Sherriffs shot a dog inside his home

Okay, all. I will try to be succinct, as well as link to some relevant source data.

Long story short, the county sherriff and her deputies conducted a no knock , search warrant on an apartment here in my little town a couple of days ago. upon entering, one of these cretins shot the family dog because he was 'being aggressive' (read that as 'barking').

this guy was a friend of apparently all of my friends in this city, according to facebook at least. and the page that was set up after this (justice for aubie) details what a sweet and loving dog he was who wouldnt hurt anyone. he was a golden retriever. how often have you heard of those attacking?

here is my comment from the justice for aubie page:

i think the main problem i have from all of this (aside from my stance that animals are as much a part of my family as anybody else) is the sheer disregard for life shown here. i think next time, law enforcement (LE) may not be so lucky when they go in guns a'blazin'. by that i mean, i read that aubie was hit by 12 gauge 00 buckshot. as we all know, that disperses depending on distance from target.

so what if there had been a child sleeping near aubie, or playing with him, when this went down? are we supposed to just be OK with this and an apology, ESPECIALLY if next time, its HUMAN? since when did dealing some weed become summary execution by cop, no trial or jury?

i am NOT okay with the massive overmilitarization of the LE, here and elsewhere. we dont live on a battlefield. there was NO REASON to go in and start shooting. that has got to STOP.

h ttps://www.facebook.com/JusticeForAubie

so i guess i am asking for yalls viewpoint on this. mine are clear.

First of all, I need to say that I am dog/animal lover as I have two great dogs (Lab and Beagle). I have fostered dogs who need a "forever" homes and I have invested a great many hours in finding them homes.

I have also had the opportunity to bring "drug dealers" into custody with a signed search warrant. I have been the "cretin" you refer to. I have been the guy who is holding a shield with one hand and a Glock in the other. I have had countless "pets" come up to me and introduce themselves while I was serving warrants. I have had countless "pets" stand and bark commands, letting me know they don't approve of my presence. I have had the dogs charge me and not get shot. If you think you can be "succinct" in your judgment call for what happen in that apartment... think again. It is a lot more complicated...

There is a REASON they were serving a warrant on a PERSON who was in the home. "Some weed" is not applicable when the word Narcotics is used. Drug dealers are desperate and unpredictable people. Going and getting these "scum" calls for safe tactics. (sometimes mistakes are made) I am proud that that apartment complex is rid of those punks.

You need to know that you can "what if" this to death. What if a baby was in the way? What if the moon was full? The unfortunate thing was a dog was killed, I'm with you on this one. Demonizing the police or anybody is an illness and not a Jedi's way. The other perspective is that there are a lot of people living in that complex who can live at ease knowing their neighborhood is a little safer .

I wish I could add what goes into serving a search warrant, but you can rest assure if babies are involved or innocents another approach would be attempted.

There are really bad people out there and they do crazy desperate acts that you never hear about because they are dealt with.

Monday morning quarterbacks are just that. If you want justice for Aubie, go volunteer in her/his honor.

The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is for Good Men to do Nothing

This is only my opinion.

i appreciate your response, but by your own admission, you are biased, as you think i am as well. there is nothing excusable about this. it is only made worse by the sherriff's intransigence.

and of course im not vilifying all LE. i have actually met and spoke with the sherriff at one function or another over the years many times. i respect her. but she is severely mishandling this situation, and it is not only me who thinks so if you follow the link. but THIS cretin screwed up. it was a golden retriever, not some snarling rottweiler.

i am NOT OK with cops coming in somewhere and opening lethal fire, be it on the couch, the dog, the wall or anyone else. NOT OK. this is not a war zone. if they had that apartment 'under surveillance' as claimed for months, then they knew there was a dog there. how about a non lethal (something)? that is not too much to ask. or hey, heres an idea: how about NOT using military style no knock incursions in the first place? that would be cool. was this guy supposed to be ready for combat at whatever ungodly hour of the night they kicked his door in?

also, to clarify, those 'no knock' incursions were being toned down even in the army by the time i left iraq. and we are going full bore here. again, not cool.

In 1980 this would not have happened. It certainly would not have happened this way.

I'm a regular sinner in hijacking threads and going all over the place with a topic but this one involves so many issues.

We have the insanity of the [strike]War on Drugs[/strike] War on People, the dangerous escalation of the militarization of police (See http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/overkill-rise-paramilitary-police-raids-america ) and the swat abuse that goes along with it. See http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/01/45-swat-raids-per-day

From the above link:

Cheye Calvo's July 2008 encounter with a Prince George's County, Maryland, SWAT team is now pretty well-known: After intercepting a package of marijuana at a delivery service warehouse, police completed the delivery, in disguise, to the address on the package. That address belonged to Calvo, who also happened to be the mayor of the small Prince George’s town of Berwyn Heights. When Calvo's mother-in-law brought the package in from the porch, the SWAT team pounced, forcing their way into Calvo's home. By the time the raid was over, Calvo and his mother-in-law had been handcuffed for hours, police realized they'd made a mistake, and Calvo's two black Labradors lay dead on the floor from gunshot wounds.


From http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/overkill-rise-paramilitary-police-raids-america

Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America

by Radley Balko

Radley Balko is a policy analyst specializing in civil liberties issues.

Executive Summary

Americans have long maintained that a man's home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

Full paper PDF http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/balko_whitepaper_2006.pdf

View in html http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/13673446

I forgot to include the hysterical War on Terror.

See: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/how-the-war-on-terror-has-militarized-the-police/248047/

How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police

By Arthur Rizer & Joseph Hartman

Over the past 10 years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more like soldiers. Here's why we should be alarmed.

Danny Moloshok / Reuters


Part of the message is hidden for the guests. Please log in or register to see it.


The views expressed by Rizer are entirely his own, and he does not speak for the Department of Justice or the U.S. Army.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/how-the-war-on-terror-has-militarized-the-police/248047/

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

@ Bro John... Yes, our oath says enemies both foreign and domestic and sometime one must carry a bigger stick.

A valid search warrant signed by a judge is an exception to the 4th amendment search and seizure rule...

There are bad people out there and thst IS the bottom line...

Yeah, if the warrant was executed in the middle of the night then YES the guy were probably well armed. Lethal fire would inply they shot the guy. And once again... I believe a MISTAKE was made.Funny, it was a Rottweiler that was the friendliestin my experience.

Most search warrants are executed during 8am and 8pm... if the warrant is for a felony the warrant can be executed anytime... these are only reserved for the worse of the worse, high risk offenders.

'No knocks" are used only for felony suspects.

The issue is that they're not only using the aggressive tactics against felony and high risk offenders. The Cato Institute report is 93 pages. That takes a bit of reading.

This http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/01/45-swat-raids-per-day is about 2 pages.

From that article:

[L]ast year Maryland became the first state in the country to make every one of its police departments issue a report on how often and for what purpose they use their SWAT teams. The first reports from the legislation are in, and the results are disturbing.

Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George's County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state's SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.

Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that's just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.

We are not going to agree on this one...