Missouri Officer Discusses SWAT Tactics
The video above was posted to Cop Block’s Facebook wall the other day. It depicts approximately 8 SWAT team officers conducting a search of a residence. According to the description on YouTube:
This video shows a search warrant served by the Columbia Mo. police department. The cops bust in this guys house in the middle of the night and shoot his two dogs (one a pit bull that was caged in the kitchen and the other a Corgi) with children in the home. it turns out that rather than a big time drug dealer, this guy had a small pipe with some resin in it, a grinder, and what the cops here call “a small amount of marijuana” (meaning less than a few grams). We here in Comlumbia want everyone to know what kind of police department we have here, check out our “finest” in action.
That’s right, not only did they fail to find a major drug stockpile, but they managed to shoot the family pets and terrorize a woman plus her young child. I decided to call the Columbia PD about the action of their officers. I wanted to find out if dogs were a big problem while executing search warrants. I also wanted to ask what department policy was on a number of things relating to SWAT.
In the video below you’ll notice how little value police put on your pets’ lives. Their official policy seems to be shoot first and ask questions later. I hadn’t realized that one dog was possibly caged until after my call but either way SWAT doesn’t seem to care. Even though SWAT teams have superior firepower, armor and backup they choose lethal force over finding any alternative.
At one point the officer says to me that you just can’t hit them (dogs) hard enough with non-lethal weapons. Though we never really got into discussing this actual video because of the pending investigation, the officer did reference my hypothetical examples to the actual story. Our conversation seemed to go round and round with a focus more on the drug war than accountability and the actions of his fellow officers.
Toward the end of our conversation the officer repeatedly referenced that he’s just following the laws made by bureaucrats. I tried to get him to realize that police don’t have to partake in such violent actions, to which he said I made a valid point. But he would still enforce any law that legislators pass and fire any officer who chose differently.
It goes to show the mentality of officers today, the ‘I’m just doing my job’ type and if you have a problem with that, talk to your masters–oops, I mean local representatives. As if that’s worked.
