www.buffalonews.com

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.

“They know they did something wrong and they were still ignorant,” said the 29-year-old Pennyamon. “At first, I just wanted an apology. Now, because they want[ed] to be ignorant and rude, I have to take it to the next level.”

She filed a report with the department’s Professional Standards Division and also contacted Mayor Byron W.

Brown about the incident. Pennyamon said Friday evening she also has retained a lawyer and intends to pursue legal action.

I just woke up to this story. A little hazy from sleep, I had to read it twice. Another family victimized by the War on Drugs and the US Police State while piglets go on “paid vacation” as the situation gets investigated internally. I can recall two incidents in the last month where police raid the wrong house with excessive force all in the name of the War on Drugs: Minneapolis and Berwyn Heights.

Three strikes and you’re out, right?

…right?

Update on Berwyn Heights Botched Raid

Things are getting worse for Prince George’s County, Md. police officials, after last week’s botched no-knock raid (previously chronicled on C@L here).

Not only did the police not have a warrant to conduct a no-knock raid, but it now appears they were well-aware that a drug ring was delivering large shipments of marijuana to innocent addressees’ homes in the D.C. suburbs. The packages would then be intercepted by other members of the ring, all without the addressees’ knowledge or involvement. Nonetheless, the cops executed their guns-ablazin’ raid on the home of Berwyn Heights mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife Trinity Tomsic, where the cops shot the couple’s black Labs and detained Calvo and his mother-in-law in handcuffs for hours.

Astoundingly, P.G. County police refuse to admit that they did anything wrong in the raid. As police chief Melvin C. High said in today’s Washington Post:

In some quarters, this has been viewed as a flawed police operation and an attack on the mayor, which it is not. This was about an address, this was about a name on a package . . . and, in fact, our people did not know that this was the home of the mayor and his family until after the fact.

I correct Chief High: When police officers execute a no-knock raid though they have no warrant or cause to do so, when they blast and shoot their way into a home without first learning who lives there, then they’ve carried out a flawed police operation. That’s the case regardless of whether Calvo and Tomsic are guilty of trafficking drugs.

In Prince George’s County, flawed law enforcement isn’t unusual. At least, in this case, the victims of the botched raid may have the social stature to fight back.

Lima, Ohio SWAT Officer Acquitted in the Killing of Tarika Wilson

A Lima, Ohio jury has acquitted police officer Joseph Chavalia of involuntary manslaughter in the death of 26-year-old Tarika Wilson. Chavalia shot and killed Wilson and wounded her infant son during a drug raid last January. Wilson was unarmed.

During the raid, one of Chavalia’s fellow officers shot and killed the two dogs owned by Wilson’s boyfriend and the target of the raid, Anthony Terry. Chavalia testified that he mistook his fellow officer’s shots at the dogs for hostile gunfire coming from the bedroom where Wilson was standing with her child. Chavalia then fired blindly into the bedroom.

The jury concluded that Chavalia reasonably feared for his life when he heard the gunshots. I guess they were then willing to overlook Chavalia’s mistaking an unarmed woman holding a baby for an armed drug dealer, and the fact that he fired blindly into a room without first identifying what he was shooting at. It’s too bad that that same sort of deference isn’t given to the people on the receiving end of these raids when they too understandably confuse the police officers who wake them from sleep and invade their homes for criminal intruders.

California Medical Marijuana Dispensary Owner Charlie Lynch Found Guilty in Grotesque Miscarriage of Justice

Charles Lynch, the owner of a medical marijuana dispensary in Morro Bay, California that was fully compliant with state laws, has been found guilty in federal court of pushing drugs. The grim details, courtesy of The Los Angeles Times:

The owner of a Morro Bay marijuana dispensary was found guilty today in federal court of five counts of distributing drugs.

Charles Lynch, the owner of the dispensary, faces a minimum of five years in prison.

His closely watched trial involved conflicting marijuana laws and went to a federal court jury Monday. Jurors were asked to determine if Lynch was guilty of violating federal drug laws.

During a week-and-a-half-long trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, federal prosecutors sought to depict Lynch as a common drug dealer who sold pot to teenagers and carried a backpack stuffed with cash.

Lynch was charged with distributing marijuana, conspiring to distribute marijuana and providing marijuana to people under the age of 21.

Whole news story here.

Lynch is one of the countless casualties of an idiotic and tragically long-running war on drugs. His shop scrupulously followed Golden State laws and when he opened his shop in Morro Bay, local officials attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony. And that kid he provided medical marijuana to? A high school athlete who had lost a leg to cancer and had a prescription from a Stanford-trained doctor (and in any case, Lynch only dealt with the boy’s parents). Yes, a common drug dealer.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/…

Just north of D.C., in the small suburb of Berwyn Heights, a county SWAT team raided a house last week after a shipping service delivered a large quantity of illegal drugs to the front door.

Good police work in the war on drugs? Probably not.

The house is home to Berwyn Heights mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife Trinity Tomsic, and their two black Labs (pictured left). Though the package containing more than 30 lbs. of marijuana was addressed to Tomsic, the couple may have had nothing to do with the drugs. In recent months there have been incidents in which large quantities of drugs were delivered to homes in the D.C. area, where they were then supposed to be intercepted by drug dealers — all without the package addressees’ knowledge or involvement. Calvo and Tomsic may have been caught up in just such a scheme.

This would make Calvo and Tomsic the unfortunate victims of an understandable error by the police SWAT team, except…

The police action was yet another guns-ablazin’, no-knock raid, in which the officers (in what seems like SOP) shot the couple’s dogs, even as one of the pups tried to run away. The cops then handcuffed Calvo and Tomsic’s mother-in-law and interrogated them for hours, while the dogs’ bodies laid in pools of blood nearby. The cops later found the package of drugs — unopened, as if it were an unexpected package. No arrests were made.

“My government blew through my doors and killed my dogs,” Calvo told the Washington Post. “They thought we were drug dealers, and we were treated as such. I don’t think they really ever considered that we weren’t.”

Of course, it may end up that Calvo and his wife are part of a drug distribution ring, and the police have gotten their man. But even if that’s true, was a no-knock, shoot-the-dogs raid an appropriate police action for a lousy shipment of pot?

And what if the current, emerging picture is correct, and this is yet another botched police raid and cops-gone-wild? If that’s the case (and I emphazie the “if”), the Prince George’s County SWAT team and its superiors need to be held accountable.

Law enforcement officers have a difficult and dangerous job, and I do not make light of that. But their sworn duty is to protect and serve the public, not blast their way into innocent people’s houses and shoot their dogs. If they cannot fulfill that duty, then they cannot be law enforcement officers.

All this over a plant people like to smoke.

http://thinkprogress.org/…

Today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) spoke to the National Urban League, a group “devoted to empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream.” When an audience member asked him how he planned to reduce urban crime, McCain praised Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s efforts in New York Cirty before invoking the military’s tactics in Iraq as the model for crime-fighting:

MCCAIN: And some of those tactics — you mention the war in Iraq — are like that we use in the military. You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control. And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement, etc, etc.

What was it I heard last week about McCain? “I hate war” I believe it was. Just like he loves the 1st and 4th Amendment right?

… or Secession Day or antiauthoritarian day or …

A few articles to check out while waiting for the hotdogs and burgers to cook.

A Fresh Look at Holidays - Butler Shaffer

Just how far we have contorted our thinking about “independence day” is reflected in most people’s thinking about fireworks. Like private gun-ownership, our personal use of fireworks represents too much power in the hands of individuals. And so, we confine ourselves to the absurdity of having the state celebrate our liberty and independence for us!

July 4th In Bizarro World - Manuel Lora

What follows are just a few of the July 4th lies and errors that we are supposed to blindly accept:

• The military is glorious, its heroes heroic, and our support is patriotic
• Freedom is about authority
• The police keep us safe and have a duty to protect us
• We are better off now than when the war on drugs started decades ago
• Continually increasing prices is a product of the market and thus the central bank must control credit and the money supply
• With proper reform, government can become efficient, especially if we elect the right leaders
• The Constitution gives people rights
• The government has been formed by the consent of the governed
• Without the state regulating/subsidizing/taxing/prohibiting activity or industry X, said industry or activity would be produced in quantities and/or qualities that are too high or too low; or would run rampant, cartelize and monopolize the market; or would not survive in a predatory competitive environment
• The more politically democratic things are, the better for everyone
• No matter what the cost to the public, protecting the children/our veterans/our senior citizens/our teachers is always the number one priority
• The free movement of goods and people destroys jobs and threatens our standard of living
• Businesses have no incentives to keep their customers safe; licenses ensure fair practices
• The law may occasionally be wrong, but it should nonetheless be followed always
• We must forever give up essential liberties to guarantee safety: it’s for your own good

Happy Secession Day! - Thomas DiLorenzo

That’s what Thomas Jefferson would be celebrating today. Unlike so many Americans, he would not be celebrating the American empire, with its “unitary executive,” swarms of tax-collecting bureaucrats, its militarization of society, protectionism, economic fascism, suspension of habeas corpus, domestic spying, etc., etc. The Hamiltonian republic that we now live under, which is celebrated by the liberal/left and neocons alike, is the opposite of Jefferson’s dream of an “empire of liberty.”

And of course there is the Decleration of Independence. Agreed upon on July 2nd and officially recognized on the 4th.

I’d imagine if you watch mises.org or lewrockwell.com today you’ll get plenty of other articles on the topic of freedom, secession, etc.