every day i run across items along these lines and they illustrate that the thin blue line isn't always what we're told it is;
On Monday evening in Houston, a dozen armed men broke into the home
of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, a middle-aged couple who had
lived in the house at 7815 Harding Street for at least two decades. The
first man through the door, who was armed with a shotgun, used it to
kill one of the couple’s dogs. Tuttle responded to the home invasion by
grabbing a revolver and shooting the man with the shotgun, who collapsed
on a sofa in the living room. As Nicholas tried to disarm the intruder,
his accomplices shot her. Tuttle returned fire, and by the end of the
shootout he and his wife were both dead. Four of the assailants were hit
by gunfire, while a fifth injured his knee.
Many people will be reassured to learn that the men who stormed into
the house on Harding Street were police officers serving a drug warrant.
I am not one of those people. Let me explain why, starting with some
fishy aspects of the official police account and ending with the
immorality of responding to peaceful, voluntary transactions with
violence.
At a press conference on
Monday night, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo initially said the
address of the raid, which began around 5 p.m., was in the 7800 block of
Hardy Street, about 12 miles from the actual location. Acevedo said
“Hardy Street” three times, and he seemed to be reading the address from
a stack of papers. By the end of the press conference, he was saying
“Harding Street.” Which address was on the search warrant? I am waiting
to hear back from the Houston Police Department on that point.*
Acevedo said the the plainclothes narcotics cops serving the warrant
“announced themselves as Houston police officers while simultaneously
breaching the front door.” Meanwhile, uniformed officers waiting in or
near a “marked police unit” outside the house “hit the siren and hit the
lights so they knew that police officers were there.” Maybe that’s
true, but it is possible that Tuttle did not hear the siren or did not
connect it to the men bursting into his house. It is also plausible that
the officers’ announcement, which by Acevedo’s account happened at the
same moment that they were knocking down the door, did not register amid
the noise, confusion, and shotgun blasts.
“Immediately upon breaching the door,” Acevedo said on Monday, “the
officers came under fire from one or two suspects inside the house.” But
as he revealed during a press conference the
next day, it was actually the police who fired first, killing what he
described as “a very large pit bull that charged at that officer.”............https://reason.com/blog/2019/01/30/the-cops-were-the-aggressors-in-this-wee
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