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The paramilitarization of America's police forces

Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team.

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.

Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”
 
Can't open the link but the cut and pasted part is ridiculous. Don't understand how the law would consider that running a gambling ring. Betting $2000 in a day is nothing.
 
qcdeac said:
Can't open the link but the cut and pasted part is ridiculous. Don't understand how the law would consider that running a gambling ring. Betting $2000 in a day is nothing.
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Lots more insanity in the article.
In March 2007, a small army of local cops, ATF agents, National Guard troops, and a helicopter raided a poker game in Cary, North Carolina. They issued forty-one citations, all of them misdemeanors.
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Great article/excerpt fr that book. Scary stuff.
 
If the cop instigates a citizen to commit a felony, then the cop should be charged and the citizen should be free. There is a difference between preventing a crime from occurring and causing a crime to occur. I feel like more and more cops are instigating crimes to occur.
 
Looking forward to the apologists on this thread as well.

The coda "don't do the crime if you can't do the crime" rings pretty hollow on some of these stories.

Another scary excerpt from the article:

"Consider the bizarre case of David Ruttenberg, owner of the Rack ‘n’ Roll pool hall in Manassas Park, Virginia. In June 2004, local police conducted a massive raid on the pool hall with more than fifty police officers, some of whom were wearing face masks, toting semi-automatic weapons, and pumping shotguns as they entered. Customers were detained, searched, and zip-tied. The police were investigating Ruttenberg for several alleged drug crimes, although he was never charged. The local narcotics task force had tried unsuccessfully to get a warrant to search Ruttenberg’s office but were denied by a judge. Instead, they simply brought along several representatives of the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and claimed that they were conducting an alcohol inspection. Ruttenberg was cited only for three alcohol violations, based on two bottles of beer a distributor had left that weren’t clearly marked as samples, and a bottle of vodka they found in his private office.

In June 2006, Ruttenberg filed a civil rights suit alleging that, among other things, using a SWAT team to conduct an alcohol inspection was an unreasonable use of force. (The town’s vendetta against Ruttenberg stretched on for years and is one of the strangest cases I’ve ever encountered. He eventually sold his bar and moved to New York.) In 2010, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit denied his claim. So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment."
 
And perhaps the most bizarre portion of the story:

In 2010 a massive Maricopa County SWAT team, including a tank and several armored vehicles, raided the home of Jesus Llovera. The tank in fact drove straight into Llovera’s living room. Driving the tank? Action movie star Steven Seagal, whom Sheriff Joe Arpaio had recently deputized. Seagal had also been putting on the camouflage to help Arpaio with his controversial immigration raids. All of this, by the way, was getting caught on film. Seagal’s adventures in Maricopa County would make up the next season of the A&E TV series Steven Seagal, Lawman.
Llovera’s suspected crime? Cockfighting. Critics said that Arpaio and Seagal brought an army to arrest a man suspected of fighting chickens to play for the cameras. Seagal’s explanation for the show of force: “Animal cruelty is one of my pet peeves.” All of Llovera’s chickens were euthanized. During the raid, the police also killed his dog.
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Follow the money. Someone is brokering these deals to buy all that crazy equipment and weapons for local police forces. They have to justify using it so they go hardcore for minor stuff.
 
bernbp5 said:
If the cop instigates a citizen to commit a felony, then the cop should be charged and the citizen should be free. There is a difference between preventing a crime from occurring and causing a crime to occur. I feel like more and more cops are instigating crimes to occur.
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though police are frequently surprisingly ignorant of the laws they claim to enforce, he had to know what he was doing was entrapment and they guy he was going after had the resources to get an atty to point out as much. makes this all the more pointless.

how much trouble did det. bullock get in i wonder? or was it deemed a "good" shooting?
 
one more thing.... in response to the article with all the forcible entries, guns drawn....

in china (authoritarian, communist country) when you're suspected of murder they don't break down your door. they turn off your water...

now that is smart. sure the 48hrs it may take to stake out the house costs money, but it saves tons of money when you consider potential alternatives.

why are U.S. LEO not able to see the wisdom in this practice?
 
PhDeac said:
Follow the money. Someone is brokering these deals to buy all that crazy equipment and weapons for local police forces. They have to justify using it so they go hardcore for minor stuff.
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I am pretty sure this is the answer.
 
PhDeac said:
Follow the money. Someone is brokering these deals to buy all that crazy equipment and weapons for local police forces. They have to justify using it so they go hardcore for minor stuff.
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ITK said:
I am pretty sure this is the answer.
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Only partly. They've wanted to do this for years. Now they've got funding for the equipment from Homeland Security and they can play Army.
 
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