“I hear bad noise, I thought somebody breaks in,” Jakymek told NBCChicago.com. “In that time, about 20 guys came in, and they said they were looking for guns and narcotics. They tell me to go into the bathroom. … They search everything. … I was scared. I thought it was gang.”
The men who burst into the home reportedly were members of the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Gang Crimes Unit, executing a search warrant for guns and narcotics.
The raid was based on information from a confidential informant.
Yep. That’s the level of police investigation required to have 20 men invade your home.
Just another day.
According to the sheriff’s office:
“Over the last four years, our gangs and narcotics unit has served more than 500 search warrants, and it is incredibly rare that those searches have resulted in this sort of outcome.”
“Incredibly rare” is still too much. And 500 search warrants in four years is about 1 every three days. That’s too much. It’s a broken system. If you served 5,000 narcotics search warrants or 5 in the same time period, it would have no difference on the availability of drugs. All you’re doing is pushing the odds. When you reduce the amount of investigation and, in mass numbers, use violent tactics for situations that shouldn’t even be situations, it doesn’t even matter how good you are. You’re playing Russian Roulette with peoples’ lives.
That will be the hardest part of ending the prohibition,weaning the police of the seizures and adrenaline rush from killing dogs.
Yeah, shooting pets is just one of the little perks of the job. No dogs to shoot and they didn’t kill the occupants….so they went away dissapointed.
Oh….and no drugs or weapons.
One tactic of law enforcement when taking about legalization is to downplay the cost of enforcement. They talk about the number of “arrests for possession” and how it is only like 1% off all arrests (or some BS like that ).
They always fail to mention how expensive these raids are. As crappy as a job as was done here, they often require a lot of prep work. Then there is a lot of work afterwards to get the charges ready. Then the prosecutor and the court system… Sometimes they involved multi-agency task forces. That’s a huge gravy train that law enforcement wants to protect.
When Richard Nixon started the drug war, he stated it would take five years to win it. Ironically this was the only timeframe that treatment and prevention were given considerably more money in the drug war budget than enforcement. The malignancy that exists decades later has spread to exist as multi-tentacled bureaucracy of progressively unsustainable enforcement budgets that accommodate more spin-off industries, prisons bloated with citizens involved in non-violent vice, and breeds greedy police fiefdoms that as this case illustrates, treat the slogan ‘to serve and protect’ as an oblivious liberal scheme.
Even given the vilification that the Nixon-era deserves, when accosted by the elderly occupants ( in daylight hours ), police of that period would more than likely have stopped in their tracks and said: ‘Beg your pardon folks, it seems to me we’ve made a mistake here.’
Last sentence correction:
Even given the vilification that the Nixon-era deserves, when accosted by the elderly occupants ( in daylight hours ), police of that period would more than likely stopped in their tracks, removed helmet ( hat ) and said: ‘Beg your pardon folks, it seems to me we’ve made a mistake here.’
This raid was no mistake. Police rely on informers who will rat out their own mothers for a reduced sentance. They are fully aware of the unreliability of these informers, and they have made a calculated and informed decision that a few casualties are completely acceptable.
Every year we see a few deaths of innocent people in botched police raids. The police never apologize, they never review or change their tactics, and the murderers involved are never sanctioned in any way. The mainstream media largely ignores these tragedies, prefering to tell Octo-Mom stories. And the pronouncements of these departments only ammount to assertions that they acted correctly and will continue to invade private residences on the flimsiest of pretexts for as long as they care to.
These raids drive huge departmental purchases of military hardware paid for by the very people who will be killed in the next raid gone wrong. These purchases have spawned an industry that only caters to LEA’s making these military purchases. Helecopters, automatic weapons, infra-red survielance equipment, armored vehicles, etc. etc. etc. All of which are extremely profitable and have NO PLACE in actual investigation or enforcement of the law.
Psychological tests for officers are designed specifically to screen out intellegent, thoughtful individuals and select for thugs and violence prone authoritarian personalities. I could go on. My Dad was a cop in the fifties, and my Grandfather a career detective from 1930- 1965. Grand pap passed away in’79, but my dad says he doesn’t even recognize the PD in his home town, it has changed so much.
You’re playing Russian Roulette with peoples’ lives
And thats what it is. I heard of a young guy who was arrested for cannabis, small amount, but thats all it takes in some states. This young man was having troubles in his life. He killed himself because he seen his life was ruined. This is the kind of ‘help’ prohibition provides. If it doesnt ruin your life, it may end it.
Take your help on down the road jack, we dont want it here(USA) .
“As soon as we entered the home, we knew this couple was not involved in the activity alleged.â€
So if they knew immediately the couple were not involved in anything illegal, why the hell did they toss the house? The damage could have been limited to the doors being bashed in, but instead they turned the house upside down:
“Everything was violently opened. Cabinets were ripped open, clothes and sheets were everywhere, and pieces of wood where the doors were rammed were all over the place.â€
Sounds like harassment to me.
If the police would do some actual investigation, these “wrong address raids” would never happen. If they’d done even minimal surveillance they would have known there was no illegal activity happening there.
It’s long past time for Americans to demand of their police departments some real investigation, including sufficient surveillance to make certain the house in question is actually the site of criminal activity, before they request a search warrant. Additionally, we should be demanding a stop to use of dynamic entry methods for non-violent offenses.
amen Windy, amen…
Damn, don’t you people know we’re trying to stop DRUG ABUSE??!?? So what if a couple of peaceful, elderly citizens are scared to death by an accidental raid? They wouldn’t have lived much longer either way and so we save some Medicare money. Dead is dead, and everyone dies. It’s the living who are most important thing.
http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/law14.htm C’mon the dude was 75 years old. He probably would have died of a heart attack at the same time and place if there hadn’t been a raid. But even if he wouldn’t have he didn’t have much longer anyway.