"WALLINGFORD - A usually quiet mobile home park was shaken Friday morning when about 15 officers from the U.S. bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and local police descended on one of their neighbor's homes with force."They had their guns drawn and were surrounding the house," said Jennifer Monroe of Hosford Bridge Road. "These weren't small guns, they were machine guns. It wasn't normal." "
Go HERE for more.
I have no issue with the police (or ATFe) executing a search warrant. Nor do I know all the details in this case. Perhaps the Boyntons have broken a law (I really don't know). What I do know, and what I find both objectionable and disturbing, is that the authorities executing the search warrant need to handle things like this in a different manner. Breaking down doors in the early morning hours (or at any time, really) for a simple search warrant rather than knocking on the door and asking is a bit of overkill.
WHY?
Why not knock on the door and show the search warrant, and ask for permission? Why force your way into a home and trash it? (I'm not going to discuss the fact that the officers had to request cooperation from the searchee to open the safes and the fact that the searchee cooperated. (under similar situations, I might not be as cooperative...).
Knocking down someones door at 6 am is not a good idea when there are reasonable alternatives. The door to someone who is, to all reasonable expectations, a law abiding citizen. Someone inside my home at 6 am uninvited is subject to harm. It would not be a good idea for police or other authorities to enter my home with a battering ram at any time. I would hate to harm an officer who thinks he is doing his/her job, and I would most likely end up shot, or dead.
The increased use of such tactics is disturbing, and the fact that we as people and citizens act instead like subjects disturbs me more. Why do we allow it? Are we that sheeplike? Where is the outcry for the authorities to use other tactics or methods? Was there reason to knock down door at 6 am? Was there a reason that they felt that they couldn't just knock on the door an execute the search warrant? Was there a valid reason to destroy property and to trash the house? I realize that there are situations that call for such tactics (like drug house raids) but to use them in a situation like this, on the home of a decent, law abiding citizen is just wrong.
Perhaps they needed the practice and thought that this would be a good search with which to get some. I don't know. But someone needs to answer these questions. Someone in the ATFe needs to explain why these tactics were used, rather than a simple knock on the door. Just because there are guns in the house is not a good enough answer. Guns by themselves do not pose a danger to police executing a search warrant UNLESS they use tactics described in the article. Nor should the regard for the officers safety just because is is the easiest way for the officers to secure the scene quickly take precedence over civil and property rights. Property rights, the right to be secure in your own home (that pesky constitution again) and just plain decency should take precedence unless there is a clear and present danger to the officers known before the warrant is executed.
This is a slippery slope here. If we allow this, then we are subjects.
All the officers on the scene, local LEO and the ATFe officers should be held accountable. The ATFe for their actions, and the local LEO for allowing it without justification. Local LEO allowed (and cooperated with) the ATFe agents to break into a house with no justification. None. They are as culpable here as the ATFe agents. THEY ALLOWED A CRIME TO BE COMMITTED. Warrant or no warrant, they allowed someones home to be broken into. The judge who signed the no knock warrant (if one exists) should also be held accountable.
Someone needs to go to jail for this action. Were I to break down his door, I'd be charged with a crime. Why not the officers and agents?
Knocking on my door is the best way. Failing to knock will place all of us in danger.
BTW, this shows how useless a gun locked in the safe is for home defense. It couldn't be used to defend the home. It was, really as useless as a paperweight would be.
I don't have that handicap.
Officers: KNOCK (gently is best!) on my door. Wait for me to open it. I will cooperate, and there is no need to place yourselves in mortal danger to execute a legal warrant.
Other methods may not have the outcome that we all want to see.
Just a thought.
ETA: A friend sent me this quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn from The Gulag Archepalego:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? . . ."
Things that make ya go "HMMMMM".
I'm just sayin'.
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