You Want to Kill My Dogs While You’re Here?
Radley Balko has been following a disturbing case out of Berwyn Heights, Maryland (D.C. suburbs), where SWAT agents charged into the house of Mayor Cheye Calvo, shot the mayor’s dogs (two black labs), and held the mayor and his mother-in-law in handcuffs and interrogated them at gunpoint as suspected drug dealers (the chilling details from the mayor himself). Apparently, someone in Los Angeles* mailed a 30lb package of marijuana to the mayor’s address, which undercover cops eventually delivered to the mayor’s wife prior to the assault. Local law enforcement is upset they were not notified first, and apparently, the raid has turned out to be a huge mistake. The mayor’s house wasn’t the intended recipient of the drug package, and the SWAT team didn’t have a no-knock warrant to conduct the raid anyway. Yet the Prince George’s County police refuse to apologize for the violent tactics or the puppycide.
It’s a fiasco on several levels, and apparently killing dogs during a raid is standard procedure, even if they are labs, who are only likely to slobber an intruder into submission. Really, it’s too much.
*Corrected. The package was mailed from LA but flagged as drugs in Arizona.
7 Responses to “You Want to Kill My Dogs While You’re Here?”
Although I feel sad for the mayor (and anyone else who this has happenned to), I hope this story becomes even bigger, and stands as a wakeup call to those that would give up individual rights for “security”.
I agree with Paul, but I am sure that there are those out there who will defend this incident. Many seem to believe that we can’t pay too high a price for keeping drugs off our streets.
This is awful. I do think there are situations where SWAT raids are justified, but there are way too many trigger-happy police departments out there.
At the risk of sounding heartless, though, I’m a little more sympathetic toward the dog-shooting in general. Real criminals do keep dogs which are trained to be highly aggressive and dangerous. In a raid situation, an officer may have only a split second to figure out whether a dog which is barking at him is dangerous (and even if the dog itself wouldn’t cause serious injury, it could interfere enough to allow a criminal to shoot him). Of course, this is all the more reason to avoid conducting raids when other methods of apprehending suspects could be used.
I agree with Eric, but why stop there, Erics logic expands to the children as well, a criminal may well train their 4 year old to run up to a police officer with a weapon or a grenade, or just buy time until the criminal can act, and the officer may just need to preserve his life from the precieved threat by blowing the kid away.
Don’t be ridiculous, John. Dogs attack “intruders” all the time; it’s a common reason why people keep them. There’s just no comparison between that and your extremely unlikely hypothetical about “attack toddlers.”
John’s comment made me think of Vietnam rather than suburbia.
The issue here, of course, is the unnecessarily violent tactics of the SWAT team. Entering guns blazing when you’re serving an arrest warrant on a violent felon is one thing. The crime here was a large amount of pot mailed to a random address. The recipients didn’t even open the package. Apparently the SWAT team here went in after the mother-in-law spotted them in the street and screamed. And they shot the dogs even though, according to the mayor, they were running away.
It’s a screw up all around, but fortunately(?) the fact that innocent dogs were killed and the guy’s a politician is bringing some much needed heat on those responsible.
The story is another example of the consequences to an excess approach to justice brought about by the “War on Drugs.”
Hysteria abounds over perceived imminent threats, leading truly to an over-kill use of SWAT.
The hysteria is wide ranging. Alex Berenson, writing for the New York Times, pronounced sodium oxybate a/k/a gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB) as dangerous as heroin or LSD. His claims are without basis. GHB is legally marketed as Xyrem, Schedule III, for treatment of narcolepsy. Without a valid prescription it is a Schedule I drug, illegal to possess or use for any purpose. GHB’s conection to date rape should be acknowledged and deplored. The dangers, and possible lethal consequences, of mixing GHB with sedative and hypnotic drug, particularly alcohol should be stressed as well. There can also be added dangers for people with sleep apnea or breathing disorders. But such is true of virtually all substantially sedating drugs. The LD50 for GHB is estimated to be between 12 and 30 times the maximum approved therapeutic dose of Xyrem. By comparison, sedating tricyclic anitdepressants can be lethal at doses as little as 3-4 times the maximum therapeutic dose, and are also very dangerous when combined with alcohol or for people who have heart disease or breathing problems.
Compared to a host of other sedating drugs, there have been relatively few deaths associated with GHB. But such truth is contrary to the informatiuon put out by many law enforcement agencies. Why? The dangers of drugs legitimately gains the attention of the public, but even more so if a particular substance can be portrayed as connected to a national crisis of death and emergency room visits as GHB falsely was.