I’ve said it dozens of times before, that SWAT teams are the standing armies our Founding Fathers warned us about. Now Tango sends me this article:
The Salt Lake City police detective responsible for a SWAT team ramming the door of a wrong house last year and pointing guns at the elderly woman inside also misled the judge who issued the search warrant, according to documents released by the city.
The narcotics detective, Cooper Landvatter, received a 20-hour suspension for violating search-and-seizure policies, committing conduct unbecoming an officer, and violating what the Salt Lake City Police Department refers to as its “Core Values.”
“The damage to your reputation as a professional and the collective reputation of the department is not easily repaired,” Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank wrote in the discipline letter to Landvatter.
This is one of my greatest fears. There’s NOTHING you can do to safeguard from this, and it can happen to literally ANYONE and the penalties for such errors are trivially minor.
Factor in the various home invasions by various gangs who kit up like Police and shout “Police!” as they break and enter your home so they can get compliance for rapes and get assistance from the home owners in their robbery, and this gets VERY scary.
If you’re not a criminal, and somebody kicks down your door and shouts “Police!” you’re dead, because if you comply it might NOT be police, and if you fight back you’ll be killed. Hell even if you comply with legitimate officers you might get killed as well!
OK now that was the LIGHT part of my post, listen to this!
Landvatter also told investigators he felt pressure from his supervisors to obtain and serve a search warrant once a month. He referred to the requirement as a “quota.” The review board report called that “a very poor policy,” but said it did not contribute significantly to the incorrect raid.
Salt Lake City Police Department spokeswoman Lara Jones declined to discuss the findings due to what she said was a claim filed against the city. It was unclear to what claim she was referring. Landvatter did not respond to a request for an interview sent through Jones.
Get that? There’s a search warrant QUOTA!!! Think of how quickly this clashes with the 4th Amendment!! How can you regulate Probable cause so that searches happen with a predictable regularity?
This also sheds a LOT of light on the raid in Ogden. The man in question was growing a few pot plants, and he had a regular job with good attendance. Their suspect routinely and predictably would leave his home and go to a workplace where guns are likely forbidden. That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be armed, but given his work history, and his military background, it sounds like a safer bet to arrest him as he leaves his home to go to work, driving to work, or at work.
But police chose to go forward with a SWAT raid….with word of this quota policy (and if Salt Lake PD is doing it, you can bet other departments are doing it too) things get really scary!
Again, SWAT teams are the standing armies our Founding Fathers warned us about!
