Brickbat: Tennessee Two-Step

Nikola Fific / Dreamstime.com

Drug Enforcement Administration agents and members of the Bradley County, Tennessee, SWAT team knocked down the door to Spencer Renck's home and tossed several flash bang-bang grenades, including one thrown into the room his young son was in. They tackled Renck to the ground, handcuffed him and arrested him. Minutes later, they figured out they were in the wrong home. Renck says officers told him they made the mistake because he has a white car like the man they were looking for.

Comments

[Rat on a train]

They must have given the map to the lieutenant.

[geo1113]

Perhaps Lt. Frank Drebin.

[Fuck you, Shikha (Nunya)]

Proctor!!!

[This Machine Chips Fascists]

Dude is lucky these modern day Sherlocks didn't "tackle" him by mag-dumping hundreds of poorly aimed rounds in his general direction.

[Crackers Boy]

And nothing else happened.

CB

[Rossami]

Yeah, because having your door broken down, explosives thrown recklessly into your home and being violently assaulted isn't nearly enough to be outraged over. I'm sure Crackers' friends do that to him and his family every other weekend. It's all in good fun, right?

[Fist of Etiquette]

"On May 22, 2018, agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Louisville Field Division and the Bradley County Sheriff's Office served a federal search warrant at an address associated with an individual wanted for murder who was also a target in an ongoing heroin investigation," the statement reads.

"This operation was a part of a larger ongoing investigation. Unfortunately, this search warrant was initially served on the wrong residence... situations such as these are tragic and DEA takes them very seriously. We intend to look into this matter further and take steps to ensure situations such as this never occur again."

"So that the residence in question never again interferes with ongoing law enforcement actions, the DEA in conjunction with local LEO from the Bradley County Sheriff's Office will raze the house and turn the property into a staging area for future operations. No charges against the homeowner have been filed at this time."

[This Machine Chips Fascists]

About the pic, it must be terribly emasculating to these heroes to have to leap heroically from a goddam passenger van! Taxpayers need to provide nothing less than a Bearcat or face charges for emotional assault, obstructing official duties, resisting (someone else's) arrest, whatever works.

[Inigo Montoya]

They mistook him for a murder suspect because he drives a white car? So much for white (car) privilege!

[Seamus]

Well, James Earl Ray drove a white Mustang as his getaway car out of Memphis (http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/R Disk/Rays All/Item 23.pdf). So my guess is that Tennessee cops are just figuring they can't be too careful.

[Mot?rSteve]

Oh shit! I drive a white car! *furiously pulls up autotrader.com*

[Longtobefree]

So maybe being able to read an address should become part of police training?

[TrickyVic (old school)]

A bridge too far.

[Will Nonya]

Serves the guy right. What's he think is gonna happen when he owns a criminal car, white, sheesh. Everyone knows that if you want to look like a good guy you have to drive a big, black SUV with illegally dark tinted windows.

[Conchfritters]

Renck says officers told him they made the mistake because he has a white car like the man they were looking for.

Ummm... racist.

[loveconstitution1789]

Being grateful that police didn't wrongly kill this innocent guy is not the way to fix this. People just need to defend themselves with deadly force and cops will stop making raids on the wrong houses.

Freedom is not free.

[$park? leftist poser]

Yeah, the guy killing a few cops sure would have deescalated the situation. And there's no way it would feed into the war on cops mentality either.

Good call.

[loveconstitution1789]

I am not talking about deescalating the situation.

I am saying that escalating the situation to let police know that citizens are not going to allow unconstitutional and illegal raids anymore.

Citizens might die from police mistakes anyway. Fighting back makes sure police double check their warrant paperwork before raiding the wrong house and getting killed.

[$park? leftist poser]

Fighting back makes sure police double check their warrant paperwork before raiding the wrong house and getting killed.

I'm sure you have tons of evidence to back up this claim.

[loveconstitution1789]

Common sense.

Police scared to die by raiding the wrong house tend to not raid the wrong houses.

Its why wrong houses are rarely raided.

[$park? leftist poser]

Police scared to die

Is what leads to them charging in guns blazing after flashbanging the shit out of the house.

[TrickyVic (old school)]

Yeah, as if authority is going to bow down to the armed home owner. The state can escalate in ways the home owner can't. Consider that Dallas TX used a robot to deliver a bomb to kill a suspect.

""Its why wrong houses are rarely raided.""

Probably not. They do want to get the right house the first time. If they hit the neighbor's, they have tipped off the target.

[loveconstitution1789]

Its sucks either way.

Freedom isn't free.

[Quo Usque Tandem]

What? No dogs killed? Why is this even news?

[Jerryskids]

Look, there are thousands of SWAT raids every day all across the country and almost all of them go right, but you focus on the one or two rare instances that go badly. What about all the SWAT raids where they successfully delivered summonses for unpaid parking tickets, served warrants for mismatched curtains, informed citizens that their trash cans were 4 inches too far from the curb, investigated reports of loud music, forced defiant little old ladies to mow all the illegal wildflowers in their yard? Have you ever faced down a suspicious-looking character running away from you with a Gameboy in his hand? Until you have, I'd suggest you cut these guys some slack, these brave heroes are doing jobs you and I would never do.

[Inigo Montoya]

You're right.

I've never had to face a sleeping toddler in a crib, or a mentally handicapped youth, or a dude chilling on a back porch. Just the thought is frightening! And then there's the idea of someone selling individual cigarettes! It's truly the stuff of nightmares.

We need to bow down and be grateful to all the brave men and women of law enforcement. They are all that separates us from a Mad Max style dystopia where toddlers, pooches, and cigarettes would be roaming free, leaving destruction in their wake.

[markm23]

You have to be wary of those sleeping toddlers. If you miss it with the flashbang grenade, it wakes up and turns into a SCREAMING TODDLER! And only parents who actually parented their kids can face that.

[loveconstitution1789]

Just protecting and serving.

[Quo Usque Tandem]

Dog lives matter!

[TrickyVic (old school)]

""Dog lives matter!"'

Is that a Samatha Bee joke?

[Rich]

Minutes later, they figured out they were in the wrong home.

Details please.

*** clicks link ***

[Rich]

Nope, nothing about their a-ha moment. I suppose that's classified.

[TrickyVic (old school)]

The a-ha moment doesn't come until they ransack the house and don't find what they are looking for.

[Chipper Jones]

But were procedures followed? Please tell me that procedures were followed it I'm gonna lose it.

[TrickyVic (old school)]

It's like they need a check list that starts and ends with, verify the address.

[Unicorn Abattoir]

Don't want to be raided, flash-banged and cuffed like a thug, don't own a white car like a thug.

[shortviking]

This is where I'd be perfectly okay with the federal government jailing each officer involved for a year. There's no oversight on police at all. States won't do anything because police unions literally own them.

[I am the 0.000000013%]

If we didn't want these things we wouldn't have color coded males and vehicles.

[Gary Trieste]

So, a civil suit will be filed, and unless the police dept settles, this poor schmuck will likely get nothing.
The federal courts have been tossing these exact kind of violations against citizens right & left.
Nothing is outrageous enough.
If the cops can show they reasonably believed something to be true, then there is no liability.
Made a mistake on the address? If someone else made the error, no liability.
Even if they made the mistake, if the cars looked enough alike? No liability.