P-D:
BULLET RIDDLED: SWAT Team raids wrong house
With her six kids and husband tucked into bed, Yee Moua was watching TV in her living room just after midnight when she heard voices — faint at first, then louder. Then came the sound of a window shattering.
Moua bolted upstairs, where her husband, Vang Khang, grabbed his shotgun from a closet, knelt and fired a warning shot through his doorway as he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He let loose with two more blasts. Twenty-two bullets were fired back at him, by the family’s count.
Then things suddenly became clear.
“It’s the police! Police!” his sons yelled.
Khang, a Hmong immigrant with shaky command of English, set down his gun, raised his hands and was soon on the ground, an officer’s boot on his neck.
The gunmen, it turned out, were members of a police SWAT team that had raided the wrong address because of bad information from an informant — a mistake that some critics say happens all too frequently around the country and gets innocent people killed.
(snip)
One of the biggest botched raids in recent years happened in Atlanta in 2006, when police killed a 92-year-old woman in a hail of nearly 40 bullets after she fired a shot at what she thought were intruders. Police had gone to her house on a drug raid, but no drugs were found.
Prosecutors said that in obtaining a search warrant, Atlanta police falsely told a judge that an informant had confirmed drug dealing there. The scandal led to a shake-up in the department, two officers pleaded guilty to manslaughter and civil rights charges, and the city faces at least two lawsuits.
Reliable figures on the frequency of erroneous raids are hard to come by. Federal agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, said they do not keep track.
Of course the FBI doesn’t keep track, because it sometimes makes these kinds of mistakes itself. Several years ago, the FBI raided the wrong house in St. Charles, Missouri, and wound up killing someone who thought their house was being burglared.
Using the logic just employed by the state government of New Jersey in repudiating the death penalty, then there should be no more SWAT raids (which themselves have sometimes resulted in innocent people being killed) by any law enforcement agencies if there’s any doubts about the veracity of stool-pidgeon informants.
Often, these “informants” often become agents provocateurs in order to goad their target into saying something or doing something wrong, in order to produce “results” for the law enforcement agency that has such “informants” (usually low-level criminals seeking to avoid prison themselves) on a string.
