Cults, Sex, Texas, and Catholics

I haven't said anything about the Texas raid on the families in Texas, to prevent children being raised in a non-traditional religion, because the whole thing is just so stunning that I don't know where to start.

So, I'll just start streaming a post together.

Start with the number. 416 kids. Some of them infants. Texas is claiming that they were being sexually molested? Not even the State of Texas is insane enough to claim that. So what are they claiming? What is the justification for raiding the homes and seizing the children?

That's just not clear at all.

They seem to be claiming that a few of them either have been molested or might be molested in the future. And they can't identify which ones are actually at risk. So they have to kill kidnap seize them all to protect the few.

So far what they've accomplished is to have created a mess. That's probably a good thing if it's important to misdirect attention away from the actual lack of any legal justification on the part of the State of Texas.

That's a start.

SWAT in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles SWAT doesn't keep their website up to date, but what they do have suggests a major shift in the kinds of tasks that make up their work load. More and more the shift is away from the traditional hostage situation towards ordinary police work of serving warrants. From 2001 to 2003 (the only years they give data for on the website) their warrant service workload tripled.

2001 35
2002 53
2003 122

A change in mission certainly should call for a change in training requirements. Change doesn't mean they've lowered standards. Patterico, a prosecutor in Los Angeles, doesn't seem to have a clear understanding of that.

Although Pattrerico does recognize that there are some areas where the "bust in the door and shoot the bad guys" approach isn't appropriate,

Also, now that I have read the report, I find myself in agreement with one general problem it identifies (even if I don’t necessarily agree with the particular recommendations the panelists make for fixing it): the way the department in general (and SWAT in particular) deals with mentally ill suspects. The report gives numerous examples that can be faulted for excessive second-guessing, but that nevertheless provide some evidence that there is a better way to deal with the mentally ill. Often a nonconfrontational approach is better — not always, but often.

he seems to miss the point about the danger of present tactics (danger to both police and victims of police mistakes). Everybody would be safer if SWAT teams had less training on shooting people and more training on getting the address right before they bust a door in

An update on Ryan Frederick

The Agitator has an update of the guy in Virginia who's sitting in jail, the victim of really bad police work that had a tragic consequence.

Frederick was a garden hobbyist, who had converted part of his garage to a nursery. An informant told police (falsely) that Frederick had a marijuana grow operation in his garage. They didn't investigate past sending the informant in to burglarize Fredericks home for reasons which are unclear.

A few days after his home had been burglarized Frederick awoke to a home invasion. He fired at whoever was trying to break in his front door. One cop dead. One guy who'd been minding his own business until attacked in his home in jail on first degree murder charges.

The police version of the raid does not agree with Frederick's version. Neighbor's who witnessed the raid give a version which agrees with Frederick's version.

This is not a gang-ridden neighborhood. It's a working class neighborhood, the police chief lives a block away.


This is the kind of crap giving too much power to the government gets you.

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.

Illegal possession of a test tube

When I was a kid I had a chemistry set. Kids back then were encouraged to learn how to blow stuff up.

These days you need to be careful with those test tubes. We have laws.

Not laws that the government is expected to follow, but laws for you to follow.

Rewrite of history

I was watching a History Channel story on Charles Whitman, the sniper in the University of Texas Tower (1966). They claimed that the UT Tower sniper was the event that prompted the formation of SWAT teams.

That's nonsense.

It's true that the Tower incident was cited as an rationalization for the need for SWAT teams when people later tried to justify them. But it had nothing to do with the cause.

The cause was the Watts riots and general racial unrest in Los Angeles, it was considered a useful tactical weapon to use against the Black Panthers in LA.

Firepower used to protect against the UT Tower sniper were mostly private weapons, from both citizens and police who went home for deer rifles. After the event it seemed pretty clear to most observers that an armed citizenry helped a lot in protecting the public.

It was in Los Angeles that they decided that heavily armed, militaristic cops were the answer, primarily because of the racial aspects of their civil unrest.

When cops go bad

Atlanta had a drug raid recently that really went bad.

On Nov. 21, plainclothes narcotics officers burst into Johnston's home, using a no-knock warrant they obtained by falsely telling a judge an informant had confirmed drug dealing there, according to government prosecutors. Johnston, 92, was killed during the raid in a hail of nearly 40 police gunshots.

The agitator is following the story closely.

So far it seems that two of the cops involved in the shooting have plead guilty to manslaughter and other crimes, one more cop at the scene has been charged with related crimes (so far he's pleading not guilty) and now 3 have been suspended for acts related to false statements in getting the warrant and/or covering up the killing.

Deep, deep problems in the Atlanta police department.

SWAT teams are just unAmerican

Police SWAT teams have taken on a life of their own and have just gotten out of hand.

they've become an integral part of the tendency for police to just run amok, unsupervised and unaccountable.

The 4th amendment doesn't even apply.

Look at this picture.

Police departments just do not need to engage in military style invasions as a regular part of doing business. But that's what police departments large and small do -- violent invasions of homes as the default approach to service of the simplest warrants has become the norm. It's surprised more police aren't killed as a result.

There's almost no oversight. Judges routinely sign off on boilerplate warrants and many SWAT intrusions are done as part of multi-jurisdiction task forces which report to no one.

It's gotten so out of hand that I don't know how we'll get it under control, but it really is destroying what little is left of the fabric of competent police work in this country.

A chair fell over. Lock it down. Call in a SWAT team.

Kent Washington is populated by idiots. Not just idiots running the schools. Some kind of idiot juice has been added to the water in Kent Washington, clearly by foreign terrorists.

A high school was put into lockdown Friday afternoon after a report of shots fired.

The King County Sheriff's Department says a school employee called them around 2 p.m. The employee was told that someone heard a "pop, pop, pop" sound coming from one of the rooms that they assumed was gunfire.

Deputies say it appears one of the teachers was having a chair stacking contest. A stack fell over, resulting in the sound which was mistaken for gunfire.

Deputies took no chances with the initial report. Video from the scene showed at least 15 police cars, along with a pair of vans, parked outside the building. Officers could be seen walking around.

The best part is the last sentence. It's the part that demonstrates that not just the school and police officials are idiots, but the TV reporters are also idiots.

Several kids could also be seen gathering outside the school.

Uh. Was the school in a lockdown? Or was the school evacuated? Or did they just go on a lunch break?

When only police have guns

I saw a comment recently about how well trained police are in the handling and the use of guns. What a joke. Come on. The news is full of stories about cops how miss handle and misuse guns.

Here's one story. A SWAT team from North Carolina was driving through Memphis. I don't know where they were coming from or going to, I guess one of those national SWAT team competitions that police agencies have from time to time. They stopped in Memphis for some barbeque, and some one stole some machine guns, pistols and shotguns. SWAT teams are supposed to be the elite when it comes to how to handle and store weapons. I don't know why we let out of state cops run around crossing state lines for recreation with machine guns there's not much point in gun control when it's that easy to steal guns from cops.

Memphis police were looking Monday night for the thieves who stole seven weapons from a North Carolina SWAT team van parked in South Memphis.

Members of the SWAT team based in Raleigh, N.C., were eating at Interstate Bar-B-Que, 2265 S. Third, about 3:30 p.m. Monday when they realized their van had been broken into, said Lt. Jerry Gwyn of Memphis felony response.

Taken were three machine guns, two semi-automatic handguns, and two 12-gauge shot guns, Gwyn said.

The Memphis police put a couple hundred cops on the case to recover the guns, and with the help of a parking lot video and a woman who called in, they managed to recover the guns. But it did take a couple hundred cops to get the guns back. I wonder if Memphis is going to send the Raleigh PD a bill (can you say Barney Fife?)

Memphis police got some lucky breaks in running down a gang of thieves and the small arsenal they stole from a SWAT van.

Tuesday afternoon, while hundreds of Memphis police scoured the streets, officer Ken Hailey got a call from a woman in his precinct who told him where to find one of the assault rifles.

It's not the first time it's happened in Memphis.

Upon hearing of the theft, Police Director Larry Godwin put together a team that had worked on a similar theft in 1997, when an FBI SWAT van was stolen with sophisticated weapons, including grenade launchers. Those weapons were recovered and the suspects charged inside of three days.

Is there something about Memphis? Or is it just that SWAT teams tend to be especially careless with guns?

Keystone Cops

An FBI agent was killed by another FBI agent while trying to arrest 3 men who were armed but did not fire at the FBI and so far there's not even a claim that anyone pointed a gun at the cops. The claim is that it was an accidental discharge. One witness claims to have heard a pop, pop, pop. So I guess it was three accidents.

There are a couple of things about the use of language in the story that strike me.

One is that the FBI uses the term "dynamic arrest situation"

Preliminarily, information suggests the agent may have been fatally wounded as a result of the accidental discharge of another agent's weapon during a dynamic arrest situation," the FBI said in a statement Thursday night.

I'm not sure what that means. When cops use the term "dynamic entry" they mean busting into an occupied dwelling with guns drawn and either no announcement or just yelling "police, police" as they knock down the door. Another way to describe it might be "planned, uncontrolled violence". But dynamic entry sounds better.

The other quote of interest is

Bush, 52, and his team were tracking a group of men believed to be responsible for at least four bank robberies, the FBI said. In two of them, the suspects had fired assault weapons while inside the bank, the agency said.

Fired assault weapons while inside the bank?

How much you want to bet that they fired the weapons into the air, that they've never shot at anyone?

Of course these guys should have been arrested, but it's really not safe for anyone, cops, bad guys, or bystanders, to create these kinds of "dynamic arrest situations". This dynamic nonsense makes the cops feel powerful and all, and it makes good press when it works. But it's just not necessary and causes big problems when it doesn't work.