[From The Daily Bell website]:
Sunday, October 21, 2012 – by Staff Report:
Recently, an ill-planned SWAT team raid ended with a young child ending up in the emergency room. A 12-year-old girl was sent to the hospital with second-degree burns after an officer with the Billings, Montana Police Department detonated a flash-bang grenade into a bedroom in a home where they were executing a warrant. No charges were filed by the raid's end. – RTAmerica
Dominant Social Theme: SWAT raids are necessary to keep people safe.
Free-Market Analysis: The militarization of the US police continues and with it these tragic incidents. If people are not being outright killed by mistake, they are being badly hurt.
And for what? To put people who make or take "drugs" in jail.
By now enough has emerged about the pharmaceutical industry to provide us with insights that legal drugs are not, in many cases, any safer than so-called illegal ones. But this does not apparently slow down police attacks – and the inevitable mistakes that arise as well.
It is not just US SWAT team raids. Here's a report on English policing, also from RT:
Police tasered and handcuffed a blind two-time stroke victim in northern England, reportedly mistaking his walking stick for samurai sword. Colin Farmer, a retired architect who is 61 and cannot move unaided, was on his own and walking down a street in Chorley, in the county of Lancashire, on a Friday evening, when the incident happened.
"I heard this male voice shouting and bawling at me from behind and I became frightened because I thought I was about to be mugged," he told reporters. "Obviously I am the perfect target for muggers, because I don't know what is going on around me and I carried on walking in the hope I would get away."
Farmer said that the next thing he knew was that he felt "this thump in the back, this huge electric shock" and it was like "thousands of volts going through his body".
"I thought that I was honestly going to die and they were going to kill me. All my muscles turned to dust and I thought I was having another stroke. I said 'I'm blind, I'm blind. I'm blind,' but this policeman knelt on me and dragged my arms round my back." ...
This is the second such incident this year, after officers tasered an agitated Alzheimer's victim several times in May. UK police recently asked for all front-line officers to be issued with tasers, rather than the current one-in-three.
With the promotional memes of the elites in disarray, is it time for a kind of escalating war on the middle class? Is such a perception too cynical?
The "MO" is always the same. The beat down commences and YouTube videos appear. The police refuse to comment. Coverage vanishes. All that remains is the violent video, a flickering, confusing testament to inexplicable violence. This was recently posted at Salon:
The NYPD beat up a homeless man in Brooklyn last week as he resisted arrest for sleeping in a synagogue outreach center, where he had permission to stay. Surveillance video obtained by local news site CrownHeights.info shows two officers brutally beating a shoeless and shirtless man, Ehud Halevi, who insisted he had permission to be in the center for troubled youth, ALIYA (Alternative Learning Institute for Young Adults).
Although sources confirmed with CrownHeights.info that Halevi had been sleeping in the space for a month with permission, one security guard, unaware of the arrangement, called the police. The guard later told the New York Daily News that he regretted making the call.
According to Gothamist, "[Halevi] was also pepper sprayed during the arrest, [and] was charged with assaulting a police officer, trespassing, resisting arrest and harassment. He's currently out on bail and faces up to five years in prison for assaulting an officer." The NYPD have yet to issue comment.
Civil society is under attack by those hired to keep order.
