Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 3:20 pm | By: Dudemaster
Let’s face it, the war on Marijuana in this country is a bloody war on the citizens of the United States, many of whom have nothing to do with Marijuana. They are simply caught in the cross fire of oppression and heavy handed tactics by unscrupulous law enforcement and run-away policies fueled by ignorant politicians who don’t really care about their own constituents.
On July 22, 2008 in Berwyn Heights, MD, the mayor of Berwyn Heights and his family were attacked by armed assailants, salaried by the sheriff’s office. They burst into their home, shot their two Labrador retrievers, Chase and Payton, even though these agents of the law knew this family had nothing to do with the Marijuana that was just delivered to their house by an overnight express company. It was part of a larger elaborate scheme they had been aware of for quite some time.
After the incident, the department investigated itself and not surprisingly, had found nothing wrong with breaking in a home that was not complicit with the marijuana deal, with guns drawn and shooting innocent family members. From their paradigm, it’s ethical, moral, and legal to break into someone’s home and shoot them.
On Monday, June 22, the mayor held a press conference and asked the federal government to intervene.
“They’ve said they’ve done nothing wrong,” Calvo said. “I didn’t sign up for this fight, but I think what we have to do now is make changes to how Prince George’s County police and Prince George’s County sheriff’s department operate.”
What happens when you catch a criminal outside of a TV store holding a television in his hand and a gun in his back pocket? He is going to say, “I didn’t do anything wrong”. These agents of the law are nothing more than a bunch of armed redneck wannabe criminals who enjoy busting into people’s houses and shooting their family members for the simple sake of a killer adrenaline rush.
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. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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.
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Exclusive interview with Corina Amato of Baltimore, Maryland, victim of a police terror raid where her dog was murdered in her bedroom and her entire home was demolished. Â No marijuana was found, but police were told there would be some by a snitch, and a judge signed off on the warrant.
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 3:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
“They shot through the door in front of screaming children that were begging them to let the dog out and she was cowering in there,” said homeowner Corina Amato, “They shot through the door and she ran upstairs in the bedroom, and they went up there and pumped AK47 shots into her in my bedroom.”
“This is the bullet hole where they shot my dog,” said Amato’s boyfriend, Rick Johnson, as he pointed to a splintered hole in the bedroom’s wood floor, “There was a pile of guts and blood right up underneath the bed.”
Police destroyed the front door, and now the couple must nail up pieces of plywood to secure their home… or what’s left of it.
The living room is unlivable, the bedroom furniture—splintered and the office has been turned upside down, not to mention tearing holes in the walls, shattering the porcelain bathroom and ripping apart the music room.
The search turned up plenty of herbs Amato had growing in her sunroom, but not the one a confidential informant suggested they would find—marijuana.
This could be you. Â A “confidential informant” — a snitch — often will tell police what they want to hear in exchange for leniency for their own crimes. Â The police, following the standard operating procedure, will approach your home as if you are Tony Montana from Scarface, lying in wait for the police with a few of your “little friends”. Â They’re armed to the teeth and armored against the attack they have been trained to believe you will engage once they burst through your door late at night without knocking. Â They will destroy your property, smash your TV, slash your furniture, break your electronics, and ruin your home, so they can impress upon you that you are a no good drug dealer and they’ve made your drug dealer life miserable. Â And God help you if you have a dog, even if it’s a black lab or a dachsund or a chihuahua, because they are trained to believe all dogs are pit bulls or rottweilers ready to attack police and must be shot immediately, if not to protect themselves, then to impress upon you no good drug dealer types that they have the power to kill and next time it might be your wife instead of your dog.
This is how, in the Land of the Free, we deal with our fellow free citizens suspected of planting the wrong herb indoors. Â We don’t even need proof; the word of a criminal is reason enough to spend your tax dollars on a violent and destructive urban military assault on your castle.
The final line of the story is most amusing:
No one has been charged, and the department has neither apologized nor offered any restitution for killing their dog or trashing their home.
Apology? Â Restitution? Â For what? In the police’s eyes, they did nothing wrong. Â They followed standard procedure in enforcing prohibition laws. Â The snitch may have made a mistake, but not the cops. Â How could they have known there would be no contraband unless they broke all the furniture, tore holes in the walls, and destroyed the bathroom to be sure it wasn’t hidden? Â So what if two innocent people had their home destroyed and their beloved pet murdered in front of their terrified children? Â That’s the unavoidable cost of fighting the Drug War; there’s always collateral damage in a war.
My fantasy hope is that when these cops who kill dogs go to hell, Cerberus is waiting for them with the ghosts of all the slain canines and all cops’ scrotums smell and taste like peanut butter for eternity.
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 10:30 am | By: MrSpof
A South Buffalo family wants answers after police shot and killed two of their dogs during a raid Saturday, leaving blood puddled on a living-room carpet and speckled on the wall.
Her father pleaded with police not to shoot the dogs, but they wouldn’t allow him to grab the dogs and put them in another room, Patterson said.
One of the officers started firing a shotgun at the two dogs, one a pit bull and the other a pit bull-boxer mix.
One of the dogs was shot three times: once in the throat, once in the back and the last time in the leg while trying to run away, Rita Patterson said.
The other dog was cowering behind a table. Neither was a threat to the police, the residents said.
Police, who were looking for a drug suspect and narcotics, left the Indian Church Road home without finding any evidence or arresting anyone, according to residents of the house.
via – The Buffalo News “Police shoot, kill two dogs during raid”
What the hell is the problem with police and killing pets? A police spokesman in this case said that officers never know what they’ll find behind a door. In this case, they found nothing and decided to murder the family’s pets. Isn’t this funny, President Obama?
[Well, you get all that training, all that adrenaline pumping to go bust the evil drug kingpins, and why have shotguns if you're not going to use them? This no accident, folks, these drug war stormtroopers are taught to kill the dogs as part of the "shock and awe" aspect of the raid. "I can kill your dog and there's nothing you can do about it." It's about dominance, not protection - I mean, really, they're going in with Kevlar body armor, thick uniforms, helments, and goggles, and they're worried about a couple of dogs?
The police should be held to the same standard of shooting a pet as they do a human. Self defense is perfectly valid, but unless those dogs are charging and attacking, there is no justifiable reason to kill them. -- "R"R]
Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 12:48 pm | By: Radical Russ
You may recall the pieces I posted about Chaye Calvo, mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD, whose dogs were killed by police during a messed-up pot raid.
Now, via Radley Balko at the Agitator, we discover a police officer so terrified of a dog he was forced to shoot it – in the driveway of the dog’s owner – when the policeman wasn’t even involved in any sort of raid or arrest or investigation. Â Just so happens this woman had a security camera trained on the driveway of her property. Â (Warning – the video includes the shooting of the dog.)
Did that look like a vicious dog rushing to attack to you? Â Yeah, me neither. Â Looked like a friendly curious dog running up to see who the strange man was.
If you’d like to add your complaint to what must be a steadily-growing pile:
Mailing address: 215 N. 3rd. St. Chickasha, OK 73018
I know this story has nothing to do with marijuana, but considering that most law enforcement think of us cannabis consumers as little more than animals, I thought it was worth posting.
Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 11:18 am | By: Radical Russ
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!
Saturday, August 9th, 2008 at 9:22 pm | By: Radical Russ
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.
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.”
Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 8:04 am | By: Radical Russ
Pr. George’s Police Arrest 2 In Marijuana-Shipping Plot – washingtonpost.com
Prince George’s County police announced yesterday that they have arrested a deliveryman and another man who they say are involved in a scheme to smuggle marijuana by shipping packages addressed to unsuspecting recipients, including a delivery last week to the wife of the mayor of Berwyn Heights.
The county Sheriff’s Office SWAT team and narcotics officers raided the home of Mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife, Trinity Tomsic, after intercepting a package addressed to her that was filled with 32 pounds of marijuana. During the raid, officers broke down Calvo’s door and fatally shot the family’s two black Labrador retrievers.
Police said the package was one of about a half-dozen retrieved by authorities in the past week along the route of a deliveryman in northern Prince George’s. The packages contained a combined 417 pounds of marijuana valued at about $3.6 million.
So the mayor and his wife may be the completely innocent victims of a large-scale marijuana shipping plot? You’ve rounded up six packages on this guy’s delivery route, but you just couldn’t wait to put the pieces together without dressing up like Rambo and terrorizing who you thought was an “evil doper”?
…[T]he deputies, guns drawn, kicked in the door, stormed the house and shot to death the Calvos’ two Labrador retrievers, one of them, apparently, as it attempted to flee. The canine threat thus dispatched, the mayor — in his briefs — and his mother-in-law were handcuffed and interrogated in close proximity to the bloodied corpses of their dogs.
Wihin an hour, it seems, the police concluded that something was seriously wrong and that there was at least a strong possibility that the Calvos — whose home contained not the slightest evidence of involvement in the drug trade — were unsuspecting victims.
Unfortunately, these drug busts run amok are not an uncommon occurrence. Drug War Victims tells many stories of people not as lucky as the Calvos – people shot to death during drug raids, many of whom either weren’t the intended suspect or just happened to be home when SWAT teams served a warrant at the wrong address.
The purpose of a no-knock warrant (which these police didn’t have) is so police can have the element of surprise when busting violent bad guys with guns, before they can destroy the evidence of their crime. Think of a cocaine dealer with a handgun and the ability to easily flush powder down the toilet.
Did the police think that 32 pounds of marijuana could easily be flushed down a toilet? Did the home have a fireplace where it could be easily burned? And why does any of that matter when you’ve already tracked a 32 pound package with the man’s address on it and it’s tested positive for weed? And did they really think that the mayor of this suburban bedroom community was a thug-4-life brandishing a TEC-9 in his home to protect his weed dealing?
RevRayGreen: I'll post a pic of me and my son....gimme a minute
Missippi Hippy: Guess what... I'm gonna be a new... ummmmm well, my pet piggie Ganja is in labor and they ain't mine in the same sense. See what your wife [...]
RevRayGreen: days they didn't talk back..or act disrespectful..
RevRayGreen: feel so lucky my son is 18 going 19 and my daughter 16 going on 17..relish the days that can't talk back
Urb Age: Congrats Spof thats awesome. My little Clara is about to hit 20 months. Im not the activist I used to be, but its made me a better man.
Urb Age: Heck I was gonna go up there, but just not feeling well this weekend..Dang it, I hate it when that happens..
RevRayGreen: wishing I was hanging at NORML cafe...
JohnH: Just a quick comment about tokin' and sperm motility....been tokin since age 14 and have 8 kids ranging in age from 30 to 9...(what can I say, I found 2 [...]
slash5city: really ..oprah 35 yr or more in the closet toker ...outed ....o my god !!
SneakerPimp: that would be huge news just imagen the headline
RevRayGreen: maybe Oprah smokes and keeps it on the DL...
SneakerPimp: and good afternoon
mr reuben: I could do without seeing Rob K. on tv. But Bruce and Eithan get a big thumbs up from me.
SneakerPimp: waitn for NSL and congrast for spofett.
mr reuben: I don't respect her opinion bluzguy.
Missippi Hippy: Something about the last year in a contract... folks become more ballsey... and Oprah has big ones.
American Medical Association Calls For Scientific Review Of Marijuana's Prohibitive Status; Dutch Marijuana Use Lower Than European Average, Study Says […]
"Truth In Trials Act" Reintroduced In Congress; Maine: Voters Approve Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Measure; Colorado: Breckenridge Voters Overwhelmingly Decide To End Pot Penalties. […]
Some of the nation’s top athletes discuss why today's pros are turning to cannabis — and away from alcohol and painkillers — off the field, and question why pro sports leagues are continuing to sanction those who do. Moderator: Steve Bloom, Author, Pot Culture; editor, celebstoner.com * Toby Grear, MMA fighter * Sean Neumann, Documentary Filmm […]
Cannabis Law Reform's Missing Link: Law Enforcement Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper; LEAP and NORML Advisory Board; Author of Breaking Rank Putting the Mexican Cartels Out of Business Mexican drug cartels now employ over 100,000 soldiers and are responsible for nearly ten thousand deaths per year. Their largest source of income is marijuana. […]
The War against Cannabis is a Bloody War against American Citizens
waitn for NSL and congrast for spofett.
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