Originally posted by Breacher:
I got banned from more than one professional forum for calling that sort of tactic what it is, terroristic mock executions which are done specifically to traumatize the victim.

A Greeley woman whose son still suffers nightmares and flashbacks after law-enforcement officials burst into their home without a warrant and pointed multiple weapons on him has filed a lawsuit against the police department and the Bureau of Alcohol, tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

On June 15, 2010, officers with the BATFE as part of the Regional Anti-Gang Enforcement (RAGE) Task Force had recently made 13 arrests in a major drug sweep when they entered the home of Amanda Griego and her eight year old son, Colby Frias without a warrant.

During the encounter Griego was handcuffed and police reportedly pointed guns at her and Frias.

“They had multiple machine pistols pointed at my son. I could see the laser sites on his body and he began to freak out. While I was cuffed I had to calm him down while the officers broke down his bedroom door.”

Griego has since filed a lawsuit against the BATFE and the Greeley Police Department accusing them of violating her 4th Amendment rights when they entered her home without probable cause or a warrant.

David Lane, Griego’s attorney told the Gazette that the BATFE still has not produced a warrant justifying their entry into the home. He went on to say that even though the event happened two years ago, Frias still remains traumatized over the incident....

The incident was not the first time authorities had been to the house.

In the months prior to the incident local authorities had been to Griego’s house several times looking for Angela Hernandez-Nicholson, a previous tenant who had lived there in over a year.

Each time they showed up, Griego told authorities Nicholson was no longer living at the address and even provided them with information on how to locate her....

What is frustrating to Griego is that to this day no one from the police or the BATFE have taken the time to contact her and apologize for their mistake.

“The last thing they told me was, ‘Well I hope you have a better day than you’ve had so far.’ And then they left,” Griego said.

Rochester police and federal agents made a mistake in Charlotte this week that has one woman baffled and frightened. She wants to know how they could mistake her house for one they were supposed to raid in a drug bust.

“I was sitting in my living room texting on my phone and I heard somebody come in my back door. I didn't realize at the time what they were saying, but ultimately they were yelling out A-T-F, A-T-F.”

Nancy Dominicos says what happened next at her home on Tiernan Street Wednesday night is almost unbelievable.

“I thought it was a family member pulling a joke on me. And all of the sudden I looked up and they were in my dinning room pointing a loaded gun at me telling me they had a federal warrant to search my premises.”

Dominicos says she kept telling the three ATF agents this wasn't right. They told her they were searching for narcotics and asked if anyone else was home. She said her adult son was upstairs and that's when this story almost turned tragic.

“My son had heard me arguing with this man and it was not a voice he'd recognize. My son is a hunter, he put a bullet in the chamber of his gun. They heard that, they yelled down long gun, at that point there he told another ATF agent that was with me, handcuff her and take her out,” Dominicos said.

Thankfully Dominicos' son recognized it was law enforcement and put the gun down right away. Dominicos says the handcuffs caused bruises and as she was going outside with an ATF agent she heard him say they had the wrong house. The ATF and Rochester police executed a number of search warrants Wednesday night. Police sent us a statement, saying they entered the home through an unlocked side door and quote:

"Upon encountering an elderly resident, the team realized that they were at the wrong location at that time and left the premises."

Officers then searched the correct house down the street.

Dominicos says the whole event plays over and over in her mind,

“I'm still terrified. It's almost like a P.T.S.D. experience, you keep hearing things. You think oh my God I hear a door slam, I hear someone pulling into my driveway. I see a light it's like oh my God are they back?”

"How could they make that mistake, how could they make that mistake?”

LAKE COUNTY, Fla. - Lake County Sheriff's Office deputies shot and killed a man they assumed was an attempted murder suspect on Sunday, but they now know they shot the wrong man.

In the early morning hours, deputies knocked on 26-year-old Andrew Lee Scott's door without identifying themselves as law enforcement officers. Scott answered the door with a gun in his hand.

"When we knocked on the door, the door opened and the occupant of that apartment was pointing a gun at deputies and that's when we opened fire and killed him," Lt. John Herrell said.

Deputies thought they were confronting Jonathan Brown, a man accused of attempted murder. Brown was spotted at the Blueberry Hills Apartment complex and his motorcycle was parked across from Andrew Scott's front door.

"It's just a bizarre set of circumstances. The bottom line is, you point a gun at a deputy sheriff or police office, you're going to get shot," Herrell said.

Residents said the unannounced knock at the door at 1:30 a.m. may be the reason why the tragedy happened.

"He was the wrong guy and he got shot and killed anyway. There's fault on both sides. I think more so on the county," Ryan Perry said. "I can understand why he [the deputy] did it, but it should have never gone down like that," Perry said.

Brown was arrested near the same building where Scott was shot. Brown and another suspect in the same case, Anthony Rodriguez, were booked into the Lake County Jail over the weekend.

Originally posted by airforce:

Residents said the unannounced knock at the door at 1:30 a.m. may be the reason why the tragedy happened.

Braving pouring rain, more than 40 protesters with signs and umbrellas stood in front of the Lake County Sheriff's Office late Thursday afternoon chanting "Justice for Drew" and shouting various questions about an incident that left an innocent man shot dead by a deputy over the weekend.

The group also paraded several feet away in front of the Lake County Historic Courthouse in Tavares, waving signs at passing cars in support of Andrew Lee Scott, shouts thatgrew more fervent every time law enforcement drove past.

"All they had to do was yell three words, 'Lake County deputies,'" yelled John Knox.

Some wore shirts that demanded justice. One woman had her own chant, "Serve and protect, not search and destroy."

"This is something that should have never happened," said protester Toni Gardner.

"You work for the sheriff's office and kill someone, you get paid leave," shouted one protester.

"If it was anybody else, they would have been arrested for murder," shouted Mark Schmude, standing in front of the sheriff's office in a soaked blue T-shirt.

Protesters said Thursday they were skeptical of the defense of the shooting.

"I want to see the video footage," yelled Mike Premo.

The protest was arranged by friends of Scott, including his employers and co-workers at Hungry Howie's Pizza in Leesburg. Manager Brian Evey, whose protest sign had Scott's birthday and day of death printed on it, said he didn't condone his drivers carrying guns but understood why Scott felt it was important to carry one even to the door Sunday morning.

Some of his co-workers and friends agreed.

"If someone came banging on my door at 1:30 a.m. in the morning and wouldn't say who they were, I would bring a gun with me to the door, too," said Paul Reed, who used to work at at the same restaurant and said he has been robbed before as a pizza delivery man....

Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies kicked in the wrong apartment door, pointed guns at a former Miss Nevada and her fiance, and watched as the beauty queen got out of bed naked, she claims.

The allegations are spelled out in Caleche Ranae Manos' lawsuit against Los Angeles County and its sheriff's office, obtained today by Courthouse News Service. Manos charges that she was forced to get out of her bed while nude on the night of Nov. 15, 2011. One of the officers allegedly joked that she would, "have a story to tell others at Thanksgiving."

But the officers had the wrong apartment. Manos -- Miss Nevada 2007 and a woman of many talents -- and her fiance, Eric Otto Ryder said that deputies had a search warrant for apartment "C" but entered their clearly marked apartment "A."

"At that time Ms. Manos was still in bed and was naked," the complaint stated, according to Business Insider. "The sheriff deputies, all of which were male and armed with guns, ordered Ms. Manos to get out of bed and then watched as she attempted to do so."

The officers reportedly spent a "significant amount of time" in the apartment before realizing their error.

Manos seeks damages for negligence, false imprisonment, civil rights and Constitution violations, and she's accusing the deputies of sexual harassment.

Her lawyer, Matthew Geragos, didn't immediately return calls to The Huffington Post.

...But on the night of July 13, 2010, the task force broke down the Francos' doors, "negligently raided the home of plaintiffs, by raiding the wrong home and physically brutalizing all the above-named occupants of said house," the complaint states.

Even after learning that they were in the wrong house, the complaint states, the drug busters stayed in the Francos' home and kept searching it.

They "handcuffed all of the inhabitants of the plaintiffs' home except plaintiff Analese Franco who was forced, virtually naked, from her bed onto the floor at gunpoint by officers of the St. Paul Police Department SWAT team and officers of the St. Paul Police Department."

The complaint states: "Upon forcibly breaching the plaintiffs' home, defendants terrorized the plaintiffs at gun and rifle point.

"Each plaintiff was forced to the floor at gun and rifle point and handcuffed behind their backs.

"Defendants shot and killed the family dog and forced the handcuffed children to sit next to the carcass of their dead pet and bloody pet for more than an hour while defendants continued to search the plaintiffs' home."

One child "was kicked in the side, handcuffed and searched at gunpoint," the family says.

Another child, a girl, "a diabetic, was handcuffed at gunpoint and prevented by officer from obtaining and taking her medication, thus induced a diabetic episode as a result of low-blood sugar levels." (...)

A state grand jury late Thursday handed up an indictment charging New Orleans police officer Joshua Colclough with one count of manslaughter in the March 7 fatal shooting of Wendell Allen during a raid inside a Gentilly home. The indictment came a day after Colclough did not show up for his expected guilty plea on a count of negligent homicide. Sources said Colclough changed his mind the night before he was to plead. After the grand jury returned the indictment, Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office indicated it would invoke a firearms sentencing provision that would subject Colclough to a minimum 20-year prison sentence if found guilty.

Had Colclough pleaded guilty to negligent homicide Wednesday, he would have faced a maximum of five years in prison.

Criminal District Court Judge Keva Landrum-Johnson set bond for Colclough at $300,000. Prosecutors had sought a $1 million bond. The judge also issued a warrant for Colclough's arrest.

According to an NOPD investigation, Colclough, a 4 1/2-year NOPD veteran, fired a single bullet at Allen's chest, killing him while police executed a search warrant related to a marijuana investigation at Allen's Prentiss Street home. Allen, 20, was unarmed, shirtless and wearing jeans and sneakers when shot. Five children were inside the home at the time.

Colclough's attorney, Pat Fanning, said he believed Cannizzaro's office had been seeking an indictment for second-degree murder, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

"Apparently (Cannizzaro) didn't get his way from the grand jury, which is of course encouraging for us," Fanning said.

Fanning said he was in discussions Thursday evening to coordinate Colclough's surrender. He said it was doubtful the officer could make the bond.

Fanning criticized Cannizzaro's use of the firearms sentencing provision, which sets a minimum 20-year sentence if a defendant discharges a firearm during the commission of a violent felony.

"Frankly, if they do that, that is an abuse of the statute," Fanning said. "The statute contemplates a criminal committing an intentional criminal act and choosing to use a firearm, as opposed to a police officer who not only carries a gun in the line of duty, but is required to as a condition of his employment."

Fanning said the move may be intended to press Colclough into reconsidering a negligent homicide plea.

New Orleans police Superintendent Ronal Serpas issued a statement late Thursday saying Colclough will be placed on emergency suspension without pay until the department's Public Integrity Bureau reviews his status.

"As I've said publicly many times, the loss of life is tragic and affects us all. Our investigators conducted a fair, thorough and transparent investigation into the death of Wendell Allen," Serpas said in the statement. "Once we had all the facts available to us, we turned them over to the District Attorney's Office."

Serpas said officers later found drug paraphernalia and 138 grams of marijuana -- about 4.5 ounces -- inside the residence. Two of the men in the home, David Allen and Brandon Boles, now face marijuana possession charges from the raid.

Fanning said Colclough made a rapid-fire decision after officers had secured the downstairs of the house. He said officers had been inside for several minutes.

"When you serve a search warrant not knowing what's behind that door, you're going in, you place yourself in harm's way. That's what officer Colclough did," Fanning said.

"Then someone steps out on him and startles him and starts raising his hand in his direction. He had to decide in a split second, do I wait to decide if he has a gun in his hand and he shoots me? Or can I assume if he steps out on me, that it was reasonable to fear the guy had a gun and was going to shoot him?"

No court dates have been set in the case. An attorney for Allen's family could not be reached for comment late Thursday.

A family is still wondering what happened when a package was delivered and then 10 minutes later drug raiders burst through the front door.

Architect Paul Brown was in the basement of his home at the end of Adelphi Avenue when he heard a “huge noise” Friday afternoon that drew him up the stairs where he was meet by gun in his face.

He was handcuffed and placed on a chair. And a gun was still pointed at his face.

“They wouldn’t tell us why they were there,” he said. Afterward, he was able to piece some of what happened together.

A package was delivered, it was about 18 inches by 18 inches 22 to 24 inches tall, by a postal inspector and was accepted outside the open garage by Brown’s son-in-law, Wilmer Aries, 28, who is married to his daughter Ericka, 23, who also live in the home.

Aries brought the package, with a name of someone who did not live there, inside the house and placed it inside the front door in the foyer. It was never opened, according to Brown.

Ten minutes later, police officers with the Metropolitan Enforcement Group smashed in the front door and began ransacking the house, even pulling out insulation in the basement.

“They crashed things, they smashed things,” Brown, 58, said. “You couldn’t walk into a room because everything from the drawers was thrown around and emptied onto the floor.

“The garage door was open. They could have just walked in,” he said. “They didn’t have to crash the front door down.”

In the end, police found no drugs and took the box that police said contained marijuana with them, Brown reported. He never got to see the box, but his son-in-law thought the first name on it was Oscar and some other last name. It did have their address on it.

The search warrant address listed Brown’s house as being in Waukegan, but it is in Beach Park. No arrests were made.

News-Sun calls to the Metropolitan Enforcement Group were not returned. Brown also has called MEG and has not been able to get them to return his calls.

“It’s pretty shadowy and pretty bizarre for us,” he said of the two-hour ordeal that began around 4 p.m. Friday. “I was terrified. My chest was hurting and I am a diabetic and prone to heart attacks.”

Watching the officers fist bump and high-five each other as they tracked broken glass from the front door through the house also irritated him.

“I was basically held hostage,” he said.

“We’re not hard to investigate,” he said of himself, his wife, Bessy, his daughter and husband, and Wilmer’s brother, Victor Aries, 32, who all live at the home.

His 77-year-old mother-in-law also lives with them and she was in the kitchen when the raid happened. Police gave her the search warrant to read instead of giving it to Brown.

“We live a very simple life,” he said, “We all work. No one does drugs here.” His son-in-law works in general construction and his brother works for a security firm.

“They were upset they didn’t find anything. When I asked them who was going to pay for the door they basically said, ‘Not us’,” said Brown, who noted the door on his luxury home was valued at $3,000 some 12 years ago and the lock set was another $130 from Home Depot.

“We’re just trying to pay our bills here. We’re regular people,” said Brown. “It must have been worth a lot because they wouldn’t have gone through all this trouble.”

Now, though, he’s worried that someone put the wrong address on the package and perhaps they will come looking for him for their drugs. “Who would be sending that?” he asked. In a way he doesn’t want to know.

But now he questions the occasional errant mail or telephone call that comes to the house. “There’s something going on out there,” he said, “It’s bizarre.

“The door’s ruined and they left my house in a shambles and they don’t care. Now they won’t return my telephone calls. They’re supposed to be on our side,” he said.

He has hired an attorney, Christopher Cohen, to look into filing a civil suit.

“Unfortunately, the Browns were innocent bystanders in the war on drugs,” Cohen said Tuesday.

While the Browns support law enforcement “they do not support damage to the property of innocent families without restitution,” said Cohen.

Brown said his blood pressure rises every time he thinks about the raid and his mother-in-law still can’t get her blood pressure to go down.

“She’s afraid to even take a nap on the couch now,” he said. “I can hardly sleep. It changes your frame of mind.”

A 61-year-old man was shot to death by
police while his wife was handcuffed in another room during a drug raid on the wrong house.

Police admitted their mistake, saying faulty information from a drug informant contributed to the death of John Adams Wednesday night. They intended to raid the home next door.

The two officers, 25-year-old Kyle Shedran and 24-year-old Greg Day, were placed on administrative leave with pay.

“They need to get rid of those men, boys with toys,” said Adams’ 70-year-old widow, Loraine.

John Adams was watching television when his wife heard pounding on the door. Police claim they identified themselves and wore police jackets. Loraine Adams said she had no indication the men were police.

“I thought it was a home invasion. I said ‘Baby, get your gun!,” she said, sitting amid friends and relatives gathered at her home to cook and prepare for Sunday’s funeral.

Police say her husband fired first with a sawed-off shotgun and they responded. He was shot at least three times and died later at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

Loraine Adams said she was handcuffed and thrown to her knees in another room when the shooting began.

“I said, ‘Y’all have got the wrong person, you’ve got the wrong place. What are you looking for?“‘

“We did the best surveillance we could do, and a mistake was made,” Lebanon Police Chief Billy Weeks said. “It’s a very severe mistake, a costly mistake. It makes us look at our own policies and procedures to make sure this never occurs again.” He said, however, the two policemen were not at fault.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is investigating. NAACP officials said they are monitoring the case. Adams was black. The two policemen are white.

Family members did not consider race a factor and Weeks agreed, but said the shooting will be “a major setback” for police relations with the black community.

“We know that, we hope to do everything we can to heal it,” Weeks said.

Johnny Crudup, a local NAACP official, said the organization wanted to make sure and would investigate on its own.

Weeks said he has turned the search warrant and all other evidence over to the bureau of investigation and District Attorney General Tommy Thompson. A command officer must now review all search warrants.

Originally posted by safetalker:
These [b]mistakes will never stop as long as the first choice of a search warrant is to kick in the door instead of knocking, presenting the warrant, and then if you have the right house you search every place with wall radar, and courtesy.
[/b]

A lawyer for the town of Monroe Tuesday asked a federal appeals court to overturn a lower court ruling keeping alive the lawsuit filed against five towns that provided the officers for the heavily armed SWAT team that killed an unarmed Easton man in his home four years ago.

Scott Karsten, who represents the town as well as the officer who fired the fatal shots, filed the appeal with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City. He did not return calls for comment. The lawyers for the other towns are also expected to appeal.

Last month, in a 46-page decision, U.S. District Court Judge Janet Bond Arterton refused to throw out the lawsuit, ruling there is sufficient evidence for a jury to decide whether members of the Southwest Regional Emergency Response Team, (SWERT) staffed by officers from Darien, Easton, Monroe, Trumbull and Wilton used unreasonable force as alleged in the lawsuit filed by the family of Gonzalo Guizan and Easton homeowner, Ronald Terebesi. She set down the case for a trial on Feb. 11.

"We are confident that Mrs. Guizan will see justice in this case, no matter how long it takes," said Morgan Ruecker, who represents the Guizan family, in response to the appeal.

Gary Mastronardi, who represents Terebesi, added that an appeal was expected after Arterton's decision.

The 33-year-old Guizan was shot half a dozen times by Monroe officer Michael Sweeney during a raid SWERT at Terebesi's home at 91 Dogwood Drive, Easton on May 18, 2008.

Guizan had been watching television in the home with Terebesi, when the 21-member police team, armed with automatic weapons, broke down the door and threw flash grenades inside.

The lawsuit states that then Easton Police Chief John Solomon and present chief James Candee made the decision to call in SWERT after an exotic dancer who had earlier been at the home told them she saw Terebesi and Guizan take "something" out of a small tin, place it in two small glass smoking pipes and smoke it. She never told officers there were weapons in the home, the suit states.

The lawsuit also claims Sweeney shot Guizan after becoming disoriented when one of the flash grenades deployed by police detonated in front of him and after another officer erroneously shouted he had been shot.

Steve Tuppeny was in the garage of his Middletown home having a smoke at 6:15 a.m., his wife and daughter asleep inside, when the Wilmington SWAT officers made their move.

Dressed in black, several officers rushed Tuppeny, ordered him to lie face down on the ground and handcuffed him. Other SWAT officers smashed the storm door in the front of the Tuppenys’ two-story colonial-style home, then used a battering ram to break through the red front door.

Jennifer Tuppeny, a teacher at Marbrook Elementary School near Prices Corner, said she was asleep upstairs when officers threw open the door to her darkened bedroom and ordered her at gunpoint to get up.

The couple’s 8-year-old daughter was awakened out of a “dead sleep” by “men dressed in black with guns shining flashlights in her face,” Jennifer Tuppeny said.

Police carried out the early morning raid in search of a man whom they called a “person of interest” in a homicide. The man, in a Sept. 19 court appearance, had said he lived at the Tuppenys’ address in the 100 block of Willow Grove Mill Drive. Police had a search warrant authorizing them to obtain a DNA sample.

The man was located later Thursday in Smyrna, was given a DNA swab and released, said Wilmington police spokesman Officer Mark Ivey. Police did not release his name, and Ivey said late Thursday afternoon that the man is neither a defendant nor a suspect....

Narcotics detectives in Salt Lake City on Wednesday used a battering ram to knock down a door and execute a search warrant on the wrong house, frightening the home’s 76-year-old resident.

"This was a mistake," Police Chief Chris Burbank said Friday. "It should not have happened."

The woman living at the home near 200 E. Hubbard Ave. (935 South) was not injured, though a police officer pointed a gun at her as officers entered the home. Burbank said he has placed one officer on administrative leave while the police department investigates how the mistake was made.

The woman’s grown son, Raymond Zaelit, spoke briefly with The Tribune on Friday. He said a police officer pointed a gun at her, asked if she had a gun and then asked if she had drugs. She answered no to both. His mother was home alone at the time.

"She was petrified," Zaelit said. "She didn’t know what to think."

"This was traumatizing to her," Zaelit added....

A 12-year-old girl suffered burns to one side of her body when a flash grenade went off next to her as a police SWAT team raided a West End home Tuesday morning.

"She has first- and second-degree burns down the left side of her body and on her arms," said the girl's mother, Jackie Fasching. "She's got severe pain. Every time I think about it, it brings tears to my eyes."

Medical staff at the scene tended to the girl afterward and then her mother drove her to the hospital, where she was treated and released later that day.

A photo of the girl provided by Fasching to The Gazette shows red and black burns on her side.

Police Chief Rich St. John said the 6 a.m. raid at 2128 Custer Ave., was to execute a search warrant as part of an ongoing narcotics investigation by the City-County Special Investigations Unit.

The grenade is commonly called a "flash-bang" and is used to disorient people with a bright flash, a loud bang and a concussive blast. It went off on the floor where the girl was sleeping. She was in her sister's bedroom near the window the grenade came through, Fasching said.

A SWAT member attached it to a boomstick, a metal pole that detonates the grenade, and stuck it through the bedroom window. St. John said the grenade normally stays on the boomstick so it goes off in a controlled manner at a higher level.

However, the officer didn't realize that there was a delay on the grenade when he tried to detonate it. He dropped it to move onto a new device, St. John said. The grenade fell to the floor and went off near the girl.

"It was totally unforeseen, totally unplanned and extremely regrettable," St. John said. "We certainly did not want a juvenile, or anyone else for that matter, to get injured."

On Thursday, Fasching took her daughter back to the hospital to have her wounds treated.

She questioned why police would take such actions with children in the home and why it needed a SWAT team.

"A simple knock on the door and I would've let them in," she said. "They said their intel told them there was a meth lab at our house. If they would've checked, they would've known there's not."

She and her two daughters and her husband were home at the time of the raid. She said her husband, who suffers from congenital heart disease and liver failure, told officers he would open the front door as the raid began and was opening it as they knocked it down.

When the grenade went off in the room, it left a large bowl-shaped dent in the wall and "blew the nails out of the drywall," Fasching said.

St. John said investigators did plenty of homework on the residence before deciding to launch the raid but didn't know children were inside.

"The information that we had did not have any juveniles in the house and did not have any juveniles in the room," he said. "We generally do not introduce these disorienting devices when they're present."

The decision to use a SWAT team was based on a detailed checklist the department uses when serving warrants.

Investigators consider dozens of items such as residents' past criminal convictions, other criminal history, mental illness and previous interactions with law enforcement.

Each item is assigned a point value and if the total exceeds a certain threshold, SWAT is requested. Then a commander approves or rejects the request.

In Tuesday's raid, the points exceeded the threshold and investigators called in SWAT.

"Every bit of information and intelligence that we have comes together and we determine what kind of risk is there," St. John said. "The warrant was based on some hard evidence and everything we knew at the time."

But Fasching said the risk wasn't there and the entry created, for her and her daughters, a sense of fear they can't shake.

"I'm going to have to take them to counseling," she said. "They're never going to get over that."

A claims process has already been started with the city. St. John said it's not an overnight process, but it does determine if the Police Department needs to make restitution.

"If we're wrong or made a mistake, then we're going to take care of it," he said. "But if it determines we're not, then we'll go with that. When we do this, we want to ensure the safety of not only the officers, but the residents inside."

No arrests were made during the raid and no charges have been filed, although a police spokesman said afterward that some evidence was recovered during the search. St. John declined to release specifics of the drug case, citing the active investigation, but did say that "activity was significant enough where our drug unit requested a search warrant."

Fasching said she's considering legal action but, for now, is more concerned about her daughters.

"I would like to see whoever threw those grenades in my daughter's room be reprimanded," she said. "If anybody else did that it would be aggravated assault. I just want to see that the city is held accountable for what they did to my children."

St. Paul police kicked a man in the face as he lay on the ground and tried to explain that his mother couldn't quickly get to the ground because she'd recently had surgery, a lawsuit says. Police then shot a "flash-bang" grenade directly at the woman, setting her afire and seriously burning her legs, according to the lawsuit.

The St. Paul City Council is slated to approve a $400,000 settlement in the lawsuit Wednesday, Nov. 7, equaling the largest payout in a St. Paul police lawsuit, according to the city attorney's office.

Six other police misconduct cases have led to nearly a half-million dollars in payouts this year, according to the St. Paul city attorney's office. The city also recently settled for $385,000 a data privacy lawsuit involving St. Paul officers.

An investigation continues into a separate case in August in which a St. Paul police officer was seen on video kicking a suspect who was on the ground.

"This is extremely, extremely sad to hear about officers we trust to protect and serve," Tyrone Terrill, chairman of the African-American Leadership Council, said Wednesday of the lawsuit about to be settled. "We really need to have a serious talk with Chief (Thomas) Smith and his leadership." (...)

... As Budd lay face down on the carpet, the elders quorum president stood up from where he was sitting on the couch, thinking he could explain why he and Budd were there.

"The kind officers [who were spouting language the two LDS home teachers were not used to hearing] did not seem to like this action and one very large officer stepped toward Budd’s companion, who then found himself looking directly into the muzzle of the gun with a bright light shining in his eyes. The officer placed his finger over the trigger and shouted, ‘I said get on the ground!’ "

The portly elders quorum president quickly complied, but to Budd’s chagrin, there wasn’t enough room between the couch and coffee table, so he landed on Budd.

"I never thought I would need to ‘support the president’ like that," Budd continued. "I assure you, I really felt the weight of my calling."

While they were on the floor, the cops, who were part of a narcotics task force, continued to shout orders and threats. "The humor of the whole situation hit me full force and I started laughing," wrote Budd.

They were handcuffed and searched for weapons, not including their scriptures.

The elders quorum president finally blurted in one breath that they were home teachers from the LDS ward, causing the officers to look at one another in puzzlement. They asked for church ID and were quickly shown temple recommends.

"I knew that my temple recommend could help me get into the Lord’s house," Budd wrote, "but I never dreamed it could help me avoid going to the Big House."

Alas, they couldn’t save the couple they had gone to enlighten. "The lost sheep we were hoping to bring back to the fold sadly ended up going to a different pen."

Eric Hill woke at 2:30 a.m. on Dec. 20 to his scared daughter telling him she had heard knocking near her closet.

Hill thought the 10-year-old was hearing things, but then came the banging on the front door of his Ogden home.

He went from his basement bedroom to the front door and asked who was there.

No answer.

Another bang.

Hill said he finally armed himself with a baseball bat and asked again who was there.

"Ogden Police," a voice called out from outside the home, located in the 1000 block of Harrop Street.

"At that point, I didn’t believe it," Hill said. "It took them so long to respond to me."

But Hill opened his front door and was met with six men who he said were dressed in black, with no police identifiers that he saw. Three had assault rifles, Hill said; two were carrying tactical shotguns.

The men pointed their guns at Hill and told him to drop the bat and come outside.

"They just automatically placed me in handcuffs," Hill said. "I [told] them my name, and they [kept] telling me my name is Derek."

Hill said the officers told them that a felony arrest warrant was being served because he had gone AWOL from the military. But Hill, 28, had never been in the military.

The man police were looking for was a 23-year-old whom officers found a couple of hours later, according to arrest records. Second District Court records show the man has been charged with desertion.

While Hill was upstairs trying to reason with the officers that he was who he said he was, Melanie Hill, his wife, said she was in their basement bedroom with their two children, ages 4 and 10, trying to make out what the voices were saying upstairs.

She said she grabbed her phone to dial 911, thinking the voices were that of a distraught neighbor. But when she went to the stairwell, she was met with a man holding an assault rifle.

"I thought we were getting robbed," she said. "I had no idea who the person on the stairs was."

Melanie Hill said she was told to go downstairs and grab her husband’s wallet so he could prove his identification. She said her children followed her up the stairs and were terrified to see armed strangers in their home.

"After the [Newtown, Conn.] shooting that just happened, my [older] kid was already scared to go to school," Eric Hill said. "They are just traumatized by it."

Eventually, Eric Hill proved his identity to the officers, and they took him out of handcuffs, the couple said. But the couple said the officers never further identified themselves or explained why they had come to their house.

Melanie Hill said one of the officers made a comment about her husband coming to the door with a bat, saying that had it been a gun, the officers would have "blown you away."

"It was a split decision to grab that bat," she said. "They could have killed him in his house for no reason in front of me and my kids. There should be other tactics to handle this kind of situation."

Ogden police Lt. Will Cragun said officers initially thought Eric Hill matched the description of the man for whom they were looking. He said once the officers verified Eric Hill’s identity, they released him and apologized for the error.

"These things are going to happen on occasion," he said. "It’s unfortunate for Mr. Hill. His response [in holding a bat], I totally get. He has the right to protect his family. I would hope [the officers] are professional."

Cragun said instances of mistaken identity are not common, but do happen. He said that the officers who went to the home were patrol officers working the night shift and would have been dressed in a patrol uniform, which includes a navy blue shirt with police patches, and tan pants.

Eric Hill said he received a phone call from police Chief Mike Ashment several days ago, explaining that the warrant was served at his house because it was the last known address of the man facing the arrest warrant.

The Hill family bought the house six months ago, Eric Hill said, but added that his neighbor told him the man police were looking for was the previous homeowner’s nephew, who had never lived at the home.

No formal complaint about the incident has been filed to the police department, Cragun said.

Originally posted by Archangel1:
Is there a group that automatically files lawsuits against federal, state and local agencies when they are negligent in their actions.