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Wow, nice work heads
SWAT team's shooting of Marine causes outrage
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Jose Guerena Ortiz was sleeping after an exhausting 12-hour night shift at a copper mine. His wife, Vanessa, had begun breakfast. Their 4-year-old son, Joel, asked to watch cartoons.
An ordinary morning was unfolding in the middle-class Tucson neighborhood — until an armored vehicle pulled into the family's driveway and men wearing heavy body armor and helmets climbed out, weapons ready.
They were a sheriff's department SWAT team who had come to execute a search warrant. But Vanessa Guerena insisted she had no idea, when she heard a "boom" and saw a dark-suited man pass by a window, that it was police outside her home. She shook her husband awake and told him someone was firing a gun outside.
A U.S. Marine veteran of the Iraq war, he was only trying to defend his family, she said, when he grabbed his own gun — an AR-15 assault rifle.
What happened next was captured on video after a member of the SWAT team activated a helmet-mounted camera.
The officers — four of whom carried .40-caliber handguns while another had an AR-15 — moved to the door, briefly sounding a siren, then shouting "Police!" in English and Spanish. With a thrust of a battering ram, they broke the door open. Eight seconds passed before they opened fire into the house.
And 10 seconds later, Guerena lay dying in a hallway 20-feet from the front door. The SWAT team fired 71 rounds, riddling his body 22 times, while his wife and child cowered in a closet.
"Hurry up, he's bleeding," Vanessa Guerena pleaded with a 911 operator. "I don't know why they shoot him. They open the door and shoot him. Please get me an ambulance."
When she emerged from the home minutes later, officers hustled her to a police van, even as she cried that her husband was unresponsive and bleeding, and that her young son was still inside. She begged them to get Joel out of the house before he saw his father in a puddle of blood on the floor.
But soon afterward, the boy appeared in the front doorway in Spider-Man pajamas, crying.
(rest of long article at link below)
http://news.yahoo.com/swat-teams-sho...184928360.html
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Looks like a buncha trigger happy jackasses. I don't think these guys were amatuers or stupid, but I do think that the level of force in executing the warrant was way overblown and unnecessary.
Wow, nice work heads
Sounds like total bull . He points a gun at the cops with the safety on? Right.
and if Tuscons swat team is anything like San Antonios swat team, they are probably laughing about it right now.
Great job. Congrats on ultra-necessary drug war
Woman and kid are lucky to be alive. 70+ shots, sounds like a spray of bullets.
Also, how the you shoot 70+ bullets and only hit 22 times? That's almost 3 out of 4 shots missing the target. No wonder they can't win the war on drugs.
This was total bull . They went in too fast. Protecting one's own residence is legal.
I just don't understand why these no knock warrants are allowed when they can easily just track the target and arrest him/her elsewhere. If they're putting so much money into these investigations, they should already have behavior pattern info and data on the house itself...this is simply not needed on any level and it accomplishes nothing but putting EVERYONE in danger. I don't blame the cops for shooting, but they shouldn't have been there in the first place so whoever signed off on that needs to be dealt with.
Well what would be the point of being SWAT if they didn't get to pretend they were just like a SEAL team in a combat zone.
Not a Cato stink tank fan of course, but has some stats:
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.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476
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Overuse of Militarized Swat Teams
During the past 15 years, The Post and other media outlets have reported on the unsettling "militarization" of police departments across the country. Armed with free surplus military gear from the Pentagon, SWAT teams have multiplied at a furious pace. Tactics once reserved for rare, volatile situations such as hostage takings, bank robberies and terrorist incidents increasingly are being used for routine police work.
Eastern Kentucky University's Peter Kraska -- a widely cited expert on police militarization -- estimates that SWAT teams are called out about 40,000 times a year in the United States; in the 1980s, that figure was 3,000 times a year. Most "call-outs" were to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders.
Here are some examples:
Last November, police with guns and K-9 units raided a charity poker game in Baltimore. Police in New York are using similar tactics against gambling clubs. Last April, a SWAT team of 52 officers raided a small-stakes poker game in a Denver suburb. An alternative weekly, the Cleveland Scene, reported last year that Jaycees and American Legion clubs in northeastern Ohio "are being raided with the kind of firepower once reserved for drug barons and killers on the lam."
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2006/02/05/224/48281
etc, etc.
Giving police (SWAT) power and assuming it won't be abused is naive. All power is abused.
USA = Police State
if i were a drug dealer i'd oppose the idea of legalizing marijuana any day. drug business is risky but its profitable as and the only reason why is its "illegal". another life lost to an unnecessary "war" imho
What the ... You serious?
The police put them self in harms way. That was not a justified killing.
No .
That was not a combat zone. A US citizen was killed for protecting his family.
Complete bull . ing drug war, and ing "barely-knock" raids.
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