Yeah, I’m done with romance. Fuck this shit in the fucking neck.
A St. Paul, Minnesota family claims in a lawsuit that police officers who conducted a wrong-door raid on their home shot their dog, and then forced their three handcuffed children to sit near the dead pet while officers ransacked the home.
And when you read beyond the first sentence, it gets worse. They gave a girl a diabetic episode because they were too busy pointing their guns at her to let her take her medicine. You can die from those. Diabetic episodes, I mean. Also guns.
Fuck every single fucking thing about this. If you change “wrong-door raid” to “illegal home invasion” and “police officers” to “basically anything“, this instantly becomes one of the sickest crimes you’ve heard of in a long while. But because they’re police, and we need those brave boys in blue to conduct raids on the terrorists who live among us and foil their evil plans, events like these just become unfortunate blips on a landscape of protecting and serving.
These people had no right to enter that house. They had no right to forcibly put handcuffs on its occupants, threaten them with death, and murder their pet dog. Nobody ever has the right to do that to other people.
But some people want them to. Many people still think that our predominant attitude toward the police as an institution should be respect, deference, admiration. And what follows from that is that if they need to kick down your door while you’re asleep one day and fire guns in your home, well, it’s a small price to pay. Your house number kinda resembles that of someone who sounds Muslim and looks pretty scary. Your street name began with the same letter. It was an understandable mistake. They’re just trying to keep us safe.
The police force is no doubt full of individuals who deserve respect, and even admiration in some cases. A lot of them surely do try hard to do a difficult job, and succeed in keeping compassion and humility at the fore of their priorities. Police officers themselves I don’t necessarily have any complaint with.
But the official body known as the police deserves skepticism, scrutiny, suspicion, and very serious doubts as to its fitness for purpose.
They spent over an hour holding this family hostage and going through their stuff. If you forget that the “they” in that sentence were police ostensibly trying to keep us all safe from danger, we’re into lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key territory.
Fuck this.
(via Popehat)
Holy shit. This is absolutely terrifying.
Well, let’s just hope our legal system can kick into gear and give those officers the worst punishment imaginable for a cop. Paid leave.
You know, this is such a hard thing. I understand where you are coming from, but my brother is a former cop. And I can tell you, he would feel absolutely terrible and guilty (for the rest of his life) if he had be involved with something like this.
They made a mistake. It is not an excuse, but a fact (I didn’t read the original article, no time right now, but I assume they made a mistake).
I do believe you are right about the culture in which we live that allows something like this to even take place.