TexasCHLforum.com

philip964 wrote: It was a drug bust on an Arizona family home with children inside at 6 in the morning, if I remember correctly. The former Iraqi vet had worked the night shift and had only been asleep for 30 min when his wife woke him and told him men were looking in the windows.

I am remembering something about a judge actually ruling that a guy was justified in his actions because the people conducting the raid did not properly identify themselves - and I also remember it being earlier than 2011 that I read about it.

That said, my memory is sometimes terrible so this may well be it.

anomie wrote:I am not at all saying that all actions on all sides were necessarily and automatically correct. I'm just saying I could see how it could start and escalate quickly given those conditions.

By putting myself into both sides of the situation, I mean.

Say someone issues a warrant and messes up and puts my address on. Say it's the middle of the night and a no-knock (based on who they actually think they are raiding) and they bust the door down and yell 'police'.

Say I'm asleep and I wake up but don't register that they yelled police, but now I'm hearing people moving in my house after being brought to consciousness by my door being busted in (edit: and, importantly, I have *zero* reason to think it's the police because I am not involved in criminal activity at all, whatsoever)

I probably wouldn't live, they're trained better than I am (and something like that is why police are yelling police the whole time they're moving through rather than just at entry)

All I'm saying is maybe something roughly analogous happened here. A situation where there's a fundamental difference between what the two sides are perceiving can easily go south, quick.

Keith B wrote:Reasonable suspicion was totally justified, and approaching the girls in a calm manner and properly identifying themselves is appropriate. However, going Rambo when the girls started to get away with a perceived 12-pack is where the reasonable part went to unreasonable in the officers actions.

Girls try to get away from who they think are police impersonators ...
Alcohol enforcement officers see what appears to them to be someone attempting to resist/flee after they've identified themselves ...

The perception of each individual side is what it is.

I am not at all saying that all actions on all sides were necessarily and automatically correct. I'm just saying I could see how it could start and escalate quickly given those conditions.

Like I said in my earlier post - a uniformed officer to make initial contact seems like a better plan.

Note that the other way, too.

"After attending an event where ways to avoid being raped and an event where an individual was raped by a police impersonator were discussed, we were crossing a parking lot when someone attempted to identify themselves as a police officer with a badge that we did not recognize".

It's entirely possible for *both* sides to have reasonable cause for their actions in a situation where something bad like this goes down. Although they probably wouldn't use the words I used above.

RAS is exactly that.

Reasonable, articulable suspicion.

"At 22:00 hours on a Thursday night, I observed a young lady who appeared to be under 21 years of age carrying a box which appeared as though it may have been a 12-pack of beer*"

*add some specific knowledge here about the area, if relevant - such as, are underage college kids in the area known to drink in greater numbers on Thursdays, is the area known for underage drinking, etc. Whatever articulable facts support the suspicion (not certainty, but suspicion) that something illegal is occuring or about to occur.

That can certainly be RAS, as I understand it, although I am not an LEO or a lawyer.

That said - I remember a few years ago a story about a guy in Arizona who was acquitted?/had charges dropped? when a law enforcement agency had raided his house and did not properly identify themselves (I don't remember off the top of my head if he was shooting at them, or actually shot them - but it was something terrible like that. Don't entirely remember all the specifics).

Failure to properly identify ... and even properly identifying in a situation where someone may not hear it ... just seems like a bad scene overall, for everybody. (don't know if one of those two happened here, but I could see both sides of the story being true - a female officer identifying, the girls in the car either not seeing it or not believing it). It seems much safer in a situation like this to have a uniform around to make the initial contact. Maybe they'll change to that, after this.