Radley Balko has posted video of the SWAT raid on a Missouri home that he wrote about last February. This is the one where the Columbia Police Department busted in, fired seven shots at the family’s dogs, and ended up recovering a small amount of marijuana:
It’s horrifying, but I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years — cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.
But they did prevent Jonathan Whitworth from smoking the pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.
CPD Internal Affairs continues to investigate whether this was an appropriate response to the “tip” they received that started all this.
