Rise of the Warrior Cop - dangers of militarized police units

[Guest AmericanWorkMule]

interesting spin on things I found in the liberal bird cage liner The Nashville Scene

 

Balko, the investigative journalist and Huffington Post columnist who moved to Nashville from Washington, D.C., three years ago, says he is neither anti-SWAT nor anti-police. But he argues there is a time and place when that kind of force is appropriate — and with disturbing and increasing frequency, that line is being blurred.

 

Balko also traces the evolution of policing as a profession and the rise of the SWAT team from its origins in the civil unrest of the 1960s.

 

Black demonstrators were seen not as fellow U.S. citizens deserving of the same constitutional and police protections but as enemy combatants whom the SWAT teams were formed to fight against.

 

"Now you have basically upper-middle-class white kids that are getting beaten up, and these are kids who know how to stream video, know how to use social media to get the word out. ... They had some advantages that people who these tactics have traditionally been used against didn't have. It drew a lot of attention to the issue that otherwise wouldn't have gone to it."

http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville

 

[Guest AmericanWorkMule]

Police raid or home invasion

 

 

Goldsberry, 59, said she had looked up from the sink to see a man “wearing a hunting vest.”

He was aiming a gun at her face, with a red light pinpointing her.

“I screamed and screamed,” she said.

But she also scrambled across the floor to her bedroom and grabbed her gun, a five-shot .38-caliber revolver. Goldsberry has a concealed weapons permit and says the gun has made her feel safer living alone. But she felt anything but safe when she heard a man yelling to open the door.

He was claiming to be a police officer, but the man she had seen looked to her more like an armed thug. Her boyfriend, Dorris, was calmer, and yelled back that he wanted to see some ID.

But the man just demanded they open the door. The actual words, the couple say, were, “We're the f------ police; open the f------ door.”
 

Goldsberry wasn't arrested or shot despite pointing a gun at a cop,
so Matt Wiggins  with the U.S. Marshal's fugitive division said, “She sure shouldn't be going to the press.”

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20130718/COLUMNIST/130719612/2256/NEWS?p=1&tc=pg

 

Edited July 21, 2013 by AmericanWorkMule

[RichardR]

As a law-abiding citizen I have zero expectations of any law-enforcement agency ever serving a warrant on my residence, therefore my immediate instinctive reaction would be to protect myself, my family & my home because it couldn't possibly be law-enforcement kicking in my door, but something much more nefarious.

I'm not responsible for any mistakes eithe law-enforcement or criminals make by kicking in my door, nor am I going to risk taking the chance of hesitating to ask for ID when fractions of a second literally could mean the difference between living or dying.

*Knock* on my door & wait for me to answer it iffin you need to talk to me or summon me for something, *kick* in my door iffin you want to engage me in a fire-fight.

It's really that simple.

[Guest ThePunisher]

It's likely that these SWAT teams will be the jackboot thugs that come after our guns when they become illegal. Neighbor against neighbor, and family against family will be the ones snitching gun owners out to these SWAT forces that come in middle of the night when you are asleep.