Friday, February 08, 2008

Ryan Frederick

Ryan Frederick lives in Hampton Roads, a beach town in southern Virginia. Right now he's in the Hampton Roads jailhouse, a victim of the drug war and a handfull of nutcase cops.

If you don't follow Radly Balko at The Agitator regularly then you should. He's made a niche for himself in following police SWAT raids gone bad. And there's plenty of them to keep him busy. Recently he's been following the Case of Ryan Frederick, a guy who shot a cop breaking into his home. A cop that had a warrent based on unreliable and false information part of a team of thugs who just battered the guys door down in the middle of the night.

A summary of what happened is that Frederick was a nursery hobbyist and had converted his house into a grow house for some oriental plants. Some of the plants seem to have leaves similar in shape to the pot leaves. His nursery equipment included some of the same heat lamps and hydrophonic equipment one might use for a marijuana growing operation. Somebody saw the nursery. Probably from the street. Frederick certianly wasn't keeping it secret.

The somebody who happened to see it was a police informant who just happened to need some kind of favor from the local drug cops. So he told them about this major mariuana growing operation. The cops even sent him to break into the house on a scouting mission a week before the raid. It's not clear what that was about.

Frederick knew his home had been burglaized. So when some clown broke down his front door in the middle of the night he rationally thought it was a burglarer and fired his personally owned, perfectly legal handgun. A cop ended up dead. Frederick ended up in jail, charged with murder. He's also charged with a misdemeanor pot possision charge, it turns out Frederick did have a small amount of persoanl use pot in his home. Whether it was his or planted by the cops informant isn't clear. The cops aren't talking, they're way to busy trying to circle the wagons and railroad.

The PC position is that this is a tradedy for all concerned, both Frederick and the dead cop and his family. But, I don't feel very PC about this sort of thing. It's Police State bullshit, the police have no business breaking into peoples homes in the middle of the night. There's no need for that kind of behavior at all. It does not enhance safety, it creats dangerious, violent situations for no reason other than to give a few thugs in uniform a thrill.

And that's why I don't feel sorry for the dead cop and his family. He was nothing more than a professional thug. A guy who made his living breaking into peoples homes and destroying people's lives. The kind of people who are willing to be SWAT team members in the kind of police departments we have in this country are the kind of people who should never be police officers, who should not be given any kind of governmental sanctioned authority.

I have pretty strong feelings about this sort of police behavior and it's really time for us to wake up and look at what's happening in our country. It's not a pretty picture. Immigration and Muslims aren't the problem. The problem is right here at home and we need to fix it.

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