HORN LAKE, Miss. - An unidentified elderly Horn Lake couple were hospitalized Thursday after police burst into their home thinking it housed a methamphetamine laboratory. The incident occurred Wednesday about 4 a.m., said police Capt. Shannon Beshears. Beshears said it was the right address but the wrong house.
You can usually tell that the police screwed up in a case like this when an elderly couple or a bunch of children get hurt in a police raid, and then the cops say that they "acted properly." One has to wonder how the cops could have have made such an obvious mistake. It seems like a perfectly human mistake on the surface, but is it? No, and let's look at what the cops should have done when raiding a house with a meth lab, knowing how volatile they can be (y'all do know they can produce toxic fumes and potent explosions, right?)
- Get the address and send some plain clothed cops in unmarked vehicles or their personal vehicles to scout out the area and see what they can find. Meth labs, and their dealers, especially in the rural south and midwest, can be a lot more dangerous than your average pot dealer...
- When they see two houses on the same property, go back and do a little quick research. Grill the informants and find out who lives at both addresses.
- They see an 80 year old couple living on one half of it. Gee, now what are the odds that the meth lab is at THAT address? Even if it is there, an 80 year old couple is statistically unlikely to be able to get from a recliner to the bathroom before the cops have swept through the other address.
Most of the time these situations are caused by macho crap on the part of cops who want to play soldier, but didn't have the balls to join the Army, let alone the Marine Corps. Military tactics are appropriate against heavily armed criminals, but are terrible against ordinary criminals, including most meth lab owners. They just make the situation more dangerous and often get innocent people hurt or killed in the War on Drugs.
Technorati tags: Drugs, Meth, Police, Incompetence.
Incompetent police who didn't verify their information.
more reason to never trust the police...if you think about it (or observe any in action), you realize that those who "serve and protect" are the lowest common denomonator in terms of intelligence (of course there are exceptions)...the fact that we give these mental midgets broad powers to apprehend, etc. is insane...
It's incredibly ironic that the police are treated almost like the military in terms of respect and admiration, yet they aren't held to nearly the same standard. If the Army had this many blatantly bad civilian kills, there would be no end of controversy. Basic intelligence gathering by recon work is part of the job for the military, why not for the cops as well?
This story doesn't surprise me. I lived in Horn Lake for 20-odd years. Every time I visit my dad tells me to "watch out for cops." He says they have become very aggressive in the past few years and becoming more thuggish all the time.
Makes you wonder exactly who they are protecting and serving these days.
It's certainly not the community. This sort of thing is increasingly become a problem all over the country, but a lot of the more conservative people out there remain willfully ignorant to it. It's part of a general trend of the government existing to control, not protect, the people.
Where I moved from recently, the cops were alright most of the time, but they had some really bad habits like picking inappropriate times to bust drinking parties. They also had some race problems. In one case, they were tailing a white pizza delivery driver and the guy that they immediately slammed up against the wall when they go there was the black manager who hadn't left the store all night.
[...] If these deployments were carried out consistently with the utmost professionalism as exemplified by our armed forces, there wouldn’t be any problem, but all too often SWAT units seem to exhibit boredom with such mundane military tactics as reconnaissance. Stories like this, where SWAT units did not actually conduct surveillance of the property before the raid to actually verify that it was the right location, are all too common. Yet social conservatives tend to have no problem with SWAT units over this, always dismissing this as “human error†or “a case of bad apples†as though the tactics themselves are not to blame for the problems. [...]