Rand Paul says no-knock warrants 'should be forbidden' in wake of shooting
courier-journal.com
courier-journal.com
The whole police immunity for murder and violence needs to stop. If a civilian did something similar even if under worse conditions they would be treated horribly by the cops and be put to jail under shitty conditions for years. A policeman can easily say "I was worried for my life!" when shooting an unarmed person but a civilians can't say the same thing if they shoot a cop that invaded their house, or even another civilian.
Hell, the police can even demolish your house during an investigation and they don't have to pay anything for it. https://www.denverpost.com/2019/10/30/swat-team-destroyed-gr...
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...
Saw that one making the rounds again, and I gotta say, you don't grab a gun unless you're about to shoot period.
Edit: Fix typo: sad -> saw
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tensions-f...
There are internal investigations every time a police officer discharges their weapon. They don't enjoy immunity against any crime they commit. If there is no evidence of a crime, then there cannot be any criminal charges.
Edit: https://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+many+police+officers+were+charged+...
I did find one: https://abcnews.go.com/US/houston-police-officer-gerald-goin...
If it's done because of a immediate threat to life situation, then the people involved are rightfully risking their lives, to save another, and they know that.
If it's done to prevent the flushing of evidence down a toilent, then that's a bad trade for everyone, and the Senator from Kentuckey is right.
I'm not affiliated with either organization.
Here's one case that recently came to my attention: https://www.theusconstitution.org/litigation/micah-jessop-br...
The plaintiffs allege that, while executing a search warrant, Fresno police officers personally stole several hundred thousand dollars worth of coins. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that even if this theft happened, the officers could not be sued:
> We recognize that the allegation of any theft by police officers—most certainly the theft of over $225,000—is deeply disturbing. Whether that conduct violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures, however, would not “be ‘clear to a reasonable officer.’” [...] Because Appellants did not have a clearly established Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from the theft of property seized pursuant to a warrant, the City Officers are entitled to qualified immunity.
Yesterday the Supreme Court declined to consider the plaintiffs' appeal, which means they're SOL.
Do you happen to know off hand if any investigation was actually pursued to track down the missing coins or money?
The police department or city should be sued for it, if the warrant were unlawfully obtainedor if items seized during the search allegedly went missing. And they were sued.
The ruling you are complaining about was specifically about removing the officers as individual defendants from the civil case. The city of Fresno is still a defendant in the case. It is simply the individual officers that are not.
On another note--the difference in values in that case is due to how the police recorded the coins into evidence. When physical money is taken into evidence, they record the stated value of the money (i.e., a quarter is recorded as a quarter...even if it is a rare quarter worth $1million on the collectibles market, since it's not the police's job to get an appraisal for items taken into evidence). The plaintiffs valued the collectibles at their alleged market values.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-georgia-deputy-acqui...
The punishment for crimes committed by police officers should be harsher than the punishment for the same crimes committed by regular citizens. And the law should be actually enforced, not conveniently ignored. It would probably only take a few high profile cases where they make an example of the officer to change the attitude in the police force.
Right now, some police, who are meant to protect, are trigger happy because they know that their colleagues "have the backs," and they will be let off the hook with a suspension in the worst case. They don't analyze a situation carefully enough before reaching for their guns. There are shortcuts taken far too often by police, such as entering properties without warrants, arresting people who have not committed or are even suspected of committing crimes. The police think they're a different tier of citizen, and well, they are, because they can violate citizen's rights with almost immunity.
It is understandable that mistakes can be made, but it this is precisely why they need to be made an example of, to prevent the mistakes recurring.
I'm also rate limited to 5 comments per 3 hours due to wrongthink. Has been that way for a couple of years.
It's a slippery slope, and that's not always a logical fallicy: https://www.aristotl.io/?s=slippery#slippery-slope
If you want to do that, it would need to apply to everyone.
This is also a slippery slope in the other direction. If they know they are essentially immune, then their limiters are removed in their behavior - making them more likely to be negligent and cause accidents, which in turn, they get let off for, strengthening the idea that police are mostly immune from prosecution.
One could argue that a police officer could voluntarily give up their "equal protection" right as a pledge for entering the force. If they are committed to serving and protecting, then such declaration could give confidence to those are meant to be being served. Right now, almost everyone is sceptical of the police in one way or another. The system is rigged and it stinks.
I read your comment as agreeing with Equal Protection. In the end we are talking about the penality for framing or depervation of rights under the color of law. It should apply to everyone. It's easy to point out the problem, but proposing a slution is much harder. Juries are the real firewall, but they depend on the knowledgebase of the jurors.
It's one of these things that a direct "of x then y" prob isnt going to work. Giving the public direct access to lower level raw information is what I would like to start with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23232250
Imagine if we could script Pacer stats....
EDIT: hit my comment limit for the night, good point about the DA; in that case, it's the next level up from juries; the electorate. The DA is only accountable to them if they make them so, and public opinion does not always wait until the next election, bad PR is fixed astonishingly quickly if the DA's boss feels the pressure. If you have another idea, please propose it.
could you check if the comment limiting on that user was a mistake?
HN is a moderated site. Whether that's censorship or not is mostly a word game; people use that word when they don't like a thing and different words when they do.
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars—and we're happy to remove the rate limit when people commit to following the site guidelines in the future. hn@ycombinator.com is the best place to contact about this.
Isn't that what stand-your-ground law enable people to do?
We'll see what happens after the case works its way through court, but he's already losing several months of wages and the stress of a court battle, which is more than most cops have to go through after shooting someone.
Unfortunately, while it appears the law is on his side based on the facts currently known (Kentucky is a castle doctrine and SYG state), these doctrines are affirmative defenses that must be argued in court. Under most state criminal procedure codes, Mr. Walker can be held until trial (unless freed on bail, or placed under house arrest).
Note that placing someone under house arrest in a conservative state like Kentucky is the judge's way of saying that he expects the defendant to prevail in court and thus won't subject them to the indignities of the prison system, but can't simply release them without bail or restriction due to the nature of the charges.
Both the castle doctrine and stand-your-ground doctrines let people shoot attackers without attempting to flee. One of the big differences is that castle doctrine only applies in your home (but is a very strong defense that is generally acceptable in almost every state), while stand-your-grand would apply outside your home, but is more limited--not every state allows for a stand-your-ground defense. For example, California allows for the castle doctrine but not stand-your-ground, so you would have to reasonably attempt to flee before engaging in deadly force.
Not so long ago, there was a woman arrested for firing a warning shot at her abusive spouse or boyfriend. She was jailed. Unsurprisingly, she was African-American. Women, in general, can't use this defense as often and minorities rarely can.
And few folks can use this against cops - you'd need someone to come to your aid and prove the cop did something wrong.
So Florida's stand your ground law provision had absolutely nothing to do with the case. Plus there's one now pretty old study out there that shows in Florida that blacks successfully used the stand your ground provision of Florida law as part of a self-defense affirmative defense more often than whites. The claim that women are disfavored in claiming self-defense is literally something I've never heard of.
I've seen this happen with fights without weapons involved (both in real life and shows like Live PD), and the charges are always serious if they left and came back, most especially with a weapon.
Weird how for everyone else ignorance of the law isn't an excuse, only for the ones enforcing it.
They arrested the murdered woman's boyfriend for his self defense of armed intrusion.
The person they were serving the warrant on was already in custody.
Clearly these cops are criminals. There's nothing else that can explain the circumstances here.
In my one run-in with the police in the bay area, after I was mugged at gunpoint and called the police immediately after, they were entirely unreliable and unhelpful. They refused to go after the perpetrators despite having a clear opportunity to at the time.
In many countries, the police is corrupt, harassing civilians to extort them into giving bribes. In Indonesia, planting drugs during a stop to extort money out of tourists is a well known scam. A drivers license check is never passed without a bribe (amounting to the entire contents of your wallet).
In Hong Kong, where I live now, the police has a history of brutally repressing peaceful protests, including the shooting of unarmed civilians, and the cover-up of multiple rapes and murders perpetrated by policemen.
Oftentimes, even when they are not outrightly criminal, the police is there to enforce awful laws that infringe on people's basic human rights.
Fuck the police.
I also used to live in the US, and the cops there are nuts.
Jon Oliver did a good video on accountability:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...
There are a lots of issues with race and police in the US also.
In every country. All police exist to protect the state by maintaining order. They do not exist to serve or protect you. Quite the opposite. This is true everywhere, including "paradises" like sweden or norway.
The police is there to "protect and serve" just like google is there to "do no evil".
In the past they required a college degree; now it's just a high school diploma or GED. In the past they provided plenty of training (ie. time on the range; de-escalation procedures, etc.); now you get 12 bullets twice a year for certification. In the past you received a good pension and great insurance; now if you die on the job your family gets nothing.
Who in the world would WANT to be a police officer in this situation!? You get little pay, little respect, and you have to run into the problem while everyone else runs away.
This is in no way an excuse for what happened in my town (Louisville, KY) but I thought it might shed some light as to why it happened. I don't think cops are bad people and it only takes a few to really drag them all down. They are generally just people trying to go to work and make a living. The vast, vast majority of police officers don't wake up wanting to end someone's life. They just want to make their town a bit safer and stay alive to spend time with their families.
People with some sort of authority fetish, who want to abuse their power over others.
> You get little pay, little respect
And quite a bit of authority.
It is very similar to teachers really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COa2t_m1K7I for those who aren't adverse to Google's tentacles.
Civil forfeiture is another huge reason. Not about killing them, but taking their property.
Is this more about exercising judgement?
Many first-world countries have no-knock warranty but really only the US has so many issues
A situation like that probably doesn't require a warrant because it probably falls under the "hot pursuit" exception.
Or say a situation where domestic violence plays a role and someone would be threatened if the police announced themselves
I think no-knock warrants should be abandoned, because they are dangerous and of limited value, but neither of those reasons are constitutional arguments.
I would argue that police officers transition into soldiers of the state when they hold what soldiers hold (bullet proof vests, flash grenades, automatic machine guns) and arrive in vehicles soldiers arrive in (MRAPs and other APCs). No-knock warrants are essentially the government choosing to "quarter" soldiers inside of some random person's house without their consent, for an unlimited amount of time.
Of course, the Constitution doesn't specify what the difference between a police officer and a soldier is, which I think is an important argument for the Supreme Court to hear anyways. A lot of what the police are (unfairly) allowed to do today stems from this blurred line. In most cases, soldiers are constrained even more than police are (i.e. Rules of Engagement).
IANAL but naively i would think that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." would be applicable, since its kind of unreasonsble to do a no-knock warrant when a normal search would be fully sufficient.
In the Branch Davidian raid in 1993, Janet Reno's crew had sought a no-knock warrant, but they were denied because the objects of the warrant (fully automatic guns and conversion kits) can't be quickly destroyed. They used no-knock tactics anyway.
Legal scholars don't even agree about basic questions like "can a professor publish a paper that lacks citations to relevant work, without violating securities law?" [1]. The odds of getting useful conlaw analysis on HN are nill.
That being said, we shouldn't always be looking to the COTUS to save us. Congress exists to make laws. If we want this practice banned, we need to enact a law to ban it.
[1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2014/12/15/sec-commissioner-...
I don't buy that though, it wasn't written in Ancient Koine Greek or Hebrew on lost tablets, heck it wasn't written that long ago compared to ancient texts and scriptures!
We've got books and legal cases to reference and confirm what was meant, we even know all about the first cases handled by the Supreme Court. The moment people start to interpret instead of reading it literally and based upon the historical context (seeking refuge from tyranny) is the moment they get confused and get the whole thing wrong.
They do because they establish basic strictures on the federal government itself. Critically the constitution, and bill of rights, outline what powers are granted to the federal government and which are expressly reserved for the states and citizens. Its the inverse of many (most?) countries that Ive seen. The fed government was granted limited, specific, powers by its constituents. The states and citizens do not derive their rights & powers from the federal government.
The idea is to establish the rules of the political game by consensus, as a stabilizing influence on a government that can have its membership completely replaced every 6 years. Like any other contract, when there’s a dispute, the first thing to look at is what was actually agreed upon and then try to map that onto whatever situation you find yourself in.
Generally, the courts in the US view themselves as arbitrators: their job is to determine how the text of the law (including the Constitution) maps onto the many messy edge cases that come up in real life in the fairest way they can. That means, in part, making determinations consistently between various cases; this is where case law gets its authority.
In theory, political and moral concerns are not in the purview of the courts, but instead are be encoded in the written laws they interpret. Modern legal opinions need the endorsement of enough legislators to be enshrined at the appopriate level of law before they can be enforced; it makes for slow progress, but hopefully avoids a lot of wrong turns.
Is politics is completely blocked these days, so most forward movements are by executive orders and appointing judges that can find creative ways to make your political agenda happening without having to do it in the senate.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opinion/supreme-court-pre...
You can't flush a very large quantity of drugs when the police knock on your door. Not only would you have to do a very extensive amount of pre-planning to destroy evidence, but 2 minutes is not nearly enough time to flush a sellable stash (i.e. if you're a dealer).
Sure, I guess you could have search warrants for small amounts of drugs (i.e. someone you just sold to), but to be perfectly honest kicking in doors over very small amounts of drugs (i.e. an end user) is beneath the dignity of the state to prosecute in that manner.
And even if you could flush your entire stash, you get a warrant either for the septic tank contents or what's about to enter the sewer. Almost like you have to do actual police work rather than kicking in someone's door in the middle of the night, throwing flashbangs into cribs, and massacring homeowners who dared defend themselves against what in any other circumstance would obviously be a violent home invasion.
(It should be absolutely embarrassing that laws get made like this; a lot of gun law is based on what Hollywood says about them rather than their reality.)
Drugs are stored off-property or in places where further search warrants are required, like a safe, or a locked toolshed.
In the event something tips them off, they "clean house" and relocate their stash.
It's also dead simple to "stealth" processed drugs -- so simple in-fact that these drugs come in by foot, plane, and cargo boat seemlessly. The only thing you need to worry about is transportation in a vehicle with a tiny solution space for where the drugs could be hidden, upon a search, such as say a small boat or plane. Cars are hit or miss, because a few officers only deal with the dumbest of the dumb drug user day-to-day, while the coast guard has experience with more elaborate setups.
It's kind of ironic. Cops busting down dumb dealers has a way of culling the herd, removing the worst-prepared, and giving more information to the most-prepared, to be even better prepared.
What is "actual police work" in this context? Searching a suspect's home after obtaining a warrant isn't "actual police work"?
> actual police work rather than kicking in someone's door in the middle of the night, throwing flashbangs into cribs, and massacring homeowners who dared defend themselves against what in any other circumstance would obviously be a violent home invasion.
I've executed "no knock" search warrants (we would say "forced entry" or "MOE" in the UK) and caught suspects in the process of destroying evidence. This is like 15 seconds after attempting entry. 2 minutes is easily enough time to flush kgs of drugs or destroy a USB drive.
Could we use technology to re-train and equip officers with shields and non lethal weapons to eliminate the fear of death, and unnecessary fatalities?
What would the price be? A few billion?
It sounds like a ridiculous idea for sure, but where are we exactly with full body armor and bullet proof visors (full body suit is even better than just a frontal bulletproof shield)? If we’re already there with the tech, then we can disarm them of guns and basically remove a scenario where a cop can kill.
We would need alternative weapons like high powered tasers.
These are exceptionally unreliable weapons.
There's no real way to bulletproof a cop. Armor piercing .223 can go through pretty much any reasonable body armor / shields you would wear into a situation like this and is readily available to fire out of AR-15s and the like.
Kinetic weapons are tough to defeat using countermeasures, perhaps obviously so.
I like your line of thinking though. Too many people just complain about the status quo and relying on government action rather than potentially solving it another way. It's just that in this case, physics is a real bitch.
The British invent the tank in WW1, the Germans develop a gun powerful enough to penetrate its armour. Tank armour gets thicker, guns get wheels. Tank armour gets thicker and slanted, you get the bazooka. Tanks get slat armour and explosive reactive armour, you get tandem-charge weapons. And so on.
I don't think there'll ever come a day when armoured troops can walk into gunfire like a firefighter can enter a burning building.
Ultimately it's going to be necessary to just chase down and eliminate the root causes of excessive use of force. Even if you completely disarm the police, they can and will kill people through other means, like giving them a "rough ride" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_ride_(police_brutality)] in a police cruiser or choking them [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner].
That's usually what SWAT (and the comparable paramilitary "police" forces of other nations; most places call them 'gendarmes') are wearing.
That armor (ostensibly a Level IV ballistic vest) will not protect against multiple hits, but it will protect against most rifle fire (including what's supposed to be armor-piercing). The helmets are not as resistant, though, and areas not actually covered by armor are naturally not protected at all.
The reason that normal beat cops don't wear this is twofold: the first is that this armor is extremely heavy (and isn't guaranteed to protect, and being hit will still turn you into a casualty), and the second is that officers wearing heavy armor everywhere will lead to citizens asking more questions about what they need to be protecting themselves from. A "cop" who is in reality a paramilitary soldier with assault rifle at the ready [bonus points if it's fully-automatic; police ultimately don't need to provide that kind of suppressing fire] is not "serving and protecting", they're "seeking and destroying".
Of course, the way you minimize suspects shooting it out with the cops is by not making non-violent offenses life-destroying ones (i.e. criminal justice reform) and following the other Peelian principles, but that would require intelligence, moderation, and persistence from the public (as well as the police, of course), which is understandably yet unfortunately rare.
This sort of idea usually comes from folks that don't have much, if any, experience in combat -- or with violence at all, for that matter.
There's a reason that anesthesiologists are some of the most highly-paid (and highly-stressed!) medical professionals. Namely, that due to some rather sensible quirks of evolution and biology, it is absurdly difficult to, in any reliable way, rapidly yet temporarily incapacitate a human being without outright killing them.
Tasers are fantastically unreliable, typically only provide one or two "shots", and can not be reloaded in the field. If you are up against multiple assailants, a Taser is absolutely useless.
Also keep in mind that the sort of situations that police have to deal with evolve very, very rapidly. Seriously, watch some of the police body-cam videos on YouTube -- you can go from "routine traffic stop" to "armed combat with a numerically superior force" in a fraction of a second.
Fixing this would require doing some things that are politically very unpalatable, sadly.
The big one would be to focus on rehabilitation and prisoner care over punishment.
Suspects would be a lot less likely to fight back against police if (a) they felt that the justice system would treat them fairly; (b) the conditions inside of jail were safe and sanitary; and (c) conviction didn't absolutely screw your chances of future employment.
We'd also actually be better off if police only carried firearms (no tasers, OC spray, batons, etc.)
The more weapons you give a person, the more likely they are to use any of them -- e.g., an officer with both a Taser and a pistol is more likely to use both than an officer with only a pistol.
Ending the War on Drugs is also a good idea.
Finally: eliminate civil forfeiture, and pass a law mandating that all monetary punishment (from speeding tickets to fines levied against corporations by the EPA) be passed back to the taxpayer as a refund. Remove the revenue incentives for police departments to behave badly.
If police officers don't need to carry firearms as SOP because they are generally quite safe from gunfire then the individuals who join just to fire a gun (or what have you) will go elsewhere.
Right now a lot of them are in messy codebase, fixing showstopper bugs 24/7. They are basically burnt and their perspective is no longer balanced.
These cops did this plainsclothed. The warrant was for somebody that was already in custody. These police officers were not up to legitimate policing, they were clearly engaged in some form of criminal enterprise, and killed completely innocent people while doing it.
To solve this problem, we need to lessen police corruption. We need to have police officers consider the crimes of other cops to be actual crimes. There are literal gangs in the LAPD, with tattoos and everything, where members swear loyalty to their gang above and beyond any sort of service to the public. And then they are protected from ever being punished for any crime they commit.
This is probably not something that technology or more gear can solve. Until NYC police officers are law abiding enough to park legally in the city, we need to consider that somebody who is entrusted to enforce the law but does not obey it themselves is a serious threat to all of us.
Edit: Sorry, I’m not disagreeing with your overall point about corruption/culture.
I think technology will make policing better. A camera on every interaction is a big deal. The surveillance state can work both ways you know.
specifically first aim for the leg
If there's a warrant for a dangerous person's arrest and you expect them to fight back, I'd rather that be in a no-knock raid in the middle of the night at their home with 50 police using military hardware, than one or two cops at a traffic stop that turns into a high speed chase/shootout in a busy public area.
What I'd be interested in, is how many no-knock warrants result in any shooting or casualties whatsoever. If that's still a really low number, this may not be as warranted.
When they happen frequently enough, you’re always in the wake of a tragedy, and this becomes an excuse to perpetually do nothing. It’s like after every US school shooting it’s always “too soon to talk about legislation.”
It isn't obvious to me that the risk of confusing people about what is going on and causing a situation where they think they need to fight back against home invaders outweighs the 20 seconds of warning a "dangerous" person might get because the cops don't knock.
In pretty much any other aspect of life, from business to personal, people will react then.
Especially since this isn't a one-time tragedy, but one that plays out continually. We need to act now before we let this happen again. I'm going to need to see a citation on your numbers, but 40 since 1980 is once a year! By your criteria of not responding after a tragedy, you are actually arguing that we should never act at all.
Which brings me to my point, the reactions are emotional, not logical. If we're creating policy based on feelings that aren't backed by data or actually run counter to data, that's bad policy. Many areas do regular no-knock raid and many areas have banned them entirely. I expect organizations with strong opinions on this subject can investigate the effects and do better than the New York Times throwing 80 links to local news websites into a csv file on GitHub and then linking to it like it's an actual source.
Normally her death might not have made the national press.