<b> In fact, the drug is <I>so</i> dangerous, that possessing even a small amount can directly lead to armed thugs bursting into your home and slaughtering your family pets in front of your children. Harmless?</b> ____________ http://reason.com/blog/2010/05/05/video-of-swat-raid-on-missouri SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family's pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on. They found a "small amount" of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment. So smoking pot = "child endangerment." Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone's safety. Just so we're clear. Now there's video, which you can watch below. It's horrifying, but I'd urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 yearsâcops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime. But they did prevent Jonathan Whitworth from smoking the pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success. <object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/RbwSwvUaRqc&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/RbwSwvUaRqc&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object> If you support the 'war on drugs', you really need to watch this video and take a first hand look at what it is exactly that you're endorsing. _________ Youtube embeds don't always seem to work properly lately (at least not on firefox). If the video doesn't play here, you can watch it directly on the youtube site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbwSwvUaRqc or http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Missouri+swat&aq=f
http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/government-goons-murder-puppie Government Goons Murder Puppies! The drug war goes to the dogs. Radley Balko from the April 2006 issue In the course of researching paramilitary drug raids, I've found some pretty disturbing stuff. There was a case where a SWAT officer stepped on a baby's head while looking for drugs in a drop ceiling. There was one where an 11-year-old boy was shot at point-blank range. Police have broken down doors, screamed obscenities, and held innocent people at gunpoint only to discover that what they thought were marijuana plants were really sunflowers, hibiscus, ragweed, tomatoes, or elderberry bushes. (It's happened with all five.) Yet among hundreds of botched raids, the ones that get me most worked up are the ones where the SWAT officers shoot and kill the family dog. I have two dogs, which may have something to do with it. But I'm not alone. A colleague tells me that when he and other libertarian commentators speak about the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco many people tend to doubt the idea that the government was out of line when it invaded, demolished, and set fire to a home of peaceful and mostly innocent people. But when the speaker mentions that the government also slaughtered two dogs during the siege, eyes light up, the indifferent get angry, and skeptics come around. Puppycide, apparently, goes too far. One of the most appalling cases occurred in Maricopa County, Arizona, the home of Joe Arpaio, self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff in America." In 2004 one of Arpaio's SWAT teams conducted a bumbling raid in a Phoenix suburb. Among other weapons, it used tear gas and an armored personnel carrier that later rolled down the street and smashed into a car. The operation ended with the targeted home in flames and exactly one suspect in custody--for outstanding traffic violations. But for all that, the image that sticks in your head, as described by John Dougherty in the alternative weekly Phoenix New Times, is that of a puppy trying to escape the fire and a SWAT officer chasing him back into the burning building with puffs from a fire extinguisher. The dog burned to death. In a massive 1998 raid at a San Francisco housing co-op, cops shot a family dog in front of its family, then dragged it outside and shot it again. When police in Fremont, California, raided the home of medical marijuana patient Robert Filgo, they shot his pet Akita nine times. Filgo himself was never charged. Last October police in Alabama raided a home on suspicion of marijuana possession, shot and killed both family dogs, then joked about the kill in front of the family. They seized eight grams of marijuana, equal in weight to a ketchup packet. In January a cop en route to a drug raid in Tampa, Florida, took a short cut across a neighboring lawn and shot the neighbor's two pooches on his way. And last May, an officer in Syracuse, New York, squeezed off several shots at a family dog during a drug raid, one of which ricocheted and struck a 13-year-old boy in the leg. The boy was handcuffed at gunpoint at the time. There was a dog in the ragweed bust I mentioned, too. He got lucky: He was only kicked across the room. I guess the P.R. lesson here for drug war opponents and civil libertarians is to emphasize the plight of the pooch. America's law-and-order populace may not be ready to condemn the practice of busting up recreational pot smokers with ostentatiously armed paramilitary police squads, even when the SWAT team periodically breaks into the wrong house or accidentally shoots a kid. I mean, somebody was probably breaking the law, right? But the dog? That loyal, slobbery, lovable, wide-eyed, fur-lined bag of unconditional love? Dammit, he deserves better.
unf*&$#*$believable. My dad was a lawyer, he taught me one thing from an early age, if a cop tries to charge you with something, dont answer a question, dont deny being there, dont even deny your guilt KEEP YOUR FUCKING MOUTH SHUT no matter what dont even respond. They will try to spin anything on you, you could even say, "I didnt do it" and they would find a way to spin that into "you didnt do what?" I got off a possesion of narcotics ticket when i was 16 because i listened to my dad, all we had was a roach, and a half bag, and i ate the ticket(meaning i claimed the weed was mine) and got off. I have watched the show cops a couple times on boring saturday nights, and the cops always tell the suspect, "You really need to tell us what you did so we can help you out." This is a blatant lie they are not trying to help you out, they are trying to draw as much information as possible out of you, shy of saying, "we will get you out of jail if you roll over on someone, or tell us what we need to know." Or "we will taze your ass, if you dont tell us something." Probably somewhere in the area of 80-90% of convictions on minor charges come from people fucking up and saying something they dont mean so crooked pigs can pin something on them. These guys are nothing more than a bunch of losers who got beat up in highschool just looking for a reason they can try out their fancy toys. (weapons) I remember as a child getting pulled over driving through fernie, and a cop came up to our window when we had been doing something close to 70 through a school zone, which happened to be a school zone situated on a highway so we didnt know, and dumbfuck pig came up to the window and asked, "do you know how fast you were going?" My dads response was "what is this a fucking quiz? give me the fucking ticket." Shortly after when the cop started threatening him, my dads response was "if you fuck this up you are going to jail." The cops immediately backed up. What we have right now is not an "army"(cops) for the people, it is a bunch of losers who want to abuse someone. If our laws dont change as they pertain to drugs sometime over the next few years i would be surprised. More and more people are realising every day that all the drug enforcement laws equate to is heart ache and poverty.
Yet there are fcking idiot cum dumpster failures of evolution that are cheering these dirt bags on laughing about it... How come when someone splatters one of these fcking pigs' brains all over the street nobody is laughing anymore? Why is that? Because I think THAT would be pretty god damned funny... There's the land of the free for ya...
Thats my impression of them too. They think they're movie stars with their leather gloves for no good reason and rolled up short sleeved shirts. Just fufilling their Chuck Norris boyhood fantasies. Raiding houses for marijuana plants?? Could you be more desperate for authority that you can't get any other way.
USA is fucking worthless. Do you think the colonists who founded this country would have stood for that bullshit?? Hell no, they would have been sodomizing those fucking pigs with bayonets quicker than you could blink. It's about we got a little "colonial spirit" back into us.
Colonial spirit, that's easy.. don't listen to any politicians when they talk about the economy, or jobs, or programs... tell them to stay on the subject of Consititutional rights... There is a way that we can take back the House of Representatives and then kick the shit out of the Senate and Executive Branch but it's not getting publicity and it's not gaining traction so far... the House of Reps was set up so us commoners could have a big say in government and it's run by commercial interests!!!!!! WAKE THE FUCK UP... http://goooh.com/home.aspx