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SWAT all over the country is out of control. We've heard the common saying that "give a boy a hammer and the whole world becomes a nail". The same is true with SWAT. LE has a weapon and now the whole world has become infested with drugs. They will go to any extreme to find drugs. And frequently it destroys people's lives. Meanwhile, LE keeps up the invasions with impunity.
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This week a federal jury declined to award any damages to Adlynn and Robert Harte, the Leawood, Kansas, couple whose home was raided in 2012 based on a field tests that supposedly identified wet tea leaves in their trash as marijuana. The verdict is not very surprising, since the only claim the Hartes were allowed to pursue required them to show that Johnson County sheriff's deputies lied about the results of the tests. There are other plausible explanations for the comically inept operation that led to an early-morning SWAT invasion and an increasingly desperate two-and-a-half-hour search for a nonexistent marijuana grow.
As 10th Circuit Judge Carlos Lucero noted in the July 25 appeals court ruling that allowed the Hartes' lawsuit to proceed, the field test the deputies say they used on the leaves is notoriously unreliable. "One study," Lucero wrote, "found a 70% false positive rate using this field test, with positive results obtained from substances including vanilla, peppermint, ginger, eucalyptus, cinnamon leaf, basil, thyme, lemon grass, lavender, organic oregano, organic spearmint, organic clove, patchouli, ginseng, a strip of newspaper, and even air." The label on the test kit warns that its results "are only presumptive in nature" and should be confirmed by laboratory analysis.
As for the ignorance, Deputy Mark Burns confessed that he had never seen loose tea before but thought, based on his training and experience, that it looked like marijuana leaves.
"The defendants in this case caused an unjustified governmental intrusion into the Hartes' home based on nothing more than junk science, an incompetent investigation, and a publicity stunt," Lucero concluded. "There was no probable cause at any step of the investigation. Not at the garden shop, not at the gathering of the tea leaves, and certainly not at the analytical stage when the officers willfully ignored directions to submit any presumed results to a laboratory for analysis. Full stop."
Just so you know, this happens everywhere, not just fly-over states.
In Los Angeles, settlements to resolve lawsuits against the LAPD amount to over one billion dollars a year. Across the country in New York City, a lawsuit is filed every two and a half hours against the NYPD. They are sued so often, in fact, that the city comptroller, Scott Stringer, said that the 2015 budget would have to include $674 million dollars for settlements and judgments against the police. The budget allotted for police negligence and misconduct is more than the budget for the Parks Department, Department of Aging, and the New York Public Library combined.
About 20 years ago in KC Kan. The police kicked down a door in the middle of the night (wrong house) broke down a bedroom door, the man in bed reached for a gun and they killed him. They never announced that they were cops and had no warrant. Courts would not do anything.
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