This video was released by the Salt Lake Tribune of a drug bust gone bad where officers shot and killed Todd Blair, 45, when he appeared holding a golf club. The police had secured a no knock warrant for his roommate — suspected of selling drugs.
On the video, you can hear the police shout “Police! Search warrant!” However, courts are now issuing no-knock warrants with greater frequency. The result has been a number of incidents where homeowners have either been shot or have shot police by mistake. In Wilson v. Arkansas (1995) the Supreme Court held that “knock-and-announce” was one of the factors that it would use to determine if an entry is constitutional, but allowed the practice generally. Later, it gutted the deterrent for violations by ruling in Hudson v. Michigan (2006) that a violation of the knock-and-announce rule does not require the suppression of evidence. According to Professor Peter Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University, no-knock warrant increased from 3,000 in 1981 to more than 50,000 in 2005.
In this case, officers were found to have acted appropriately in shooting Blair because they saw a glint of an object in his hands.
Jonathan Turley
RE: shano, January 20, 2011 at 1:28 pm
The war on drugs has created a police state.
###############
I have an additional view…
Round 1:
The police state created the war on drugs.
Round 2:
The war on drugs created the enlarged police state.
Round 3:
The enlarged police state created the enlarged war on drugs.
Round 4:
The enlarged war on drugs enlarged the police state further.
Round 5:
The further enlarged police state enlarged the war on drugs more.
Round 6:
The enlarged war on drugs shot and killed the police state.
In this fictional playlet, the gun was a revolver, a six shooter, and it ran out of bullets, casings, powder charges, and primers.
Now, how is that for a primer on the madness of the mutually assured destruction of escalating adversarial reciprocal retaliation?
How many rounds remain in the clip of human stupidity; said clip being the whole of recorded human history and its continuing self-destruction?
Round and Round we go, firing round and round at each other as at ourselves, Row, row the boat, round and round we go, swamping the boat and drowning ourselves in the hailstorm of rounds?
The problem is not the people.
The problem is mental illness.
The mental illness of the vast majority of people.
Time corrupted learning is the result of mental illness.
Coercing little children to believe they made mistakes they were told to not make, made the mistakes anyway, knew and understood better, are at fault, and deserve to be punished is the cause of mental illness.
If you do not understand mental illness as caused by child abuse, the indoctrination of authoritarian beliefs through the coercion of the terrible twos, methinks that the boogeyman got you.
And the boogeyman is mental illness such that the mental illness keeps the person with mental illness from recognizing the boogeyman.
Blame the police officers, and you have brought forth your own mental illness.
I blame no one.
Maybe we should rekindle the War on Poverty and attack it with as much money as the War on Drugs?
The war on drugs degrades the legal system.
And the Constitutional right to be secure in your own home.
shano,
dim wits for sure.
The war on drugs has created a police state.
I would rather drugs were regulated, taxed and legal, like Portugal. ,Anyone who has a drug problem should be going to rehab instead of prison.
Our Prison Industrial complex would fight this tooth and nail, of course. But one day we will be forced to end the failed war on drugs. We can no longer afford the costs.
Those cops were pussies. Yea, thats right, they were so afraid they couldnt wait two seconds longer for him to drop the ‘weapon’.
So cowardly. Dim wits.
“Busting in” often creates the evidence which otherwise would never have existed.
Therefore, not “busting in” is the crime or concealing the evidence for want of its actually being made by “busting in.”
Round and round…
One has to wonder, how many shots were fired to save par or was it a hole in one…?
Mark:
Excellent comments.
The reason they bust in like this is they don’t have evidence. If they did have evidence of a crime they wouldn’t have to bust in. These deadly fishing expeditions ought to be outlawed.
The only reason cops murder people like this is because they are afraid to die. Well, duh, being a cop means you deal with bad guys. Get over it or get out.
Cops like these guys should find safer work that doesn’t scare them so much.
Like, maybe, a clerk in the lingerie department at Wal Mart.
When the next-to-the-last living person is killed by the last living person, absent parthenogenesis, the war on drugs will have finally been successfully won.
I think the shooter did get a Mulligan because the police force claimed the shiny object in his hands could have been a gun. I am a little confused here. Since they had surprise on their side and a massive firepower and manpower advantage, why wouldn’t you turn on the lights so you can see who is threatening you and what the object is? I wonder if the Supreme Court would regain some sense if one of their homes had been the target of a no-knock attack?
I guess no one heard fore……or is that four….I suppose those with real weapons can play through….I am wondering if they can use a mulligans on this shot?
There are so many screw-ups so often by so many officers it might be about time to go “British” where the officers don’t normally carry guns. They do have access to guns, but the extra steps it takes them to become armed may allow the situations to cool down enough for them to get their wits together. Their profession is going down the toilet on a daily basis it appears.
given the number of armed citizens in this country how soon will it be before cops get shot in one of these brain dean maneuvers? And will the courts be as understanding of the shooter (assuming he is left alive) as they are of the cops?
Minneapolis, MN just settled with a home owner whos house was shot up when he opened fire on a no knock raid. The amazing thing was nobody got hit despite 20-30 rounds being fired by the 2 sides. Well, that and the fact that the executed the raid based on the word of a paid informer and no evidence.
I have alot of problems with these No Knock raids when the police like to execute them late at night. They like to wake people up before they can think with a clear head and if someone wakes up trying to defend their home and property they can likely end up dead.
If this article is about the video I saw a week or so ago the cops bust in and yell who they are, you see a guy appear at the edge of a hallway holding a golf club a few seconds pass and then the guy with the gold club is shot I think 3 times.
I think it was about 23 seconds from when they burst in announcing themselves to when the man was shot.
If the cops did this to me I would probably be dead too. I’m losing my hearing and may not have understood what was being said at first and could easily see myself in this guys shoes.
If they burst in when I am sleeping I think the cops yelling would wake me up but I wouldn’t have understood it and jumped out of bed to see what was going on and would likely be shot.
I think these No Knocks seriously take away from our rights of being secure in our homes and persons because it can make people hesitate to defend their own home when there are so many instances of cops doing this and even making mistakes and picking the wrong house.
In my previous post I failed to include the href in the link to information on the Amadou Diallo affair. Here it is properly with href included properly.
Well the occasional death of a person that some left wing, liberal, chattering class types see wrongly as “innocent” is a small price to pay for teh robust prosecution of teh war on drugs.
The dead guy was not innocent, he possessed some dope and he threatened police officers with golf club that could have injured them were they in range. Quite rightly did the police officer shoot him dead, attacking or threatening to attack police is absolutely unforgivable.
I have no doubt that in the extremely unlikely event that the officer who shot the man is prosecuted any decent jury will acquit him, just as the jury in Albany NY rightly acquitted the four officers who shot Amadou Diallo 19 times when the police perceived that a dangerous Black man threatened them with a wallet. This officer was quite justified in assuming that the golf club might have been a special long rang club capable of striking at a distance of 20 metres, or even a disguised laser plaster brought back by time machine from the year 2150.
I guess that “License to Kill” isn’t restricted to James Bond anymore.
Golf club………………gun………one knocks a ball 400 yards the other kills in less space & time. So just how does one really justify this sort of police action, overkill, what?? Maybe the payout on this will be larger than that poor guy who was shot by the swat team.
We know who the real criminals are and it isn’t the guy with the golf club.
Oh, sorry, it WASN’T the guy with the golf club.
B*stards.