So police in the city of Ankeny, Iowa are on the hunt for a couple of people suspected of credit card fraud. Their solution? Conduct a SWAT raid on an older woman’s Iowa home with a team of at least eight militarized, storm-trooper wannabe cops. In a raid that appears more suitable for a compound in Abbottabad than a neighborhood in the corn belt, you’d at least think they were certain they had the right home? Wrong.
The police didn’t find the suspects they were looking for, and instead went ahead and arrested two other people in completely unrelated charges to justify their ridiculous behavior. If not for the fact the family had security cameras installed (which the police made every attempt to dismantle), we would have no evidence of this wildly inappropriate behavior. You seriously have to wonder what is wrong with these people. Are they still being taught their mission is to “Protect and Serve” or has this been change to “Probe and SWAT.” One seriously has to wonder.
This video is brought to our attention by Radley Balko, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, and now a writer for the Washington Post. I have highlighted Mr. Balko’s excellent work in the past, most recently last summer in my article: There are Over 50,000 SWAT Team Raids Annually in America, which you should definitely go back and read.
In his article for the Washington Post, Radley writes:
Watch this video, taken from a police raid in Des Moines, Iowa. Send it to some people. When critics (like me) warn about the dangers of police militarization, this is what we’re talking about. You’ll see the raid team, dressed in battle-dress uniforms, helmets and face-covering balaclava hoods take down the family’s door with a battering ram. You’ll see them storm the home with ballistics shields, guns at the ready. More troubling still, you’ll see not one but two officers attempt to prevent the family from having an independent record of the raid, one by destroying a surveillance camera, another by blocking another camera’s lens.
Now here’s the video. Brace yourself, this is extraordinarily disturbing and pathetic behavior:
Radley continues:
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