Poll: Police State USA: Boston Area Raids

[Darkasassin96]

This may show my ignorance here but but the only point I have too much of a problem with is people saying they need a warrant.

Im pretty sure when the police does a search grid like that warrants would be automatically issued to the entire area, because the amount of time it would take to do individual warrants fro every house is just not practical.

And all that a warrant is really is saying that the police have a right to enter your home officially because they have reason to believe that something is inside your house.

In that kind of situation I think everyone in the government has agreed that they need to search the entire city.

Also, again correct me if Im wrong because i would genuinely like to know, but how much of a mess do police officers make when they're looking for a human, when they're looking for drugs or weapons yes it may make a mess because drugs are small and can be hidden in anything.

I doubt the police were checking behind every book on the bookshelf looking for this guy, most likely they would check under the beds, all the closets etc. the most mess I could see them making is pulling a bookshelf or something out to make sure there are no portals to Narnia behind them that he could be hiding in.

 

[Kopikatsu]

Im pretty sure when the police does a search grid like that warrants would be automatically issued to the entire area, because the amount of time it would take to do individual warrants fro every house is just not practical.

I'm 99.6% sure that a mass warrant isn't a thing. However, the situation probably constitutes an exigent circumstance (Specifically, the imminent escape of the suspect being a very real possibility), which means a search warrant wouldn't be required for the kind of mass searching the police did.

 

[Johanthemonster666]

The only reason this got as much attention as it did is that white, New England suburbia was now crawling with federal agents, SWAT officers, national guard, and security contractors -as opposed to lower income areas they typically patrol on a daily basis-. 'Terrorism' is the new go-to legal precedent (with CISPA and the 2012 additions to the NDAA gleefully making Bush era practices openly legal) for the US government to deprive both US and foreign citizens their rights under laws governing the rights to privacy, affiliation, speech, fair trial, and to life.

What happened in Boston was tragic and a monstrous crime murdering 3 people and severely injuring/maiming hundreds. But the last thing you do when trying to secure justice for those victims is to shoot the suspect (yes he still is considered a 'suspect') in the throat, deny reading him his Miranda rights, immediately declaring the suspect a guilty 'Muslim' terrorist without any credible evidence....while occupying homes and threatening innocent residents with automatic rifles.

 

[Cecilo]

The fear of those americans is just great - they don't just fear the terrorism... they fear their own police.

Why would you say "I have nothing to hide - so they can search my home"? because you fear the cops.
Otherwise you would think "I have nothing to hide - so they don't need to search my home"

You know the terrorist is not in your house. So why let them search your house? They are waisting their and your time if they look in your house.

This is the most sense i've seen someone with so little posts make. People defending police knocking on your door and screaming "GET OUT GET OUT" while pointing assault rifles in your face are deluded into thinking that's ok. Simply knocking and asking if they can search, nicely would have done the same thing.

Here are two ways it can go down that wouldn't end up making a thread like this.

*knocks* Hello sir/madam. We're searching houses because of the recent bombings, may we come in?

If yes:

Searches house, finds nothing, leaves. Owner is happy, police haven't stepped on their rights.

If no:

Police watches house, gets warrant. If the owner still say's no they burst in, legally. If the owner goes "fair enough, you have a warrant, have at it" the owner is still happy, because the police haven't stepped on their rights.

Notice how both these options don't let the terrorist get away, nor do they step on your rights. Stand up for them.

It's great to see that, when hunting for someone believed to be armed, dangerous, and capable of either taking hostages or harming more people either with explosives or through other means, the police must maintain an air of complete calm and a lack of any alertness or caution. Why believe that the person responsible for multiple explosives as well as the murder of a police officer is not on any of the properties and act accordingly in reasonable anticipation of more fighting? It's not like they should worry that another firefight might start up when they find him, or care about their own safety and that of the people around them, making the people whose homes they're asking to search feel as though their is absolutely no pressure on them to say yes is the most important thing.

Tell you what, find someone who said no and still had their home searched, or someone who said yes but felt like they were being threatened to do so, then you might have something, because everyone so far from Boston or who knows people from Boston seems to be appreciative of the police's response. But what the fuck do they know, it's not like it was their (or their friends'/families') rights supposedly being trampled, meaning that they're opinion is much more important on the matter than everyone else's.

Did you read the first page of the thread? You clearly didn't, because someone posted a fucking video showing that a guy opened the door, was faced with assault rifles and told to get out.

That's a raid without a warrant and is still illegal.

Except it wasn't illegal. As many others have posted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_States_law

"An emergency situation requiring swift action to prevent imminent danger to life or serious damage to property, or to forestall the imminent escape of a suspect, or destruction of evidence. There is no ready litmus test for determining whether such circumstances exist, and in each case the extraordinary situation must be measured by the facts known by officials."

A person who is a known bomber was on the run. "Imminent Danger to life or serious damage to property, or to forestall the imminent escape of a suspect, or destruction of evidence."

There is legal precedent for this. So no. It wasn't illegal. Excuse me if I sound tired of rehashing arguments, I am, also I am tired of the Government boogieman being thrown at people all the time. The Government may be incompetent at fixing the economy. It may be full of ancient idiots bent on lining their pockets rather than helping the average citizen.

But to believe any one person higher up in the government, or to believe that those idiots in Congress could actually get together and preform a conspiracy like what you are all proposing is rediculas. Or to think that every man, and woman in the army, police, FBI, CIA, DHS, or whatever else have you would betray us, the citizens of the US, "Just because we tell you to" is.. stupid. It is paranoid, it is not a real thing.

 

[Kopikatsu]

You know it's nice being able to look back and call the police dumb for not looking right where the guy was hiding.
"Hey, we know there's a terrorist hiding in the area, mind if we make sure he's not in your crawl space?" seems to be a pretty reasonable request. If there wasn't a bombing a couple days before and they said something like that, I'd tell them to go away.


It's always interesting to see how some people react to news most people wouldn't bat an eye at. Reminds me of the time someone in one of my college classes said that Europe was a mock-democracy with secret police just because some Eruopean countries outlawed anti-semmetic hate speech.

EDIT:
On a side, it doesn't matter what the police see in your house. I'm pretty sure they can't do shit. Anything they find is evidence they gathered without a warrant or reasonable suspicion on you making it useless in court.

If the police find evidence of anything (including a completely unrelated crime), they can use it as evidence if they were there lawfully. For example, if they (legally) walked into someone's living room searching for the bombing suspect and saw a few bags of cocaine on the table, they could arrest the owner for it. However, if they aren't there legally, then it's considered fruit of the poisonous tree and becomes inadmissible as evidence.

Interestingly, the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' clause doesn't exist in English common law. In the UK, any unlawful search and seizure can be retroactively justified if contraband (or really any evidence) is discovered as a result.

Edit: As mentioned above, their actions are entirely legal despite not having a warrant. So yeah.

 

[Darkasassin96]

Im pretty sure when the police does a search grid like that warrants would be automatically issued to the entire area, because the amount of time it would take to do individual warrants fro every house is just not practical.

I'm 99.6% sure that a mass warrant isn't a thing. However, the situation probably constitutes an exigent circumstance (Specifically, the imminent escape of the suspect being a very real possibility), which means a search warrant wouldn't be required for the kind of mass searching the police did.

I agree it probably isn't a thing, the point is when most everyone in a position of power agrees that they need to search your house is a warrant really necessary, who else do you need to get permission from, is what I was asking the people who are complaining.

These are the same people who envision a world where you cant go to the bathroom without submitting a form in triplicate to your local congressman.

Police invading privacy is one thing but really all you would be doing from a practical standpoint is sending them back to base until they can fill the proper forms out and then come back, at which point your entire family could have been murdered and the investigation hits a road bump where it needs to search your house and cant search your house, and again the only problem I can find, if youre not a criminal, is if they make a mess which i still dont see them making too much of a mess when theyre looking fro a person(see previous post).

 

[major_chaos]

I feel safer around drug addicts than i do cops and i don't even do drugs.

Then you have never actually been around a dealer. I have, and most of them make it very clear that if you piss them off they will redefine pain for you.

OT: Zeromachine and a few others basically made up my points better than I ever could so i'll just say that I find it funny that a site so eager to mock fox news occasionally goes into full on Glen Beck level tinfoil hat mode.

 

[f1r2a3n4k5]

Yeah, I guarantee your emotions would be different if you'd been around a terrorist attack. I still remember a quarter of the sky being black with smoke from the Twin Towers for days after the attack. This was on a different level, but for a lot of people, any small act of terror brings us back to that vulnerable time period.

And after a terrorist attack, you don't want to leave your house. You just want to find out that your loved ones are okay, stay out of the world for a little while, and get justice.

The cops obviously weren't there looking for anything else. Let them do their jobs. They were successful, so ultimately it paid off. Imagine the state of the country if he'd not been found. There would always been that uncertainty. Did he die off alone somewhere or did he make it safety and is planning another strike?

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

Except it wasn't illegal. As many others have posted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_States_law

Only applies in select circumstances. Eg. if a criminal runs into a house or a privately owned industrial complex the cops don't have to go get a warrant to pursue the supect, they can simply continue to pursue. They have no justifiable cause to believe that he was in any of these houses beyond the fact that they were near where the suspect was last seen. If they tried it on any other occasion they would likely be looking at a ton of lawsuits. But because everyone has paranoid terrorism fever, they will get away with it despite it being outside of the actual bounds of legality, because they don't have probable cause that he is in any specific home, and using it to search at random is in contradiction of past rulings on such violations.

There are 14,629 houses in Watertown, saying that they had to search those houses because there was a probable cause for each house, is saying probable cause is equal to a statistic probability of one in fifteen thousand that the suspect was there. That's a ridiculously low threshold which, again, wouldn't hold up in any other circumstances except that fascism is ok when terrerists are about. And if 1 crime discovered in 15,000 houses searched in justifiable under the law, then they could literally just do away with warrants and search everyone's houses regardless. Luckily as I have pointed out, this is not the case; and without directly pursuing a suspect or having actually reasonable cause, what they are doing is extralegal.

 

[Starik20X6]

Would I let the police raid my house without a warrant? I guess so- I've got nothing illegal and nothing to hide. That said, I'd like to know why my house was being raided, and if they break things then I'd be mad.

In this case, I'd have no problem with it. I'd have to be a pretty pedantic bastard to go make the cops get a warrant while some nut-job bomber is running around loose. It's not like people didn't know what was up. Maybe some of it was needlessly aggressive/excessive, but again, it's not like they were trying to catch some idiot with a pocket full of weed. Like a lot of things, it's all about context.

 

[Dogstile]

The fear of those americans is just great - they don't just fear the terrorism... they fear their own police.

Why would you say "I have nothing to hide - so they can search my home"? because you fear the cops.
Otherwise you would think "I have nothing to hide - so they don't need to search my home"

You know the terrorist is not in your house. So why let them search your house? They are waisting their and your time if they look in your house.

This is the most sense i've seen someone with so little posts make. People defending police knocking on your door and screaming "GET OUT GET OUT" while pointing assault rifles in your face are deluded into thinking that's ok. Simply knocking and asking if they can search, nicely would have done the same thing.

Here are two ways it can go down that wouldn't end up making a thread like this.

*knocks* Hello sir/madam. We're searching houses because of the recent bombings, may we come in?

If yes:

Searches house, finds nothing, leaves. Owner is happy, police haven't stepped on their rights.

If no:

Police watches house, gets warrant. If the owner still say's no they burst in, legally. If the owner goes "fair enough, you have a warrant, have at it" the owner is still happy, because the police haven't stepped on their rights.

Notice how both these options don't let the terrorist get away, nor do they step on your rights. Stand up for them.

It's great to see that, when hunting for someone believed to be armed, dangerous, and capable of either taking hostages or harming more people either with explosives or through other means, the police must maintain an air of complete calm and a lack of any alertness or caution. Why believe that the person responsible for multiple explosives as well as the murder of a police officer is not on any of the properties and act accordingly in reasonable anticipation of more fighting? It's not like they should worry that another firefight might start up when they find him, or care about their own safety and that of the people around them, making the people whose homes they're asking to search feel as though their is absolutely no pressure on them to say yes is the most important thing.

Tell you what, find someone who said no and still had their home searched, or someone who said yes but felt like they were being threatened to do so, then you might have something, because everyone so far from Boston or who knows people from Boston seems to be appreciative of the police's response. But what the fuck do they know, it's not like it was their (or their friends'/families') rights supposedly being trampled, meaning that they're opinion is much more important on the matter than everyone else's.

Did you read the first page of the thread? You clearly didn't, because someone posted a fucking video showing that a guy opened the door, was faced with assault rifles and told to get out.

That's a raid without a warrant and is still illegal.

Except it wasn't illegal. As many others have posted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_States_law

"An emergency situation requiring swift action to prevent imminent danger to life or serious damage to property, or to forestall the imminent escape of a suspect, or destruction of evidence. There is no ready litmus test for determining whether such circumstances exist, and in each case the extraordinary situation must be measured by the facts known by officials."

A person who is a known bomber was on the run. "Imminent Danger to life or serious damage to property, or to forestall the imminent escape of a suspect, or destruction of evidence."

There is legal precedent for this. So no. It wasn't illegal. Excuse me if I sound tired of rehashing arguments, I am, also I am tired of the Government boogieman being thrown at people all the time. The Government may be incompetent at fixing the economy. It may be full of ancient idiots bent on lining their pockets rather than helping the average citizen.

But to believe any one person higher up in the government, or to believe that those idiots in Congress could actually get together and preform a conspiracy like what you are all proposing is rediculas. Or to think that every man, and woman in the army, police, FBI, CIA, DHS, or whatever else have you would betray us, the citizens of the US, "Just because we tell you to" is.. stupid. It is paranoid, it is not a real thing.

And as it has been argued, they need more than a "he was around here somewhere..." for that to be applicable. Destruction of evidence? Not applicable, they have evidence. He might get away? Nope, again, all they have to do is watch the house. Danger of the site? Yeah, no. He's surrounded and they had no evidence that he wanted to martyr himself, especially as he was on the run.

Its nice to know that they have a backup law though, so any unlawful entry can be dismissed as "well we thought he was in there and we didn't want to waste time" even though the statistical likelihood of him being in any of those houses was about one in fifteen thousand.

It was illegal, just because a bomb went off doesn't make it less so. People get dragged out of their homes and arrested in Iraq just because they were near a bomb site too, funny how its not ok there but because a bomb went off in Boston, well fuck me, totally ok.

 

[Aramis Night]

I feel safer around drug addicts than i do cops and i don't even do drugs.

Then you have never actually been around a dealer. I have, and most of them make it very clear that if you piss them off they will redefine pain for you.

OT: Zeromachine and a few others basically made up my points better than I ever could so i'll just say that I find it funny that a site so eager to mock fox news occasionally goes into full on Glen Beck level tinfoil hat mode.

I've known my fair share of drug dealers. My father was one. Had pain redefined for me a few times. As for the other drug dealers i've known, your right. Difference is you actually have to do something to piss them off first. Well that and they don't have people so eager to sanitize any wrongdoing they do by comparing those that call them out for it as Glen Beck alarmists.