Posts Tagged warrants

Officers Association Against No-Knock Raids

From National Tactical Officers Association:

We can all agree that there is no easy answer, but there is a correct answer: No-knock search warrants, though well-intended, no longer pass the test of tactical science, risk mitigation practices, and liability-conscious decision-making.

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Gun Rights and Police Raids Are Incompatible

From Open Source Defense:

As more people become able exercise their gun rights, an ever-bigger percentage of people are going to have a gun on them or nearby when encountering police. And that means that in a raid (which are often indistinguishable from home invasions), or when there’s a strange knock on the door at night, people are going to use their gun for its purpose. That’s just a description of reality in a world of robust gun rights. So either that can be a death sentence for ≥1 of the people involved in the encounter, or police tactics can change.

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Patriot Act Reform Fails By One Vote

From Ars Technica:

A majority of senators—59 out of 100—supported the amendment. But under the Senate’s dysfunctional rules, it takes a 60-vote supermajority to end debate on a proposal like this and move to a vote. So even though a majority of senators supported the amendment, it did not become part of the reauthorization bill.
Four senators—Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) missed the vote. The amendment would have passed if any of them had voted “yes.”

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Gun Control Leads To More Dead Innocents

From The American Conservative:

As I reported in American Conservative here and here, a Montgomery County SWAT team launched an unprovoked attack on the Lemp family home at 4:30 a.m. on March 12.  Lemp was fatally wounded by the first shots that the police fired through his bedroom window. His family says he was sleeping in bed with his pregnant girlfriend at the time.
 Police claim that they received an anonymous tip two months earlier that Lemp possessed firearms. The police department asserted  Lemp was prohibited from owning firearms due to a juvenile conviction but there are apparently zero court records or other records to support that justification.  Regardless of Lemp’s juvenile history, there was no evidence that he posed an imminent threat justifying a frontal assault that included throwing flash-bang explosive devices into the family home. 

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Houston PD To Stop No-Knock Raids

This is a positive for everyone. No-knock raids put police in more danger as well as the suspects and bystanders, especially in states where gun ownership is common. More police departments should consider this kind of reform.

From NPR:

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo says his department will stop serving “no knock” search warrants, weeks after a raid on a house left two married suspects dead and five officers injured. Acevedo also reiterated that the officer who led that raid may face criminal charges.
“The no-knock warrant’s going to go away, kind of like leaded gasoline in our city,” Acevedo said. He added that raids that stem from those warrants would only be used in very limited cases — and that they would not be used to nab people suspected of dealing small amounts of drugs.

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Primer for Protesters and “Anti-Government Extremists”

From EFF:

Cell Phone Guide For US Protesters, Updated 2014 Edition

With major protests in the news again, we decided it’s time to update our cell phone guide for protestors. A lot has changed since we last published this report in 2011, for better and for worse. On the one hand, we’ve learned more about the massive volume of law enforcement requests for cell phone—ranging from location information to actual content—and widespread use of dedicated cell phone surveillance technologies. On the other hand, strong Supreme Court opinions have eliminated any ambiguity about the unconstitutionality of warrantless searches of phones incident to arrest, and a growing national consensus says location data, too, is private.

Protesters want to be able to communicate, to document the protests, and to share photos and video with the world. So they’ll be carrying phones, and they’ll face a complex set of considerations about the privacy of the data those phones hold. We hope this guide can help answer some questions about how to best protect that data, and what rights protesters have in the face of police demands. Read the rest of this entry »

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