oped: First and foremost having served in the military as well as local and Federal Law Enforcement I find this action appalling,abuse of authority,to include excessive force...this is beyond the pale and a black eye to anyone who is serving or has served in law enforcement.
When the Bush administration first formed the DHS I spoke out saying this was a bad idea being that it opens the door for abuse centralizing all law enforcement into one agency...it takes away the checks and balances of traditional law enforcement...if the DHS was set up as a clearing house to share information as it was intended/sold...that would have been fine...but when it became centralized we see the results...abuse and excessive force actions all over the 50 states. This has escalated under the lawless Obama administration...it has become his personal army as he said he would set up!
What needs to be done is for congress to defund,disband,abolish this out of control agency...nothing short will do!
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In America, we have certain rights. Central to our civil liberties is a presumption of innocence until having been found guilty in a court of law and the right of citizens to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures.
One Florida couple found out the hard way that though these rights exist in theory, the modern federal government feels free to play fast-and-loose with these concepts.
At approximately 6:16 am on June 10th, 2014, Kari Edwards and her live-in boyfriend were seized upon by a SWAT team who smashed in the door and using flashbangs and armed to the teeth, swarmed upon the couple and even stripped Ms. Edwards naked in the process.
The couple says that the group entailed personnel from DHS, for whom Edwards once worked. After smashing in the door, the tactical team threw in flashbang grenades, traumatizing their cat and swarmed upon Edwards’s boyfriend and Edwards who had just gotten out of the shower.
“They busted in like I was a terrorist or something,” Edwards said.
“[An
officer] demanded that I drop the towel I was covering my naked body
with before snatching it off me physically and throwing me to the
ground.”
“While I lay naked, I was cuffed so
tightly I could not feel my hands. For no reason, at gunpoint,” Edwards
said. “[Agents] refused to cover me, no matter how many times I asked.”
“I have never been in any trouble before,” Edwards later stated. “Haven’t even had a traffic ticket in over ten years.”
The
couple claim to have seen several different agency uniforms and Edwards
repeatedly asked who they were and why they were there. Edwards claimed
that they would only identify as “police” and refused to identify why
they were there.
The
couple has surveillance cameras which caught much of the action. When
they were discovered, agents turned the cameras toward the wall.
After two hours and after the agents had thoroughly trashed the house,
Edwards was given a warrant signed by Jonathan Goodman, a federal
magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District
of Florida that authorized the agents to search for computers and
electronics.
Edwards’ boyfriend fixes up old
computers but she claimed that the police barely looked at any
electronics and did not seize any of the electronics in the house.
Like
so many recent instances regarding federal militancy, the root cause of
the police action can be justifiable while the manner in which police
are investigating alleged illegalities is wholly inappropriate. If the
police had a warrant to search for electronics, it’s possible to have
executed that warrant without the firepower once reserved for Army
Rangers going door-to-door in Fallujah.
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