POLICE RAIDING WRONG HOME PART OF TREND

The recent SWAT team attack on an innocent home in Hender-sonville, as
detailed in the story, "Police apologize after raiding wrong house,"
(AC-T, May 15), is not the rare occurrence that the police would like
people to think it is. All across the nation, horror stories abound
about drug raids gone bad. Numerous totally innocent Americans have
been killed and injured by "dynamic entry" techniques that have become
all too prevalent.

Normally the cops do not even apologize, much less accept
responsibility. The police consider their safety more important than
the public's so they use maximum force as much as possible; less risk
for cops means more for civilians.

What was the reason that a magistrate or judge signed a "no knock
warrant" so that police could simply bomb (smoke bombs are dangerous,
they explode and cause fires and injuries) and assault a home before
announcing themselves? Were the police able to arrest the real suspect
without the use of force, and if so why wasn't that the first option?

All too commonly the police, as they did in Atlanta recently in the
case of Kathryn Johnson, who was murdered by police, try and get
permission for these assault type methods of announcing their presence
and they normally succeed. Blurring the line The police commonly abuse
the persons present, cursing and screaming as they rough up the
occupants, counting on the public having less sympathy for the "bad
guys" (regardless of the presumption of innocence) and the fact that
most accused are poor and unable to afford lawsuits to correct
wrongful police actions.

This militarization of the local cops is a direct result of the trend
toward blurring the line between civilian and military operations;
President Bush has done away with posse comitatus as well as habeas
corpus after 600 years as a protection for us, having gutted most of
the Constitution in the name of chasing terrorists. But the real
effects can be felt in small ways, such as in the incident in
Hender-sonville, where children are slammed to the floor with guns at
their heads and the police damage or destroy whatever they wish as
they ransack property. See for yourself Just try searching on your
computer for "police misconduct" or "police kill wrong person" and see
how many awful true stories are there testifying to the lack of care
that police take during operations and the incredible number of
innocent people injured or killed by sloppy police work. If the cops
cannot read the right address then how can they be trusted to do much
of anything right?

All raids should be videotaped for later use should things go
wrong.

The police resist this, as tapes show how brutal and nasty most cops
are when raiding private homes, and their image as protectors and
servants is shown to be a farce in actual practice when they storm
through a family's lives under the guise of protecting themselves from
the cokeheads and petty dealers they arrest.

Use of force While this incident may be only one of a few locally, it
is just part of a terrible trend.

The police are acting more like home invasion robbers than cops when
they use more force than is called for by the facts.

The cops like to assume everyone they face is ready to shoot them on
sight, and this is just not true, not yet. That will only happen if
the citizens feel that the police are more dangerous than some idiot
using drugs in the privacy of his home and arm themselves against
intrusions that are unjustified. Remember, had any police been shot
while they were assaulting that mistaken address, the residents would
have been fully justified even though they no doubt would have been
gunned down regardless of innocence; once a bad raid starts it doesn't
end until the shooting stops and the cops start checking the facts.
That is something they should do before the shooting starts, don't you
think? Rich Moore is a disabled Vietnam-era Air Force veteran retired
from retail sales. He chronicles eroding civil liberties and police
misconduct issues from his home in Franklin.