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Comment by 6t6t6 | Hacker News Reader

I don't live in the US, so I am maybe missing something but, if the police wants to arrest someone, wouldn't be easier to wait until this person leaves the house, grab him on the street and tell him: "Hi mate, we are the police and now you are under arrest".

I don't see the need of assaulting a home.

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Of course it's not necessary to assault a home. But tactics like this intimidate the population into stunned compliance. The word for this is "terrorism", from the French reign of terror where enemies of the revolutionary state were summarily executed in public. Of course, terrorist states managed to redefine the term by the mid-20th century.

Depending on where you live, that's exactly what happens.

In Kentucky, they'll send (usually) 3 state troopers, and knock on your door. If the person that they want isn't at home, they'll take your word for it, and let you be on your way.

In Ohio, it's usually six or more officers with guns drawn. They'll try to open the doors of the house to gain entry without knocking or announcing their presence. When the person that they're looking for isn't at home, they'll try to find a reason to come inside and search the property looking for that person (and a reason to arrest everyone inside). They'll then circle the house outside for 24-48 hours to intimidate the people inside but eventually give up when they realize that the person doesn't actually live there.

What's really sad is that I was great friends with a member of Law Enforcement until I realized how short-sighted and two-faced he was; the LEO community really breeds an environment of "us versus them" and if you're a defendant (regardless of guilt or innocence), you're a scumbag who deserves to be in jail.

The war on drugs is a primary driver for militarization of police in the US. To be fair, SWAT teams who raid drug houses often face heavily armed, violent criminals. There's a need -- sometimes -- for aggressive tactics. But the SWAT officers are far better trained than the regular police force who should not be engaged in this level of high risk, forced entry.

I've known SWAT officers and non-violent drug dealers who were both fundamentally decent people.

The problem can often be traced back to how police departments make up budget gaps. A large chunk of a department's budget comes from federal funding. The more drug related arrests, the more "war on drugs" money a department gets. This inadvertently enters a slippery slope where militarization on both sides is incentivized.

If local communities actually covered the full budget of a police department, the system would probably tend towards a more just and appropriate level of force.

Not criticizing you for ending your friendship; but, as a side note, this contributes to another effect- basically the only people that thuggish oppressive cops can actually relax around, and be casual friends with, are other cops. Which only contributes further to "us vs them".

If a sci-fi novel portrayed a society where the police were a separate race of creatures who lived in walled compounds and survived by robbing and intimidating the citizens around them, I'd agree that it was far-fetched... But it seems like our society is taking constant, purposeful steps towards such a world. The war on drugs, asset forfeiture laws, militarization of cops.... violent raids on a little old woman selling illegal beer, followed by attempts to have her home destroyed...

Yikes.

Not to mention the fact that many police officers don't live in the communities they, er, police (I can't bring myself to use the word 'serve' any more in relation to the police :-( ).

An ex-cop I know justified this on the basis that you don't want people who would probably have a grudge against you to know where you live, which would be reasonable enough if police didn't have so many other protections in place. I don't think his attitude is universal, but there is clearly a significant cohort of police officers who are fully engaged in a 'race to the bottom' and consider themselves the rightful beneficiaries of a secular antinomianism.

> wouldn't be easier to wait until this person leaves the house, grab him on the street and tell him: "Hi mate, we are the police and now you are under arrest".

But then they wouldn't get to use all the paramilitary gear and act like they are some special Commando unit or something. They would be boringly waiting outside for hours and they just say "Hands behind your back, you are under arrest". That is absilutely not fun compared to busting door with a ram, throwing flashbang grenades, running around like idiots crouching and shouting at the top of their lungs like in video game, wearing cool full body bullet proof with kevlar elbow pads and so on.

paramilitary gear

There's nothing "para" about it. That gear is coming straight from the military.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/upshot/data-on-transfer-of...

As I understand it, this is part of the war-on-drugs mindset. Since possession of even minor quantities of drugs can result in severe sentences, they assume offenders will be as violent as anyone receiving such sentences.

Yep. As long as enough of the population continues to buy into this nonsense they will have "legitimacy" to act this way.

The problem with that is that it makes entirely too much goddamn sense. </cynicism>

Also something about cops being in such constant terror and fear for their lives that criminals are constantly carrying around AR-15 gas powered rifles, that it's easier to catch them by surprise at home than to risk doing your job more humanely and end up with a 5.56 round in the chest.

Or something like that.

</Snark>

One, lots of people like kicking doors in. Two, there are no consequences for getting it wrong in most cases. Three, there's a slim possibility that if they stop someone in the street and they've underestimated the situation, someone in the house would open fire on them, so it's become increasingly standard to carry out every raid like they're in a John Carpenter movie.

That didn't work in England when they wanted to arrest a terror suspect, so they secretly followed him to work one day, then shot him dead as he entered the train station. It turned out he was a plumber, not a terrorist.

Context: this was two weeks after the Tube bombings in London. It was a tragic error, but it is absolutely not routine.

Wikipedia has a convenient list of UK mainland police shootings, which happen less than once a year: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_firearms_in_the_U...

(The word "mainland" there excludes Northern Ireland, where the RUC behaved as an occupying force with the support of the army until the peace agreement with the IRA, at which point the police were reconstituted as PSNI with an explicit effort to be police for all the community equally.)

If you want an idea of what a western 'police state' would look like, then Northern Ireland, say Belfast between 1970 and 1995, is a good proxy. Police and soldiers on patrol togetrher, an official shoot-to-kill policy, military checkpoints, internment without trial and conviction without jury, all that good stuff.

That was all in the name of terrorism and was orders of magnitude worse that the policies that have been put in place in the UK and USA since 9/11, for the next round of terrorism. So until we are at 'Troubles' levels of policing, I think the GWoT policing responses have actually been pretty restrained.

> I don't see the need of assaulting a home.

it's almost always for drugs, where they'd be afraid the person could flush them down the toilet.

As the GP said, that's why you simply wait until they leave the house. In nearly all these cases, they're only looking for one person.

If you arrest people outside their house when they go for a walk, how on earth are they going to "flush the drugs down the toilet"?

What, you don't carry a portable toilet around?

Sometimes people barricade themselves inside the home or have hostages. I had assumed that was the only case where they used flashbangs ... until I read this article. According to the article police can get a no-knock arrest warrant. I don't get why that type of warrant is authorized so frequently. I guess courts are giving the police whatever they ask for.

It seems like cops are afraid of losing their lives, and they think flashbangs protect them. I can understand that thought process. But it doesn't excuse what is happening. I couldn't live with myself if I burned up a baby like they did. Unbelievable that the county won't pay medical bills.

Yeah, but that's less fun and would require patience.

Who has time for patience?

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