Thursday, January 31, 2019

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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