by the general public.
-
They should have tasered her as well.
-
The grenade is commonly called a "flash-bang" and is used to disorient people with a bright flash, a loud bang and a concussive blast. It went off on the floor where the girl was sleeping. She was in her sister's bedroom near the window the grenade came through, Fasching said.
Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/grenade-burns-sleeping-girl-as-swat-team-raids-home/article_8bc67054-464d-5951-a5a1-003d4ed02d99.html#ixzz296YQmtbH
How well do flash bangs work on people who are sleeping? It seems that it would not disorient them much at all.
-
St. John said investigators did plenty of homework on the residence before deciding to launch the raid but didn't know children were inside.
"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."
The decision to use a SWAT team was based on a detailed checklist the department uses when serving warrants.
Investigators consider dozens of items such as residents' past criminal convictions, other criminal history, mental illness and previous interactions with law enforcement.
Each item is assigned a point value and if the total exceeds a certain threshold, SWAT is requested. Then a commander approves or rejects the request.
In Tuesday's raid, the points exceeded the threshold and investigators called in SWAT.
"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."
Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/grenade-burns-sleeping-girl-as-swat-team-raids-home/article_8bc67054-464d-5951-a5a1-003d4ed02d99.html#ixzz296Ywsg4N
My question is typical of these incidents and something that will likely never been answered for us. Who did the investigation and on what basis did they determine it was a meth lab and there was cause to do a SWAT raid? It sounds like it was insufficient and/or flawed and they need to go back to the drawing board on their process (or fire someone for sloppy investigating). I would think the Judge authorizing this would be asking these questions too.
-
Police state now in Montana.
Looking for a non-existent meth lab. No arrests and no charges, but "some evidence" collected. ;/
I'd say there's "evidence" in the form of the girl's burned body, flash-bang hull, finger prints on it, broken window, and police report filed by the SWAT officers.
I hope for arrests and charges to be filed shortly, against the people that botched the recon, along with the officer that deployed the flash-bang.
-
With a militarized police you have to expect a certain level of collateral damage.
Give the little girl a Purple Heart for her sacrifices in the war on drugs.
WAR IS PEACE
-
"It was totally unforeseen, totally unplanned and extremely regrettable," St. John said. "We certainly did not want a juvenile, or anyone else for that matter, to get injured."
Uh, doesn't he mean "Foreseeable that folks would get burned by an incendiary device when used inside a residence?"
St. John said investigators did plenty of homework on the residence before deciding to launch the raid but didn't know children were inside.
"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."
If that is their homework, they need some more schoolin' to get it right.
-
They had "intel" that said there was a meth lab.
Which there wasn't.
Their "intel" did *not* indicate that there were children -- or at least one child -- in the home.
Which where was.
Boy, howdy, that's some pretty busted intel.
That there "intel" is something we used to call "rumors."
-
If you claim to have done your homework, and your best information leads you to the incorrect conclusions that:
1. There was a meth lab in the house
2. No kids were in the house
Then you should have to prove your competence before you are trusted with such decisions or dangerous toys.
-
with a raid like this, i would think it is more likely for police to get hurt as well. if someone throws a grenade in my kids room i can't imagine that i would be asking questions before grabbing the shotgun. i hope the girl recovers fully, and is not maimed/scarred for life. the mother is calling for someone to be "reprimanded"? i would be looking for jail time of whomever made the decision.
-
with a raid like this, i would think it is more likely for police to get hurt as well. if someone throws a grenade in my kids room i can't imagine that i would be asking questions before grabbing the shotgun. i hope the girl recovers fully, and is not maimed/scarred for life. the mother is calling for someone to be "reprimanded"? i would be looking for jail time of whomever made the decision.
Whoever made the decision has qualified immunity. The judge who signed it has sovereign immunity.
As Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 3, there's a time for everything. Since this is a public forum, I won't say out-loud what time it is.
-
SSShh...
-
with a raid like this, i would think it is more likely for police to get hurt as well. if someone throws a grenade in my kids room i can't imagine that i would be asking questions before grabbing the shotgun. i hope the girl recovers fully, and is not maimed/scarred for life. the mother is calling for someone to be "reprimanded"? i would be looking for jail time of whomever made the decision.
Probably scarred emotionally at the very least =(
-
They had "intel" that said there was a meth lab.
Which there wasn't.
Their "intel" did *not* indicate that there were children -- or at least one child -- in the home.
Which where was.
Boy, howdy, that's some pretty busted intel.
That there "intel" is something we used to call "rumors."
Anyone laying odds that this RUMINT came from some punk trying to buy himself a get-out-of-jail-free card?
-
Anyone laying odds that this RUMINT came from some punk trying to buy himself a get-out-of-jail-free card?
No bet.
-
Anyone laying odds that this RUMINT came from some punk trying to buy himself a get-out-of-jail-free card?
I was thinking that they might have gotten the wrong house, but I don't know this area and how likely that was. If they were lying about the "intel" and it was just a rumor from some punk, then that is worse. Either way, they are responsible.
-
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.
-
I a going to cheer the day when the first 3 guys in the stack tak a load of 00 to the face while doing a no-knock on the wrong house.
It will take such a low probability event to finally get police to reconsider their tactics.
-
I a going to cheer the day when the first 3 guys in the stack tak a load of 00 to the face while doing a no-knock on the wrong house.
It will take such a low probability event to finally get police to reconsider their tactics.
They'd "reconsider" them to be even more pointlessly violent. Explosive breaching anyone?
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtQtnczZYDc
-
{Police Chief} St. John said investigators did plenty of homework on the residence before deciding to launch the raid but didn't know children were inside.
"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."
The decision to use a SWAT team was based on a detailed checklist the department uses when serving warrants.
First, a freakin' meth lab is not something that can be easily flushed down the toilet. The cops were executing a search warrant, not an arrest warrant for a violent felon. There is IMHO no excuse for using flash-bangs and dynamic entry to execute a search warrant.
Second, it would seem that however much investigation the cops did, they should have done more. TWO kids (at least) live in the residence. If the cops did even minimal investigation, how could they NOT have know that?
Third, it would appear that the department's "detailed checklist" is in serious need of some revision ...
-
course this could be corrective
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&NR=1&v=BdyALmaEs_g
-
I would think the Judge authorizing this would be asking these questions too.
I would think the judge who authorized this raid should be removed from the bench and never allowed anywhere near the legal profession ever again, other than as a client.
-
does it have to be a judge? or can a magistrate sign off in montana? the training for magistrates here is less than optimal
-
I was thinking that they might have gotten the wrong house, but I don't know this area and how likely that was. If they were lying about the "intel" and it was just a rumor from some punk, then that is worse. Either way, they are responsible.
It's a somewhat older but still nice neighborhood.
It's right off one of the main shopping streets (24th St W) on the west side, not too far from King Avenue which is Big Box Row.
It's definitely the Right Side of the Tracks (literally).
-
How well do flash bangs work on people who are sleeping? It seems that it would not disorient them much at all.
I'd imagine they would quite well. I think getting woken up by an earsplitting bang would be pretty damn disorienting.
-
I'd imagine they would quite well. I think getting woken up by an earsplitting bang and 2nd degree burns would be pretty damn disorienting.
FIFY
-
Whoever made the decision has qualified immunity. The judge who signed it has sovereign immunity.
As Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 3, there's a time for everything. Since this is a public forum, I won't say out-loud what time it is.
It is getting close to tar & feathers time. When gov't critters claim they are above the law and then act lawlessly, they leave is few options.
-
U.S. Constitution - Amendment 4
Amendment 4 - Search and Seizure
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Personally, I'm seeing a serious 4th Amendment violation here. Every single person involved in this debacle of an operation should have sworn an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America. They failed -- miserably -- to honor that oath and to respect this girl's RIGHT to be secure in her person and in her home. I would say for a teenager to be awakened by a flash-bang being set off so close to her bed that she suffers serious burns is pretty danged "unreasonable."
-
I'd imagine they would quite well. I think getting woken up by an earsplitting bang would be pretty damn disorienting.
Perhaps, but on the wrong person it would lead to some pretty negative results. I was woken up to the sound of rockets exploding nearby in Afghanistan a few times. Some six years later I find that when kids in my apartment complex set off firecrackers when I'm sleeping I still snap awake briefly wondering where my rifle is before I realize I'm at home. =|
-
Perhaps, but on the wrong person it would lead to some pretty negative results. I was woken up to the sound of rockets exploding nearby in Afghanistan a few times. Some six years later I find that when kids in my apartment complex set off firecrackers when I'm sleeping I still snap awake briefly wondering where my rifle is before I realize I'm at home. =|
That is what I was thinking. It doesn't blind you or anything so it depends on how you react.
-
They failed -- miserably -- to honor that oath and to respect this girl's RIGHT to be secure in her person and in her home. I would say for a teenager to be awakened by a flash-bang being set off so close to her bed that she suffers serious burns is pretty danged "unreasonable."
'Failed miserably' is too soft of terms, in fact it goes way beyond negligence and is encroaching on malice.
If some loser threw an incendiary device on my daughter while she was sleeping, the only thing reasonable about it would be that those involved should be expected to be looking over their shoulders the rest of their miserable lives and spend as little time as possible between cover.
-
I would think the judge who authorized this raid should be removed from the bench and never allowed anywhere near the legal profession ever again, other than as a client.
I was trying to leave room for the police misrepresenting their "evidence".
-
course this could be corrective
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&NR=1&v=BdyALmaEs_g
"Think ya used enough dynamite there, Butch?"
-
Talk about hitting rock bottom and starting to dig...that's a pathetic and despicable excuse of law enforcement operations. *This* is a good example of police way overstepping their bounds.
-
A 12-year-old girl suffered burns to one side of her body when a flash grenade went off next to her as a police SWAT team raided a West End home Tuesday morning.
"She has first- and second-degree burns down the left side of her body and on her arms," said the girl's mother, Jackie Fasching. "She's got severe pain. Every time I think about it, it brings tears to my eyes."
Every time *I* think about it, my trigger finger tenses.
Medical staff at the scene tended to the girl afterward and then her mother drove her to the hospital, where she was treated and released later that day.
A photo of the girl provided by Fasching to The Gazette shows red and black burns on her side.
Police Chief Rich St. John said the 6 a.m. raid at 2128 Custer Ave., was to execute a search warrant as part of an ongoing narcotics investigation by the City-County Special Investigations Unit.
As has been stated before, a search warrant. This looks more like a "use it or lose it" budgetary SWAT raid than normal procedure...
The grenade is commonly called a "flash-bang" and is used to disorient people with a bright flash, a loud bang and a concussive blast. It went off on the floor where the girl was sleeping. She was in her sister's bedroom near the window the grenade came through, Fasching said.
A SWAT member attached it to a boomstick, a metal pole that detonates the grenade, and stuck it through the bedroom window. St. John said the grenade normally stays on the boomstick so it goes off in a controlled manner at a higher level.
Again, this has been stated before, but WTF WERE THEY THINKING?!?!?!?!?!?!
METHAMPHETAMINE PRODUCTION CREATES LARGE AMOUNTS OF EXPLOSIVE FUMES. THIS IS WHY METH LABS COMMONLY EXPLODE.
Where the FRAK did these idiots get certified to be police officers, an arcade with a Lethal Enforcers machine?
However, the officer didn't realize that there was a delay on the grenade when he tried to detonate it.
Why the hell not? Shouldn't the man DEPLOYING THE WEAPON SYSTEM be at least somewhat passingly familiar with HOW IT FRAKKING WORKS?!?!?
He dropped it to move onto a new device, St. John said. The grenade fell to the floor and went off near the girl.
What a GREAT idea. Let's take a dud/hangfired device, and instead of removing it and tossing it out into the street where it can safely be disposed of later, let's DROP IT INSIDE, so there's the possibility of it sympathetically detonating when the NEXT one is deployed.
"It was totally unforeseen, totally unplanned and extremely regrettable," St. John said. "We certainly did not want a juvenile, or anyone else for that matter, to get injured."
Yea, I'll bet the paperwork is such a bitch.
She and her two daughters and her husband were home at the time of the raid. She said her husband, who suffers from congenital heart disease and liver failure, told officers he would open the front door as the raid began and was opening it as they knocked it down.
Of course they did. They're NOT ABOUT to be denied their chance to tear *expletive deleted* up without ANY possibility of reprisal or responsibility.
When the grenade went off in the room, it left a large bowl-shaped dent in the wall and "blew the nails out of the drywall," Fasching said.
St. John said investigators did plenty of homework on the residence before deciding to launch the raid but didn't know children were inside.
This bit left me damned near speechless when I first read this this afternoon. "Plenty of homework" my ass. If they would have, they would have noticed the 2 kids there.
"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."
Oh, so there *IS* a time you'll use those devices when kids are present? Good to know.
How about if you need to arrest someone, you snatch them up outside the home, and they search the house withOUT all the jackbooted thuggery?
The decision to use a SWAT team was based on a detailed checklist the department uses when serving warrants.
1 - Is there SWAT budget left over? If yes, let's find a raid
2 - Do we have information for a potential raid?
3 - Load up all our tacticool gear
4 - Drive to Raid Location
5 - Attempt to deploy Tacticool Gear. Glance at manual, but throw that damned thing away. It's just too hard, and we'll figure it out, anyway.
6 - If anyone attempts to peacefully let us in, pretend we didn't hear them and DEPLOY EVERYTHING! Extra jackbootings for everyone
7 - Shoot all dogs
8 - Shoot the cats, too
9 - Shoot any grandparents / old people present, you know how treacherous those old people can be.
Investigators consider dozens of items such as residents' past criminal convictions, other criminal history, mental illness and previous interactions with law enforcement.
Each item is assigned a point value and if the total exceeds a certain threshold, SWAT is requested. Then a commander approves or rejects the request.
In Tuesday's raid, the points exceeded the threshold and investigators called in SWAT.
I want to see the information they used to decide to do this raid, but that'll never happen.
"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."
Yea, your evidence was so good you MISSED THE PRESENCE OF KIDS. You bastards knew NOTHING.
But Fasching said the risk wasn't there and the entry created, for her and her daughters, a sense of fear they can't shake.
If this were a just world, this would be creating, in the cops, a sense of fear of the unemployment line.
A claims process has already been started with the city. St. John said it's not an overnight process, but it does determine if the Police Department needs to make restitution.
I would say YES.
"If we're wrong or made a mistake, then we're going to take care of it," he said. "But if it determines we're not, then we'll go with that. When we do this, we want to ensure the safety of not only the officers, but the residents inside."
Right, so one of your methods to "ensure the safety of the residents inside" is to drop UXO off of the stick into the house you're raiding, so you can attach another? There should be CHARGES against this kind of *expletive deleted*.
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."
Fasching said she's considering legal action but, for now, is more concerned about her daughters.
Yea, I'm really sure. If they were so significant, then why were no arrests made on the spot?
"I would like to see whoever threw those grenades in my daughter's room be reprimanded," she said. "If anybody else did that it would be aggravated assault. I just want to see that the city is held accountable for what they did to my children."
Reprimanded my ass, try FIRED, CHARGED, and SUED.
GAAAAH, this pisses me right the hell off.
-
1 - Is there SWAT budget left over? If yes, let's find a raid
2 - Do we have information for a potential raid?
3 - Load up all our tacticool gear
4 - Drive to Raid Location
5 - Attempt to deploy Tacticool Gear. Glance at manual, but throw that damned thing away. It's just too hard, and we'll figure it out, anyway.
6 - If anyone attempts to peacefully let us in, pretend we didn't hear them and DEPLOY EVERYTHING! Extra jackbootings for everyone
7 - Shoot all dogs
8 - Shoot the cats, too
9 - Shoot any grandparents / old people present, you know how treacherous those old people can be.
This form of detailed checklist rings all too true and is being used far too often. :mad:
-
Phyphor brings up another issue that I have remarked upon before: the gear-queer mentality that thinks SWAT = Cool Toys, no training necessary.
From the looks of things, SWAT is not intended to be used against hard, evil men. They just don't act like they might face such men. I don't believe them when they claim heightened danger, because they don't act like there is a heightened danger.
Sell all the gear or don't buy it and spend the money they save/make on training street cops to be more effective in a fight or train the detectives to do their homework better so fewer teenaged girls get flash-bang alarm clocks.
-
Maiming a few teenage girls cuz we hit the wrong house is a small price to pay for all this cool stuff the feds give us! (it's a small price because someone else has to pay it)
-
You go to a house where you "suspect" there's a meth lab (just skip all that surveillance stuff, that's too time consuming and expensive) and you toss in . . . a FLASH BANG! grenade, because that's absolutely how you roll around famously inflammable chemicals and stuff like that.
Inconceivable!
There is a reason why they're called "pyrotechnics". Pyro and meth are not good combinations. Actually pyrotechnics and the interior of houses are often not a good combination.
-
Judging by the comments, I guess everyone else is thinking that cop was never allowed to actually practice with "real" flash bangs. Cost too much I am sure.
-
There is a reason why they're called "pyrotechnics". Pyro and meth are not good combinations. Actually pyrotechnics and the interior of houses are often not a good combination.
Waco, TX for $200, Alex.