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I disagree. there was no legitimate law-enforcement purpose served by a raid on his home during the hours of nautical twilight. He was a respectable businessman holding a position of significant responsibility. They could have approached him discretely at work on any of a wide variety of pretexts. They could have grabbed him while he left work, discretely or not. They could have stopped him as he was driving home from work. They could have waited for him at his home.
ATF has a significant history of conducting cinematic raids for, by all available evidence, purely PR purposes, and it has a significant history of those raids turning into clusterfucks that get innocent people killed. This appears to be yet another example of their long-established pattern of unconscionable behavior. If they did indeed violate their own guidelines by conducting the raid without bodycams, as opposed to destroying evidence of legally-questionable behavior, as they again have a long, well-documented history of doing, then there is no reason at all to grant them the benefit of the doubt.
This is an interesting post because you've managed to combine in the two paragraphs something I agree with strongly and something I disagree with strongly.
In the first part -- yes. LEs should always try to get suspects away from their home or do it as a traffic stop. The whole over-reliance on dynamic entry to a home instead of trying to isolate the home or surprise people elsewhere is a systematic flaw.
On the second part, this is idiotic. Yes, dynamic entry is overused, but the people responsible for getting folks killed are the ones that are firing on officers.
Finally, I'm not sure what your theory of his action is. You should be explicit: in your mind, did he fire on officers as a case of mistaken identity (e.g. thought they were robbers)? What other theory of his mind makes sense?
I think the ATF agents made an intentional tradeoff to maximize the drama and PR effect of their raid at the cost of a greatly increased chance of a gunfight.
I think he fired at officers as a case of mistaken identity. That doesn't change the fact that they appear to have deliberately created a situation that maximized the danger to their target, in exactly the way their agency has a long history of doing. Nor does it change the fact that they appear to have intentionally violated their own policies in a way that minimizes their legal exposure for doing so.
No, the people responsible are the officers who were more interested in headlines than in doing their jobs properly. They created the situation. Their creation of the situation is impossible to justify because it was so obviously excessive and unnecessary. Their actions in the situation are impossible to justify because they deliberately disabled the required tools of accountability. They work for an agency with a long history of these exact behaviors, leading to these exact outcomes.
Suppose a jurisdiction begins using full swat teams to serve speeding tickets. They use unmarked police cars to suddenly box-in the vehicle in question, then multiple plainclothes officers burst out screaming orders while waving badges and pointing machine guns at the vehicle's occupants. Shootings of "suspects" are significantly higher using this method than with the standard method. If this is pointed out, would you argue that it's the suspects' fault for failing to comply? If it turns out that all the officers in a traffic stop that resulted in a shooting left their body cameras behind, would you find that fact suspicious?
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