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Originally Posted by firstdown
Its sad and mistakes happen but where is the rage form the people living in the city with 365 murders in 2008 and tops the nation in murder rate. Oh its "No Snitch" when its a gang member or a common crook but have a cop make a mistake and they suddenly find their rage.
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For those interested in studying more about police raids, I highly recommend the writings of
Radley Balko of
Reason Magazine. In particular, his piece about the case of
Cory Maye, who at one point was sentenced to death row for the shooting death of a police officer who was part of a SWAT team raid of his house, which turned out to be the wrong one. It's a long article, but well worth it.
Here's a snippet of the piece, which I think eloquently makes the case about how so much preferential treatment is given to police when they make mistake, but not so much in the case of those whose home is being raided:
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Criminal charges against police officers who accidentally kill innocent people in these raids are rare. Prosecutors almost always determine that the violent, confrontational nature of the raids and the split-second decisions made while conducting them demand that police be given a great deal of discretion. Yet it’s the policy of using volatile forced-entry raids to serve routine drug warrants that creates those circumstances in the first place.
Worse, prosecutors are much less inclined to take circumstances into account when it comes to pressing charges against civilians who make similar mistakes. When civilians who are innocent or who have no history of violence defend their homes during a mistaken raid, they have about a one in two chance of facing criminal charges if a policeman is killed or injured. When convicted, they’ve received sentences ranging from probation to life in prison to, in Maye’s case, the death penalty.
It’s a remarkable double standard. The reason these raids are often conducted late at night or very early in the morning is to catch suspects while they’re sleeping and least capable of processing what’s going on around them. Raids are often preceded by the deployment of flash-bang grenades, devices designed to confuse everyone in the vicinity. While narcotics officers have (or at least are supposed to have) extensive training in how to act during a raid, suspects don’t, and officers have the advantage of surprise. Yet prosecutors readily forgive mistaken police shootings of innocent civilians and unarmed drug suspects while expecting the people on the receiving end of late-night raids to show exemplary composure, judgment, and control in determining whether the attackers in their homes are cops or criminals.
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