We have 100-150 paramilitary raids of American homes every DAY, mostly in the name of the War on Drugs, when most drug users are neither armed nor violent. (Missoula Independent)

(Drug War Chronicle) Doing drug law enforcement is just not that dangerous. According to statistics on police line of duty deaths compiled by the Officer Down Memorial Page, only three law enforcement officers were killed enforcing drug laws last year, and those three were not undercover narcs doing drug buys or SWAT team raiders busting down doors, but DEA agents who died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. (One officer, Michael Crawshaw of the Penn Hills Police Department in Pennsylvania, was killed responding to a drug-trade murder in which one drug trafficker killed another over a drug debt. This officer death was certainly related to the drug war; we rightly or wrongly did not include him in the count because he was responding to a murder, not a drug crime.)

According to historical data provided to the Chronicle by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, which also compiles statistics on police line of duty deaths, last year’s low death toll among officers enforcing the drug laws is not a fluke. In the decade between 1978 and 1988, an average of 6.5 officers were killed each year; in the following decade, the number was 6.2; and in the last 10 years, an average of 4.3 officers were killed each year enforcing the drug laws. The single bloodiest year for drug law enforcement was 1988, when 12 officers died.

In 2008, the number of police who died maintaining drug prohibition was seven; in 2007, it was four; it 2006, it was five; in 2005, it was four. When placed in the context of the more than 1.5 million drug arrests made in each of those years, it is clear that only one in every several hundred thousand drug arrests leads to an officer’s death. During the past 10 years, the odds were less than 1 in 350,000.

The whole post is worth a read.  The Chronicle does a great job of recounting some of the horrific abuses of SWAT, including the dog shooting stories of Mayor Cheye Calvo and the Missouri SWAT Dog Shooting incident this month.

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The two black labrador retrievers murdered by police - click picture to learn the full story of the raid

(Washington Times) A small-town mayor whose two black Labradors were killed by Prince George’s County authorities during a raid at his home last summer complained Monday of a “paramilitary culture” within the sheriff’s department as he announced a lawsuit.

Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo said he filed a lawsuit Monday in Prince George’s County Circuit Court against the state of Maryland and officials at the county sheriff’s office and police department. Mr. Calvo is seeking unspecified damages and a court order forcing the county to revise how authorities execute warrants, treat animals and detain individuals.

“We had hoped that the sheriff’s office and county police department could exercise internal leadership to acknowledge wrongdoing and make these changes on their own,” Mr. Calvo said in a statement. “But their comments and actions over the last year made clear that they lack the will and credibility to do so.”

The lawsuit claims that authorities’ failure to knock or announce their entry, the “cold-blooded” killing of the dogs and the “degrading detention” of Mr. Calvo and his mother-in-law, were the “direct and proximate result of a rogue, paramilitary culture” within the sheriff’s department.

The defendants acted “intentionally, with an evil and rancorous and improper motive, with ill will and actual malice,” the lawsuit states.

Of course the sheriff’s office didn’t make any changes to their dog-murdering and citizen-degrading policies… what, you want them to take all the fun out of police work?

Mayor Calvo is right about the “paramilitary culture”; it’s the psychology all soldiers must employ in war.  The enemy (we pot smokers) is dehumanized and attacks on the enemy must be engaged with enough “shock and awe” that the enemy is overwhelmed physicially and psychologically.  A bullet or two in your beloved canine best friend shows you who’s in charge and how serious they are and if you dare oppose them, you’ll get a bullet as well.  Sitting you handcuffed on the floor in your dead dog’s pool of blood further dehumanizes you and asserts allied forces’ dominance over the battlefield.

Sadly, this is a story so very common (see my collection of dog shooting stories) that it usually doesn’t even make the news unless, like Mayor Calvo, the victims are white and well-connected, the dogs aren’t Rottweilers or pit bulls, and no marijuana is found in the raid.

These police canicides are nothing short of domestic terrorism.  I live in Oregon.  My wife is a medical marijuana patient and I am her caregiver.  I would really like to grow our own marijuana plants.  When I mentioned this to my wife, she said, “No, no, no!  What if there is some big mistake and the cops raid our house and shoot Roscoe?”  We’re a continent away from Berwyn Heights, we’re protected by a medical marijuana law, and we live in the most pot-friendly county in Oregon, and yet this incident and others like it still has terrorized my wife into thinking a pot plant will lead to our dog’s murder.

Killing of Mayor’s 2 Dogs Justified, Pr. George’s Finds – washingtonpost.com
The Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office has concluded in an internal review that its deputies were justified when they shot and killed two dogs belonging to the mayor of Berwyn Heights during a July drug raid, Sheriff Michael Jackson said yesterday.

The sheriff said that one dog was engaging an officer and that the other was running toward a second officer at the time the black Labs were shot, but the ruling did not satisfy the mayor, who said the inquiry was incomplete and misleading.

According to the necropsy, 7-year-old Payton was shot four times, twice in the chest and twice in the head. One of the shots entered through his mouth and lodged in the back of his neck.

Four-year-old Chase was shot twice. One bullet entered the dog’s back left leg, then lodged in his right back leg. The other entered his side and passed through his chest.

“The report confirms what me and my family saw, heard and lived and makes it clear the sheriff was not telling the truth,” Calvo said.

He said the number of gunshot wounds to the two dogs indicates that the violence used in the raid was “unbelievably excessive.”

Jackson said the department looked at each shooting in detail. The first dog was engaging officers near the front door, he said. The second was shot, he said, as it ran away from the deputy who fired and toward an officer standing in an adjacent hallway with his back turned.

Calvo said there was no way a deputy shooting from the kitchen could have seen another officer in the hallway as Jackson described. He called on the sheriff’s department to release photos taken of the dogs the night of the raid, which he said will prove the point.

The Sheriff’s Office did this internal review without interviewing Mayor Calvo or his mother-in-law, both of whom sat in handcuffs near the collecting pool of blood from the first shot dog.  What did they expect the officers involved in the raid to say, that the dogs were not threatening and the second dog was actually running away, as Mayor Calvo asserts?  Of course the cops are going to say the dogs were attacking, because part of the standard operating procedure in these drug raids is to kill the dogs as a “shock and awe” means of pacifying the victims of the raid.

Questioning the killing of the dogs misses the larger point: are the police ever justified in breaking in and terrorizing citizens over marijuana?  There was more violence committed by cops in that drug raid than is committed by a thousand stoners in a year!

US MD: FBI to Review Raid That Killed Mayor’s Dogs
An attorney came forward yesterday to allege a possible pattern of animal abuse by the sheriff’s department. Michael Winkleman said he is representing another family whose dog was shot by sheriff’s deputies in November, along with a woman who is suing the department for searching her home without a warrant and threatening to shoot her dog.

In the first case, Winkleman said, sheriff’s deputies arrived at the Accokeek home of Frank and Pamela Myers with a warrant for another house on their street. After the couple informed the deputies of their error, they continued to question the couple and looked around their home.

As they spoke, the couple’s 5-year-old German boxer began barking in a yard, out of sight. Soon after, according to Winkleman, the couple heard gunshots, and they found the dog shot to death. He said the family is preparing to file suit.

In another case, Upper Marlboro resident Amber James has filed a $4 million lawsuit accusing sheriff’s deputies of searching her home without a warrant in May 2007 while looking for her sister, who lived in Capitol Heights. According to the suit, deputies falsely claimed to have a warrant and searched every room of the home. When they did not find the sister, the suit alleges, they threatened to return the next day and search again, saying that if they did, James’s dog would be dead.

Some lawyers and leading law enforcement groups said deputies should have known to do everything possible to avoid killing Calvo’s dogs.

Courts across the country in recent years have ruled that it is almost always unacceptable for police to kill pets in the course of searching a home. Cases in three federal circuits have found that killing pets amounts to unreasonable seizure.

Killing dogs is considered a “last resort,” said John Gnagey, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, a group that provides tactical training for police departments and is advocating a national accreditation system for SWAT programs.

Uh-huh, sure it is.  A commenter on the story at DailyKos points out:

Killing the dogs is standard operating procedure in SWAT raids. It is intended to terrorize the “perps”, SHOCK and AWE them into absolute and immediate submission. The message is, “Yeah, that’s right, I killed your dog, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. We have the authority and power to do this and if you don’t STFU and do exactly as I say then you’re next.”

Any claims to the contrary are bullshit.

The Associated Press: SWAT team kills 2 dogs in raid on Md. mayor’s home
BERWYN HEIGHTS, Md. — A SWAT team raided the home of a Washington, D.C.-area mayor, killing his two black Labrador retrievers and seizing an unopened package of marijuana delivered there.

Prince George’s County Police said Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo brought a 32-pound package of marijuana into his home that had been delivered by officers posing as delivery men. The Tuesday evening raid was conducted by county police narcotics officers and a sheriff’s office SWAT Team.

Sheriff’s office spokesman Sgt. Mario Ellis says deputies “apparently felt threatened” when they shot the dogs.

Calvo said officers entered about 7:30 p.m., first shooting 7-year-old Payton. They then pursued 4-year-old Chase, who ran away and was shot by police from behind, he said.

It takes a special kind of man to shoot a fleeing dog in the back.  Especially a black lab.  Everybody knows what a vicious reputation that breed has… if you’re a duck.  The worst thing that dog would probably have ever done to a decent human being not participating in a SWAT raid is lick him to death.

Obviously the first shot at the older dog made such a noise that the second dog was scared off.  Could you have not just fired a warning shot to scare both the dogs off?