It
seems we hear about these no-knock SWAT team raids going wrong all too often. Police
forces around the country routinely exercise their show of force to intimidate
citizens.
It’s
the strategy of barge in and ask questions later. Sadly, here’s one more case of a no-knock SWAT raid that went horribly wrong… and there was
no reason for it to even happen in the first place:
Tampa
Bay, FL – A Florida family seeks justice after their son Jason Westcott, was
killed by members of a SWAT team, during a “drug raid” on his house which
yielded only $2.00 worth of marijuana. An ‘internal investigation’ absolved
officers of any wrongdoing though police only found .02 grams of marijuana in
Westcott’s home. “They have IA, they have internal
investigations but when you police yourself, you have that veil of concern by
the outsider,” said attorney T.J. Grimaldi.
On
Tuesday, attorney T.J. Grimaldi, representing the family of Westcott, informed
the city that family would be filing a lawsuit, after finding numerous “glaring inconsistencies” in police statements in the
aftermath of the killing. “We have developed and seen what
we view to be significant inconsistencies with the way that the police
department portrayed this case from the get-go all the way to its conclusion,” he
said. “We have put the city and the police
department on notice that we are going to be filing a lawsuit,” Grimaldi
said.
Westcott
became the target of an intense drug trafficking investigation after a
confidential informant led investigators to believe that Westcott was a dealer,
as opposed to the casual cannabis smoker he was in reality. The informant has
since gone public and admitted that he was lying to police in the case.
And
why did the informant lie? Because he was a felon and a drug addict. He said
“he repeatedly lied about suspects, stole drugs he bought on the public’s dime
and conspired to falsify drug deals.”
It
certainly doesn’t help that police now choose the gung-ho approach of knocking
down doors and shooting anyone who gets in the way rather than doing the work
to investigate and verify sources.
How
many more will have to die in unjustified no-knock raids before such practices
are made illegal?
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