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.

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Council Bans Sale of Single Cigars in Bid to Curb Youths’ Marijuana Use – washingtonpost.com
The Prince George’s County Council adopted one of the nation’s most sweeping restrictions on the sale of cigars yesterday, an effort to curb a growing trend among urban youths of using hollowed-out cigars to smoke marijuana.

The council voted 8 to 1 to ban the sale of single cigars, requiring stores to sell them in packages of at least five. The new law will also make it easier to charge someone possessing a cigar with a drug paraphernalia offense.

Tobacco stores that specialize in cigar sales, and often sell high-end cigars for as much as $5 apiece or more, are excluded from the legislation’s restrictions, as are other locations that are sometimes age-restricted, including golf courses, fraternal lodges, bars and restaurants.

Sylvia Quinton, who works with the Suitland-based Substance Abuse Treatment Education Prevention Network, said use of short fat cigars, often called blunts, to smoke marijuana has “become embedded in youth culture.” Blunts make frequent cameos in rap music and movies.

She said the new law cannot stamp out the glorification of blunts, but raising the price might discourage some youths.

Excuse me, but aren’t tobacco sales of any kind restricted to adults 18 years and over?  If you’ve got a problem with youths buying single cigars at convenience stores, maybe you need to crack down on ID enforcement.  Or how about promoting the raise of the tobacco age to 21 along with alcohol?  Funny how nobody ever wants to propose that!

It’s also funny to me that it is the hollowing out of the addictive, deadly tobacco and replacing it with non-addictive, non-toxic cannabis is what has driven these do-gooders to want to restrict black kids’ – er, I mean “urban youths” – access to cheap fruit-flavored single cigars in convenience stores.

If you’re Rush Limbaugh or Bill Cosby, feel free to enjoy one of our fine $5 single cigars at the exclusive lodge, but if you’re a young black man in the city, you’ve got to cough up the dough for five cheap-ass cigars at a time, otherwise you’ll just use them for blunts.

Am I the only one who thinks that this won’t have any effect whatsoever on how many “urban youths” in the Washington DC-area will be smoking blunts, while also creating a great new way for dealers to make even more money by buying cheap cigars in packs of five and selling them in singles for a markup?

The law was opposed by tobacco distributors and the Altria Group, the parent company of Philip Morris. Last year, Altria bought the company that makes Black and Mild cigars, a popular brand for single sales, Dachille said. Bruce C. Bereano, a lobbyist for the distributors, said the intent of the law was “laudable.” But, he said, the law will only create a cottage industry of people who buy cigars in packs of five and then sell them individually on the streets.

Oh, great, now I’m agreeing with a tobacco industry lobbyist.

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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!

Related posts

• Mayor Calvo sues over police murder of his dogs (6)
• Update IV on Dog-Shooting Story: Police pattern of dog executions (1)
• SWAT team kills 2 dogs in raid on Maryland mayor’s home (8)