Two More Isolated Incidents
By Radley Balko on police raid
In Buffalo, while I was on vacation.
Armed with a battering ram and shotguns, Buffalo police looking for heroin broke down the door and stormed the lower apartment of a West Side family of eight.
The problem is that the Wednesday evening raid should have occurred at an apartment upstairs.
And, that's only the tip of the iceberg, according to Schavon Pennyamon, who lives at the mistakenly raided apartment on Sherwood Street with her husband, Terrell, and six children.
Pennyamon alleges that after wrongly breaking into her apartment, police proceeded to strike her epileptic husband in the head with the butt end of a shotgun and point shotguns at her young children before admitting their mistake and then raiding the right apartment.
She says she's left with a broken door, an injured husband, jittery children and — what bothers her most — still no apology from police.
[...]
Pennyamon remains unconvinced it was a mistake. She says officers told her they had "raided the house before" and she believes they felt entitled to do it again — warrant or not.
"The way they make it seem is 'we can do whatever we want,' " she said.
Pennyamon's troubled by what she says is an arrogance by police officers and an unwillingness to "serve and protect" those who need it.
Buffalo police then raided the "correct" house, but found no illicit drugs, and made no arrests.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about "Operation Shock and Awe," a massive, city-wide series of drug raids culminating in a press conference in which police officials announced that they had "put a dent" in the city's drug trade. The police even invited reporters along to watch the excitement up close. Follow-up reporting showed that the "dent" was barely a scratch–six pounds of marijuana, and seven ounces of crack. Most of those arrested were later released for lack of evidence, meaning an untold but significant number of those raids came up empty.
Looks like they didn't learn much from the experience. theagitator.com |
