Dog Kill Dog Who Boarded Bus and Bit Children

http://dcist.com/2011/05/pg_county_cops_shoot_dog_after_scho.php

Prince George County, Maryland

May, 2011

Breed; American Bulldog, erroneously reported as a Pit Bull

A dog somehow got onto a bus and bit a few students, thankfully only resulting in minor injuries. Police arrived, felt they could not contain the dog, shot him three times and as he lay dying, shot him a fourth time to kill him.

September 2010: Prince George County Strikes Again

Prince George County, Maryland

A man and his brothers were able to stop a carjacking with a shotgun. Police arrived to a rather chaotic scene. While everyone laid down on the ground, one man began to struggle.

The family's 5-yr-old Labrador-Rottweiler Mix (who looks like a mutt, period) was sitting on the driveway. At some point, she may have approached an officer, although witness reports (from the article) seem to indicate she was not acting aggressively. The dog was shot once and killed.

August 2010 - Prince George Sherriff Kill Dog During Eviction Notice

Prince George County, Maryland

A woman in Forest Heights lost her dog when officers served an eviction notice, even though she was already moving her stuff and even though officers knew a dog was on the premises. The dog, described as a Rottweiler, was inside the home - it is unclear whether the dog was in the basement or if the officer entered the basement.

When the dog charged, the officer shot and killed him.

Prince George County officers cleared in death of dogs

Officers who shot two dogs to death during a botched no-knock raid have been cleared of any wrongdoing.

Neither dog had been aggressive toward the officers - one dog was shot as he ran away in fear.

You can read more about the raid here. The victims, the mayor of Berwyn Heights (and his wife and mother in law), were cleared of any wrongdoing due to the fact that they hadn't done anything wrong. As part of a drug trafficking scheme, a package of drugs (that SWAT knew about) was left on the stoop of the mayor's home and, when she went to pick it up, moments later her home was raided and life changed.

I don't want to go over more details, except to make a comment on what Sheriff Jackson has to say:

"I'm sorry for the loss of their family pets," Jackson said. "But this is the unfortunate result of the scourge of drugs in our community. Lost in this whole incident was the criminal element. . . . In the sense that we kept these drugs from reaching our streets, this operation was a success."

Sheriff Jackson seems to be forgetting that the package containing drugs had already been intercepted by authorities. That is, police already knew about the package and what it contained. Already, the drugs were safe from public dispersal. The entire raid could have been prevented by confiscating the package and, I don't know, doing a bit of legwork in investigating the mayor...which would have shown he wasn't a drug trafficker.

Instead, police intercepted the package, allowed it to be put on the doorstep of this house, then allowed SWAT (a paramilitary group, people) to raid the home w/ a no-knock warrant. I mean, it's absolutely disingenuous to argue this case is a shining example of preventing the "criminal element" from distributing drugs. It's a shining example of what is wrong with the "drug war" and a disturbing story of how our rights to due process and privacy can so easily be trampled upon.

What's wrong with SWAT

In August of 2008, the lives of Berwyn Heights mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife, Trinity and her mother Georgia were irrevocably altered when Prince George County SWAT and police officials stormed their house and shot their two friendly dogs (one as he ran away from the officers). The dogs died.

The Washington post recently published a great article on what the Calvo's went through that fateful day.

Of course, this story is truly more about the dogs (though the emotional impact is powerful and heart-wrenching) - it is about how faulty the "War on Drugs" really is. Innocent people have died and been emotionally scarred because of these no-knock warrants, all on the quest for a few pounds of pot or cocaine. Many dogs have died because they had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time doing what dogs do and defending their pack (or, if you're in Omaha, sitting at the end of a chain).

Americans have defended their right to privacy and the sanctity of their homes since Revolutionaries denounced British soldiers entering homes and businesses with impunity to search for contraband rum and tea and generate taxes for the British Crown. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits unreasonable government searches and seizures. But civil libertarians argue that this constitutional protection has been seriously eroded in recent decades, largely as an unintended consequence of the nation's war on drugs.

In Balko's summary, paramilitary police units called Special Weapons Attack Teams, or SWATS, grew out of the social unrest of the 1960s. They were used to quell protesting migrant farm workers led by Cesar Chavez, then against urban rioters and in a shootout with the Black Panthers in Los Angeles. Balko writes: "Until the 1980s, SWAT teams and other paramilitary units were used sparingly, only in volatile, high-risk situations such as bank robberies or hostage situations. Likewise, 'no-knock' raids were generally used only in situations where innocent lives were determined to be at imminent risk. America's War on Drugs has spurred a significant rise in the numbers of such raids, to the point where in some jurisdictions drug warrants are only served by SWAT teams or similar paramilitary units, and the overwhelming numbers of SWAT deployments are to execute drug warrants."

and

Last year, Prince George's police deployed SWAT teams to serve search warrants more than 400 times, a police spokesman said. The department's narcotics unit now deploys its SWAT team to serve the overwhelming majority of its search warrants, Maj. Andy Ellis said. The Prince George's Police budget shows that the county expects to spend at least $2.5 million this year reaped from assets seized in drug raids.

and

Many victims of botched or abusive drug raids are poor minorities whom the public is unlikely to hear about or rally around, Boyd said. Legal immunity granted to police makes it difficult for victims to successfully sue for compensation, he said.

You can read the entire Washington Post article HERE.

Even more provocative is The Cato Institute's tracking of botched paramilitary (e.g. SWAT) police raids.