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bblhd672 wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ... c9772a7e57

The police report would claim it all kicked off at 7:38 a.m., but Bob Harte later thought it had to be earlier.

His 7:20 a.m. alarm had just yanked him awake. Got to get the kids — a boy in seventh grade, a girl in kindergarten — ready for school. Then he heard, like a starter’s pistol setting everything into motion, the first pounding on the front door of his home in Leawood, Kan., a bedroom suburb south of Kansas City. It was thunderous. It didn’t stop. Should I get up? Bob thought. Should I not? Sounded like the house was coming down, he would recall later.

Wearing only gym shorts, the stocky 51-year-old left his wife in bed and shuffled downstairs. The solid front door had a small window carved at eye-level, one-foot-square. As he approached, Bob saw the porch was clogged with police officers. Immediately after opening the door, seven members of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) pressed into the house brandishing guns and a battering ram. Bob found himself flat on floor, hands behind his head, his eyes locked on the boots of the officer standing over him with an AR-15 assault rifle. “Are there kids?” the officers were yelling. “Where are the kids?”

“And I’m laying there staring at this guy’s boots fearing for my kids’ lives, trying to tell them where my children are,” Harte recalled later in a deposition on July 9, 2015. “They are sending these guys with their guns drawn running upstairs to bust into my children’s house, bedroom, wake them out of bed.”

Turns out both the man and his wife are former CIA officers. She is now an attorney, and he's a stay at home dad. Trying to find something fun and educational to do with his son, he and his son set up a hydroponics garden in the basement, where they drew a handful of tomato plants. The police were surveiling the local hydroponics shop, taking down the license plate numbers of customer vehicles. This guy's plate was on their list. That was used to justify searching his trash, where they found "wet glob vegetation" ......his wife's used tea leaves.....

On that basis, they storm-troopered his residence.

This fascist crap has to stop.

Would like to read the article, but apparently WaPo has decided that I've partaken of too much of their "journalism" without paying.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/cr ... 00778.html Story from KC Star the incident occurred in 2012.

Weird.....it is in the WaPo "morning mix" with a July 28 publication date. On further investigation, your link says:

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judge’s decision on some issues but overturned the decision pertaining to the Hartes’ claim that they were the victims of an unlawful search and seizure.

That article has a 7/25/17 publication date.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ... c9772a7e57

The police report would claim it all kicked off at 7:38 a.m., but Bob Harte later thought it had to be earlier.

His 7:20 a.m. alarm had just yanked him awake. Got to get the kids — a boy in seventh grade, a girl in kindergarten — ready for school. Then he heard, like a starter’s pistol setting everything into motion, the first pounding on the front door of his home in Leawood, Kan., a bedroom suburb south of Kansas City. It was thunderous. It didn’t stop. Should I get up? Bob thought. Should I not? Sounded like the house was coming down, he would recall later.

Wearing only gym shorts, the stocky 51-year-old left his wife in bed and shuffled downstairs. The solid front door had a small window carved at eye-level, one-foot-square. As he approached, Bob saw the porch was clogged with police officers. Immediately after opening the door, seven members of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) pressed into the house brandishing guns and a battering ram. Bob found himself flat on floor, hands behind his head, his eyes locked on the boots of the officer standing over him with an AR-15 assault rifle. “Are there kids?” the officers were yelling. “Where are the kids?”

“And I’m laying there staring at this guy’s boots fearing for my kids’ lives, trying to tell them where my children are,” Harte recalled later in a deposition on July 9, 2015. “They are sending these guys with their guns drawn running upstairs to bust into my children’s house, bedroom, wake them out of bed.”

Turns out both the man and his wife are former CIA officers. She is now an attorney, and he's a stay at home dad. Trying to find something fun and educational to do with his son, he and his son set up a hydroponics garden in the basement, where they drew a handful of tomato plants. The police were surveiling the local hydroponics shop, taking down the license plate numbers of customer vehicles. This guy's plate was on their list. That was used to justify searching his trash, where they found "wet glob vegetation" ......his wife's used tea leaves.....

On that basis, they storm-troopered his residence.

This fascist crap has to stop.

I agree with Lynyrd, in that we need to be careful to not paint all LEO with the same brush. The problem the LEO community has is an old one.....the horrible actions of a few bad apples bringing shame and dishonor on the heads and shoulders of good decent cops, making their jobs that much harder. I think we need to remember that there are LOTS of LEO who read these stories, and agree with us that not only is justice not served, but that evil is encouraged whenever a cop gets away with murdering a citizen without any consequences to their own liberty. In the previously mentioned book, "Rise of the Warrior Cop: the Militarization of America's Police Forces", the author, Radley Balko, gives examples of officers who cringed at what they were ordered to do, and then went on to become activists against this kind of thing.

So remember that the good cops still considerably outnumber the bad ones. It's just that the actions of the bad ones are so appalling that it is hard to see beyond them to the good ones who actually agree with us.

But there is no doubt that the policing arm of gov't at all levels has become the enforcement arm. I'd like a LEO to describe to me how, beyond his personal recognition of my 4th Amendment rights, I still even have any 4th Amendment protections in the eyes of law enforcement at large. When the police won't police themselves, and their masters (apparently not us) won't police them, then who makes sure that the rights of the individual citizen are always placed ahead of an ambitious prosecutor's crapulent need to make a name for himself at election time?

bblhd672 wrote:

Lynyrd wrote:http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/07/26/mi ... -home.html

Mississippi police officers shot a mechanic to death Sunday after the cops served an arrest warrant at the wrong residence, according to multiple media reports.

Not only did they try to server a warrant at the wrong address, they shot an innocent man while they were at the wrong address. His wife claims the police account of what went wrong isn't true. Someone got killed, no one got arrested.

If you're mad about this read the book " Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" by Radley Balko. This is not an isolated or rare incident.

What he said. Read the book. Sadly, this is not unheard of. What's very rare, however, is any kind of accountability on the part of the murdering cops.