No-Knock Police House Raids

How is one to know if a home invasion is being committed by law enforcement or a bunch of crack addicts? Well, you can't. So if armed thugs break into your home, you must first identify them so as to rule out the possibility of them being a law enforcement officers. Hopefully the crack addicts will understand by pausing and not shooting you while you clear this up.

After you have made positive identification that the intruders are not law enforcement, feel free to defend yourself.

Read examples of this here.

The number of no-knock raids has increased from 3,000 in 1981 to more than 50,000 in 2005.

In many cases, armed homeowners, believing that they are being invaded, have shot at officers, resulting in deaths on both sides.

Zealous government agents also are known to raid the wrong address ("wrong-door raids").

They often conduct the no-knock raids late at night. Even if they do announce before breaking in, there is a distinct possibility that the resident did not hear the announcement.

Plain clothes officers have done no-knock raids with disastrous results. The police in this incident were so incompetent that they shot themselves during the raid. Planting drugs and lying to obtain search warrants is routine in the police department.

In the above linked Kathryn Johnston no-knock murder, the Johnson family sued the city and got awarded $4.9 million. The no-knock murderers were jailed for a short time, and no other disciplinary actions were taken against the police department. The taxpayers payed for the law suit settlement.

The Atlanta police department tripled the size of the narcotics force after the murder.

Even if police always got the right house and every raid were performed flawlessly (and that's obviously not the case), the image of police dressed as soldiers routinely breaking into private homes to serve warrants for non-violent crimes is one we ought to find disturbing. At one time we did. There's an old Cold War saying, "Democracy means that when there's a knock at the door at 3am, it's probably the milkman." Masked government agents dressed in black barging into private homes in the middle of the night was once an image we associated with totalitarian states. We seem to be troublingly comfortable with it, now.