Doomsought
Well-known member
That is the point. It should not be expedient.
United States George Floyd Protests, Reactions and Riots
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But it has to be, there are situations where the police need to have an the capability to respond immediately with superior/equivalent force.
SWAT teams were formed basically in response to the Watts riots, and the violence there was the justification for the actions SWAT teams would take. The Hollywood stereotype is to use them in hostage situations where you have multiple people barricaded in some location that would be difficult for normal cops to get into. The reality is that they have been more often than not used in drug busts and used a level of violence that far exceeds anything that would have been necessary, in part because of Federal interference ("git tough on crime" + being limited to only certain types of crime), and partly to justify the continued existence of these SWAT teams, because they are expensive to maintain and there is hardly ever an event like the ones they were actually intended to be used for. And if that wasn't bad enough, all the Federal agencies have a SWAT team, even the Department of Education, who will totally send their SWAT team after you if you stop paying on your student loans.
Doomsought
Well-known member
No there aren't. If superior force to that degree is requried, then the difference between five minutes and an hour doesn't matter, but if it doesn't exist, then that hour matters a lot more.
You don't need the national guard. You remove SWAT from the control of individual police departments and you give them to the Sherrif's Depts. In Texas at least, the Sherrif's have a much broader jurisdiction.
OR you formally recognize the state militias and have SWAT become a part of them. No need to call up the National Guard now.
OR Keep them as National Guard, but as Active National Guard so they are up and running 24/7 without any need of 'activation.'
After the Arbery case was over. And all the evidence that was in the trial was presented aka actual autopsy things. He still pedaled the lie that Arbery was wearing Timberlands when they showed the damn sneakers in court. He also did not tell his audience about the corrupt indicted DA that not only covered for the McMicheals but for other dirty cops who did a ton of shady shit for years. It took local news in the area to expose all of that. B Tatum is nolonger to be trusted. He will always back the blue no matter who. Which is very unwise.
He probably didn't know about the DA.
Bit he definitely will retract those if enough let him know about it.
And no he won't always back the blue
And how many innocent lives have these wonderful 'risk assesments' killed in no-knock raids?
Cops get paid to take risks in order to protect innocent people; that does not end just because someone gets a no-knock warrant.
At minimum the depts involved in situations like this need to be hit with a massive wrongful death lawsuits, have the local media hound them till the offending officers who authorized and executed no-knocks that got innocetns killed are removed.
Anyways, the validity of the no-knock warrant aside, the police did arrest Mekhi Speed, a seventeen year old Cousin of Amir Locke who was the suspect of a January 10th Murder of a 38 year old man named Otis Elder in a suspected robbery and murder that came out of an alleged drug deal gone awry. Amir Locke was apparently staying in the apartment of Mekhi Speed's brother Marlon. An apartment where Mekhi Speed had apparently occupied recently.
thefederalist.com
Let's Talk About Mekhi Speed, Amir Locke's 'Violent' Cousin Directly Related To Locke's Death
Is it possible that Locke knew what he was getting into when he chose to stay at the home of his cousin, whose brother was wanted for murder?
thefederalist.com
Judges authorize warrants, not officers.
As i see it, no knock warrants are like general anesthesia surgery. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary, but it inherently carries a risk and there is even a small chance it could kill a healthy person who doesn't need surgery at all. Hence, a careful risk-reward balance has to be carefully considered, and even if done perfectly, sometimes shit will happen.
Likewise, any case of police doing forced and/or surprise entry operation carries a certain minimal amount of risk of people getting shot, because its a tense, combat like situation with proverbial fog of war. That risk persists even if the whole operation is unnecessary and mistakenly hits completely innocent people (that's the swatting problem in a nutshell), sometimes caused by weird coincidences of circumstances that can't be really known beforehand, like this one.
Well, glad they caught him. Still there was no need for a no knock to catch him.Anyways, the validity of the no-knock warrant aside, the police did arrest Mekhi Speed, a seventeen year old Cousin of Amir Locke who was the suspect of a January 10th Murder of a 38 year old man named Otis Elder in a suspected robbery and murder that came out of an alleged drug deal gone awry. Amir Locke was apparently staying in the apartment of Mekhi Speed's brother Marlon. An apartment where Mekhi Speed had apparently occupied recently.
Let's Talk About Mekhi Speed, Amir Locke's 'Violent' Cousin Directly Related To Locke's Death
Is it possible that Locke knew what he was getting into when he chose to stay at the home of his cousin, whose brother was wanted for murder?
The officers specifically would only do it on a no-knock, and requested it. They bear guilt here.
And no, it's not like a general anesthesia surgery. The patient in anesthesia (or a preestablished medical proxy) is able to consent, which is what makes it acceptable. The one way a person doesn't need to consent to a general anesthetic is when they are unable to consent and in a clear and present danger. And you don't need a warrant for a clear and present danger.
So no, the more I think about it, maybe ban all no-knock warrants.
More lives are put at risk at times for Knocks, all depends on the situation. A packed NYC apartment complex and the guy has a illegal full auto? More danger to knock. A apartment like the one in the locke case? Not needed, but valid worry
I've heard that theory a number of times, but never backed up to the point it passes the smell test. SWAT teams are expensive to train and maintain, yes. But that doesn't explain why cities would go out of their way to use SWAT just for the sake of using SWAT (running the risk of someone innocent getting hurt or killed every time and generating severe blowback) vs just cancelling the expensive SWAT team they basically never need. Most american cities are notoriously cash-strapped, if they could save loads of money by getting rid of SWAT, they would.
That's not a viable solution. No city government wants police officers running around in the city that don't answer to the city, because the city government is going to be on the hook for whatever happens. Also, sheriff's have a wider jurisdiction than a city PD, but that doesn't mean they want to spend time dealing with crime in the city (nor does it mean city PD wants the sheriff running around arresting people). Cities have a police department of their own specifically so they don't have to go through the sheriff to manage law enforcement.
Additionally, since SWAT is composed of officers from the local department, that department won't want to risk it's officers being given conflicting orders by the department and the sheriff (on top of just not wanting another agency controlling any part of the department).
Those are both unworkable due to cost and control issues.
SWAT teams are composed of regular police officers that have been given additional training and equipment to act a SWAT team when needed, but when not needed they just work as regular cops, because city governments cannot afford to have dozens or hundreds of cops just sitting around not doing anything while they wait for a SWAT call to come in. The same dynamic applies to the national guard or state defense force, the city cannot afford to just pay a bunch of people to sit around and do nothing.
Additionally, as I said before, the city cannot just call in the national guard or SDF, because the national guard or SDF do not report to the city government, they are state level organizations and take orders from the governor, not the mayor or chief of police of wherever they're stationed (and no, ordering them to "go to that city and do whatever the mayor says" is not a viable workaround).
Haven't you heard of the whole thing where people/agencies do everything in their power to spend more money/increase their apparent operating costs, because if they don't, they won't get funding sufficient to cover their needs for the next year?
In some places Sheriff's offices are the SWAT teams
Yes, but I'm not sure how much it applies in this case. If your department regularly buys up extra crap at the end of the year to use up their budget, that's one thing. If people semi regularly get crushed to death under piles of excess inventory that was only purchased to fill out the budget, that's the sort of thing that someone's going to look into.
Doomsought
Well-known member
It gets them more authority over people's lives with less oversight. That is all the reason they need.
So? The judge still had to sign it. No one held a gun to his head. If he didn't sign it, guess the situation would have had to be handled a different way. But the judge deemed the risk worth the benefit to the investigation.
In this case of course judge is the third party that gives consent or not, instead of the would be arrestee, who naturally would prefer not to be raided ever.
They both bear responsibility. First, both wrongly determined the risk worth the benefit. But the police asking for it is worse than the judge. The judges do, as part of their job, let shitty but constitutional things happen all the time. It's not their job to decide policy, it's the cops job as part of the executive branch.
So no, the cops are the problem here. The laws are also a problem here. The judge acting as a cog in a machine? Generally good, but has bad results.
Let me be dead clear: I don't care about the balancing of risk vs benefit to investigation. It's a stupid fucking balancing act that balances the wrong things, and police who are trying to do this to protect themselves are in the moral wrong. The only balance that should be done is risk to civilians with no-knock vs risk to civilians without no-knock. Damn the risk to cops here, they can mitigate the risks on the knock raid, this is the job they signed up for.
No, he's not. Because he's not looking out for the person being raided. He's looking out for other people. Which is why this is a horrible analogy that doesn't work.
No, just because shit happened doesn't mean the risk calculation was wrong.
Cops don't get to decide policy either, they enforce judiciary's decisions, execute orders from the executive branch, and have to care about their own work safety and liability while at it. From what i understand the last part was the reason for the cops objection.
What is morally wrong about police wanting to protect themselves while doing their jobs?
On the contrary, it would be immoral to force them to work as some kind of martyr brigade.
This argument doesn't fly with miners, fishermen, airline pilots, truckers, factory workers and in case of soldiers using it often is a good way to get fragged. Cops are people too.
He is looking out for the interest of the public in general, as such he weights the risk of damage to the public (both potentially innocent target and chance of stray shots hitting neighbors for example) vs the benefit to the public (likely contribution of the action to law and order being maintained).