I’m going to keep talking to myself, I don’t care.

The Mayor Calvo story has been in the news again this last week. One county in Md finally released their SWAT team numbers and they were pretty awful. More than 100 times last year they were used to deliver warrants for non-violent misdemeanors. Anyway, there was a long letter to the editor of the paper from a former local Police Chief that Radley Balko rips apart:

theagitator.com

It’s a long piece, read it all, but here is the gist:

If Mr. Schweinsburg had read much at all on Calvo’s story before firing off his letter, he’d know that the most aggravating thing about the raid is that Prince George’s Officials—from County Executive Jack Johnson to Sheriff Michael Jackson—have stubbornly and shamelessly refused to admit that the police made a single mistake. The horrifying lesson to draw from that: It’s perfectly acceptable for the police to barge into a home of an innocent family without first doing any corroborating investigation, shoot and kill the family’s dogs, handcuff the home’s occupants for hours on end, lie about the circumstances leading up to, during, and after the raid, then refuse to turn over any information about the investigation and raid when the wrongly raided family requests to see it. No mistakes were identified because Jackson has determined none were made. No training and policy modifications will be put in place because Jackson doesn’t feel any are appropriate. This is why “micro-managing” SWAT teams is necessary. Because police and public officials have come to the mind-numbing conclusion that something as atrocious as the Calvo raid can occur … and yet still believe that no one made any mistakes.