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SWAT Raids Wrong Home, Breaks Windows, then Issues Family Citation for Broken Windows

This case gives a new and an even more despicable meaning to the term, “Broken Windows Policing”

SWAT-Team-Raids-Wrong-Home-Breaks-Windows-on-Home-Issue-Citation-for-Broken-Windows

By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | June 30, 2015

St. Louis, MO — Leon Walker and his family were settling down for dinner last week when they were violently interrupted as flashbang grenades came flying into their house and began exploding.

The front door was kicked down, and armed assailants rushed in with AR-15 rifles drawn and pointed Walker and his family. These armed and incredibly incompetent and dangerous assailants were members of the St. Louis Police Department’s SWAT team.

The SWAT team was looking for an evil man who allegedly committed the ‘crime’ of selling a substance to willing customers. This man’s name was Darron Ford, and he lived two doors down from the Walker family.

The fact that the man they were looking for lived two doors down was of no consequence to these thugs in uniform as they went along with the raid, in full. For two hours, police, who knew they were at the wrong address, tore the home of Leon Walker apart in search of a non-existent reason to justify their idiocy.

Never let a botched SWAT raid go to waste.

Had Walker tried to defend his home against the armed invaders, he would have been killed, and the world would have never known about it. The blurb on the nightly news would have been that police kill an armed man who fired on them.

“Obviously they think they’re being invaded,” family attorney Bevis Schock said. “The hope is that they won’t fight back but that they’ll cower in fear – the flight response rather than the fight response.”

Schock says that police should have stopped their madness once they realized they were at the wrong home. However, they were on an apparent mission to destroy and intimidate.

After the life-threatening home invasion and subsequent destruction of their home, the St. Louis Police Department sent out a building inspector. In turn, the inspector issued the Walker family a citation for a window the SWAT team broke during the raid!

“In this case the insult was to have the building inspector cite them for the window that had been broken by the police an hour earlier as part of the entry, and that’s outrageous,” Schock said.

The Walker family could have been killed by these barbarians as they followed their controller’s orders to seek out illicit substances. Instead of an apology for threatening all their lives and ransacking their home, the Walkers were extorted!

The Walker family has since filed a lawsuit against the city of St. Louis. The taxpayers will now foot the bill for the belligerent idiocy of the St. Louis SWAT team.

The Walker’s situation is hardly an isolated one either. Also this month, and in the same town, another family was wrongfully raided by St. Louis SWAT. Angela Zorich and family were subject to a massive military-style raid during which their house was destroyed, their beloved dog killed, and their mother kidnapped. The reason for this war-like assault on a family — Zorich was on hard times and was temporarily unable to pay her gas bill.

Sadly, many Americans are still unable to see the horrors of the massive and brutally negligent police state that has exploded in this country. The apologists sit back and tell people that if they don’t do anything wrong, they don’t have anything to worry about.

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

“Grab Anybody!” St. Louis PD Indiscriminately Taser and Arrest People Walking Down Sidewalk

By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | June 1, 2015

St. Louis, MO — Friday night in St. Louis, a peaceful, silent protest was organized to raise awareness and call an end to police brutality. It was referred to on social media as #shutdownbaseball. The protest took place outside of Busch Stadium during a Cardinals game.

The road was already closed off for baseball fans, and the protesters simply held their signs and chalked the sidewalks.

The protest was largely uneventful except for some people becoming upset when they saw a flag being “disrespected.”

According to RevoNews,

It wasn’t until the last 13 remaining protesters started to head home around 11:30pm when things got out of hand. People still motivated to bring attention to their cause had decided to leave the sidewalk and walk in the street. Faced with a myriad of options, when the commands given to leave the roadway were not met Lt Dan Zarrick made the decision to make arrests.  What we see in the video below (supplied by the female taser victim) shows what happened after that decision was made.

As the video starts out police are taking people into custody for being in the street. One officer who was blocking the arrests with his bicycle, ordered the crowd to disperse. “Get back,” he says.

Then another officer can be heard screaming, “Grab anybody, they were all in the street!”

As people begin to comply with the first officer’s order to “get back,” they turn and walk away down the sidewalk. But they are quickly met by officers with tasers drawn.

The man in front, wishing not to be tased, side-steps the taser but is quickly hit. Then the woman is tased.

“Oh my god, Oh my god, why did you do that? I didn’t do anything,” pleads the woman just prior to being hit with the taser again.

The cries for help and obvious distress of the woman in the video are disturbing.

Right before the video ends we can her the woman screaming in pain, “Why are you doing this to me? I’m on the ground.”

RevoNews reports that eight of the protesters were arrested. All of them were charged with impeding the flow of traffic and two had an additional charge of resisting arrest. They have all been released.

This small group of people were complying with the original officer’s orders, yet they were met with excessive force. There was absolutely no need for tasers to be deployed. No one was running away; no one was resisting, nor was anyone posing a threat.

According to Missouri state law, impeding the flow of traffic is punishable by “a fine of not less than ten dollars nor more than fifty dollars.” However, these people were met with a large show of force and brought to jail for it. Is that justice?

June 1, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , | Leave a comment

St. Louis Police Officers Caught Running Possibly Politically-Motivated Background Checks On Police Board Members

By Tim Cushing | Techdirt | February 3, 2014

The problem with access to other people’s personal data is that the potential for misuse is ever present. This is inherent in any system, whether it’s the NSA’s or a local politician’s — simply because humans are humans. The solution is accountability, not layers of bureaucratic control. That’s what appears to be the focus in this story of alleged background check abuse by St. Louis County police officers, which is a good start.

Two St. Louis county police officers who were assigned to the detail of County Executive Charles Dooley have had their access to a criminal database suspended while an investigation over whether they were running unauthorized background checks, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The officers are specifically accused of running such a check on a former candidate for the police board, a body that’s theoretically supposed to supervise officers.

Internal affairs is now investigating the two officers in order to determine why it was accessed and if there was any additional abuse. County police chief Tom Fitch found himself questioning the motivations and actions of these two officers after they were inadvertently “outed” by a member of Dooley’s office.

Questions first arose in October when Dooley’s chief of staff, Garry Earls, announced to the county council that a criminal background check into former police board candidate David Spence had come back clean, County Chief Tim Fitch said.

Fitch said he had questioned how the county administration would know that information because he didn’t believe it was his officers’ place to run the checks.

Officers running background checks on their own supervisors isn’t a good idea, especially when it gives the unauthorized access the appearance of being politically motivated — and possibly ordered by a county official. (This has been denied, of course.) Simply running a check for any other reason than “criminal justice” is itself illegal. And now Fitch is trying to figure out who else these officers have “checked out” in violation of policy.

At this point, the two officers must ask a supervisor to run names for them and have no access to the REGIS database. Until further details emerge, this at least prevents misuse by the two accused of unauthorized access. Whether there’s evidence of more abuse remains to be seen. On the downside, Chief Fitch is being rather cagey with details on how much abuse has been uncovered.

Fitch would not say how many names the officers ran during their time assigned to Dooley’s detail, citing the ongoing internal investigation.

“The number (of names) isn’t important,” he said. “What’s important is why it was done and who asked them to do it.”

Understandably, some details need to be withheld during an ongoing investigation, but Fitch is a bit off when he says the total number isn’t important. Checks that complied with department policy obviously don’t matter, so it’s only the total number that fall outside compliance that anyone’s worried about. That number matters just as much as the “why.” The “who” behind it matters as well, although the accused officers still had the option to say “no” if they were indeed asked to break the rules.

While it’s refreshing to see a police chief unwilling to downplay his officers’ misconduct, the intensity must be maintained not only through this investigation, but going forward to ensure incidents like these become rarer and rarer. And if it turns out that the database was frequently misused, the consequences need to be as severe as the abuse.

February 3, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption | | Leave a comment

US military secretly sprayed radioactive particles in St. Louis and Texas

RT | October 1, 2012

A college professor from St. Louis, Missouri claims that allegedly harmless chemical sprays that doused the city in the 1950s and ‘60s as a Cold War-era protection measure was something much more sinister.

Lisa Martino-Taylor, a sociologist at the St. Louis Community College in the Midwest, has been endlessly digging through publically available archives and documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests to learn more about a bizarre spraying program that blanketed parts of her hometown and other cities during the Cold War. At the time, the US Army admitted to showering certain locales with a chemical mixture, but said it was to test smoke screens they’d deploy to shield St. Louis from any nuclear assault by way of Russia. According to Martino-Taylor, the Army and others misled the public and actually poisoned residents of St. Louis and other cities with a dangerous compound composed of zinc cadmium sulfide and radioactive elements.

“It was pretty shocking. The level of duplicity and secrecy,” the researcher tells St. Louis’ KSDK.

“Clearly they went to great lengths to deceive people.”

Martino-Taylor has been researching what she calls the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition since at least 2011, but only last month formally presented her findings. In it, she suggests that tests in St. Louis and in Corpus Christi, Texas involved military personnel relying on low-flying airplanes to spray city skylines and even in some instances using chemical sprayers placed atop skyscrapers and station wagons, all the while using unsuspecting citizens as test subjects in the budding steps of biological warfare.

“The study was secretive for reason. They didn’t have volunteers stepping up and saying yeah, I’ll breathe zinc cadmium sulfide with radioactive particles,” she tells KSDK.

Instead of using curious citizens as test-subjects, the Army resorted to waging a secretive radioactive war on its own impoverished townspeople: according to the material Martino-Taylor has collected, the military launched no fewer than 16 tests in only the year 1953 that involved 35 separate releases of zinc cadmium sulfide in St. Louis. The neighborhoods affected, the professor found, were described at the time as “a densely populated slum district” that held around 10,000 low income residents, mostly children.

Martino-Taylor says she hasn’t been able to confirm for certain that St. Louisans were subject to radiological testing, but tells KSDK, “There’s an awful lot of evidence that there were radiological components to the study.” She says that a powder form of zinc cadmium sulfide was mixed with fluorescent particles so that dispersal patterns could be traced among unknowing test-subjects, and that a company called US Radium — previously put before a judge for radioactively contaminating its workers — has been linked to the scandal.

“US radium had this reputation where they had been found legally liable for producing a radioactive powdered paint that killed many young women who painted fluorescent watch tiles,” she says.

Regardless of what her future research reveals, she says, “This was a violation of all medical ethics, all international codes, and the military’s own policy at that time.”

On Monday this week, local lawmakers terrified of Martino-Taylor’s analysis asked the Army to come forth and explain the actual merits of the mysterious spray program that has long been acknowledged, but not necessarily with the greatest of accuracy.

“The idea that thousands of Missourians were unwillingly exposed to harmful materials in order to determine their health effects is absolutely shocking. It should come as no surprise that these individuals and their families are demanding answers of government officials,” State Senator Roy Blunt (R) tells the Associated Press.

State Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, has also asked Army Secretary John McHugh for more information in a letter sent this week.

“The Senate and House had investigations back in the 1990s but nothing ever came of it,” Martino-Taylor says. “Nobody has ever talked to the people who were exposed.”

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October 1, 2012 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment