Gangsters in Blue

December 17th, 2008 is the 6th annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

From GT 2005-12-17: December 17th is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers

The commemoration began from the Sex Workers’ Outreach Project’s memorial and vigil for the victims of the Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Since then its purpose has expanded to a memorial for, and protest against, all forms of violence against women in prostitution and elsewhere in the sex industry.

I’m opposed to prostitution as an industry, on radical feminist grounds. I frankly have very deep and sharp differences with the organizers of the event, and I’m iffy at best towards the rhetorical framework of sex work as a whole, for reasons that are way beyond the point of this post). But so what? The day is an important one no matter what differences I may have with the organizers. Real steps towards ending the ongoing daily violence against women in prostitution and elsewhere in the sex industry are more important than that; here as much as anywhere — probably more than anywhere else — women’s lives are at stake.

You can read the rest at the original post. Any serious commitment to freedom for, and an end to violence against, women, means a serious commitment to ending violence against women who work in the sex industry. All of it. And that means any kind of violence, whether rape, or assault, or robbery, or abduction, or confinement against her will, or murder. No matter who does it. The one image of violence against sex workers that the malestream media never tires of repeating is the roving madman, cutting women down in the streets. But roving madmen come in a lot of shapes and sizes and uniforms. It may be a serial killer. But it may be a pimp. Or a trafficker. Or a john who imagines that paying for sex means he owns a woman’s body. Or, lest we forget, it may be a cop who believes that his badge, and his victim’s status in the system of patriarchal sex-class, makes absolutely any kind of sexual predation or physical torture a cop’s prerogative and nothing better than what the victim deserves. Or, lest we forget, a cop or a prosecutor or an immigration control freak, who calls the violence of an assault, restraint, and involuntary confinement an arrest or a sentence under the color of The Law. The Law has no more right than anyone else to hurt women or shove them around.

No matter who does it, this kind of violence — violence against peaceful people whose work, whatever you think of it, is honest work for willing customers, and is a way to get by, and doesn’t do one thing to threaten or violate the rights of a single living soul — violence against women who are made vulnerable by the violence and the killing indifference of the State — violence against women practiced in the name of enforcing patriarchal sex-class and misogynistic hatred for overtly sexual women — is wrong, absolutely wrong, and it has to stop. Immediately, completely, and forever.

In Las Vegas tonight, SWOP-Las Vegas is holding a vigil:

Reminder! TONIGHT in Las Vegas…

Join SWOP-Las Vegas to commemorate December 17th, the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers!!

Las Vegas
Wed, December 17th

7:00 pm:

Meet at The Center: 953 E. Sahara Ave., Suite B-31, Las Vegas, NV, 89104. (In the Commercial Center) Phone at The Center: 702-733-9800

We will memorialize those sex workers who have lost their lives, and honor those who are missing. We’ll also make signs for the vigil.

8:15 pm:

We will hold a vigil in The Center parking lot with candles and then take our signs and red umbrellas to Sahara, where we will walk towards the strip. We will have masks for those who wish to use them. Afterward, we will return to Commercial Center to eat Thai food! Yum!

For more information, email us at info(at)swop-lv.org or call us toll-free at 1-866-525-7967, ext. 701.

In Washington, D.C., sex workers’ freedom and harm-reduction groups are coming together for a National March for Sex Workers’ Rights:

Advocates from across the nation will converge to mark the 6th Annual Internatinal Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (IDEVASW). We are calling for an end to the unjust laws, policing, shaming and stigma that oppress our communities and make us targets for violence. We will both honor the lives of sex workers whose lives have passed and celebrate our vital movement. SWOP-USA, Different Avenues, HIPS, SWANK, Desiree Alliance, and many allies in harm reduction and social justice welcome your support. Join us as we march on Washington to demand human rights!

I wish that I could attend an event tonight but I will be away, traveling. In commemoration of the day, in memory of the 48 women murdered by Ridgway, and in solidarity with the living, I have contributed $120.00 tonight to Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive, a harm reduction group that provides counseling, safety resources, clothing, and food to prostitutes on the streets of the Washington, D.C. area, and $120.00 to Alternatives for Girls, whose Street Outreach Project provides similar services out of a van along the Cass Corridor in downtown Detroit. For other groups that provide similar resources and mutual aid, you can check out the links at the end of my original post.

May we all live free in the glory and joy of life that every human being deserves.

—Daisy Anarchy, I deserve to be safe

Remember. Mourn. Act.

See also:

• GT 2008-11-19: Gynocide: violence against women in prostitution in Las Vegas
• GT 2008-11-11: R.I.P. Duanna Johnson
• GT 2008-10-24: Ending State violence against women in prostitution in San Francisco
• GT 2008-06-30: Law and Orders #8: Memphis cop Bridges McRae “exceeds expectations” by punching Duanna Johnson repeatedly in the face with handcuffs over his knuckles for failing to stand up on command in the booking area at 201 Poplar
• GT 2008-03-10: Rapists on patrol (#2)
• GT 2007-12-21: Rapists on patrol
• GT 2005-12-17: December 17th is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers

Lots of interesting new information came out at a pre-trial hearing yesterday in Chesapeake, Virginia for Ryan Frederick, the man charged with capital murder for killing Det. Jarrod Shivers during a botched drug raid on Frederick’s home last January.

To briefly catch you up: Police were acting on an informant’s tip that Frederick was growing marijuana in his garage.  They found no plants, and only a misdemeanor amount of marijuana, which Frederick concedes was for personal use.  Both I and the Virginian-Pilot newspaper have since reported that the informant in the case, “Steven,” and another man who also says he was a police informant, Renaldo Turnbull, illegally broke into Frederick’s home three nights before the raid to look for probably cause, likely with the consent or at least the knowledge of the police.

Here’s what we learned yesterday:

• The State is now conceding that the police informant in the case illegally broke into Frederick’s home three nights before the raid.  Until now, they had either denied the connection or refused to comment.

• Frederick’s attorney released an audio recording taken in a police car shortly after the raid.  In it, Frederick tries to explain that he was confused and frightened because someone had broken into his home earlier in the week.  A police detective replies, “We know that.”  In a second recording, the detective says again, “First off, we know your house had been broken into. OK?”

• Yet according to the Virginian-Pilot, the State still insists that, “there is nothing whatsoever to suggest police knew at the time who broke in or who was involved. They said police learned months later that the parties involved included one of their informants.” (Emphasis mine.)

This doesn’t make any sense.  The affidavit the police filed to obtain the warrant notes that the police informant was in Frederick’s home three nights before the raid.  That’s exactly when the burglary happened.  The State is trying to argue that even though (a) the police knew their informant was in Frederick’s house three nights before the raid, and (b) the police knew someone had broken into Frederick’s home three nights before the raid, they apparently believed at the time that these two incidents were entirely coincidental, which is why they didn’t include on the search warrant affidavit the fact that their informant illegally broke into Frederick’s home to obtain probable cause.

There are two options here.  The Chesapeake police are either corrupt, or they’re naive to the point of incompetent.  The State apparently believes its case is better served by arguing the latter.

But there’s one other niggling detail that throws the State’s argument into a tailspin: Ryan Frederick never reported the break-in.  How, then, could the detective who questioned Frederick the night of the raid have known about it?

• Despite all of this, Judge Marjorie A.T. Arrington still denied a defense motion to suppress the warrant.  Which if nothing else I guess gives Frederick an early issue to put in his appeal should he be convicted.

• There’s now more than enough evidence to suggest that Chesapeake police had knowledge that the probable cause for the search warrant to Frederick’s home was obtained illegally.  Moreover, Turnbull’s interviews with me and with the Virginian-Pilot also raise the possibility that this wasn’t the first time a Chesapeake police informant burglarized a private residence to search for probable cause.  According to Turnbull, this was common practice.  And the police encouraged it.

It’s past time for an outside investigation, preferably from the Justice Department.

• Special Prosecutor Paul Ebert subpoenaed Virginian-Pilot reporter John Hopkins, the other journalist to speak to Turnbull. Ebert never called Hopkins to the stand. But the possibility that he could have caused Judge Arrington to bar Hopkins from the courtroom.  Hopkins—who has covered this case as well as I’ve seen any journalist cover one of these raids—now won’t be able to attend next month’s trial, either.

• The plants the informant Steven claimed to have found in Frederick’s home were never turned over to the police, and thus were never tested to confirm that they were actually marijuana. For all we know, they could still have been Japanese Maple saplings. Turnbull says Steven turned the plants over to the police.  The State is either arguing that the police didn’t know Turnbull and Steven removed the plants, or that they were aware, but never got around to asking Steven to turn them over.  Again, the choice here is corruption or incompetence.

That also means that this entire raid was conducted solely on the word of the informant Steven, a shady character who at the time was facing his own criminal charges for credit card fraud.  There were no controlled buys, and no significant surveillance.  The only corroborating investigation the police did were a few drive-bys of Frederick’s home. According to the affidavit, that should have lessened their suspicion, because they noted no unusual activity.

Prior posts on the Frederick case here.

UPDATE: Chesapeake-area blogger Rick Caldwell writes:

Ryan Frederick is being harassed by the city of Chesapeake, through code enforcement. His sister has recently moved back to the area, having lived overseas for several years. Since her arrival, she has received numerous notices from the city’s code enforcement division, regarding siding in disrepair, the condition of the pool in the back yard, and demanding the removal of two signs expressing support for Ryan from the front yard. The city has been sending these notices to Ryan at the jail as well, and is even threatening to sue over the pool.

Nice touch.

Chalk this one up to the power of YouTube.

If not for the video, the guy on the bicycle would probably still be facing charges.

Yet another reason it should always be permissible to videotape the police.

One of the reforms the city of Atlanta implemented in the wake of the 2006 botched drug raid in which narcotics officers shot and killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston was to set up a Citizen Review Board to look into allegations of police misconduct. Unlike other review boards across the country, the new law actually gave the one in Atlanta some teeth. The Board has immediate access to all police documents related to the cases it investigates, regardless of what internal police department investigations may be going on at the time.

Civilian review boards with enforcement and subpoena power are a good idea in general, but it was particularly important in Atlanta, where the federal investigation sparked by Johnston’s death revealed corruption, civil rights violations, and cover-ups so pervasive, the city eventually fired or reassigned its entire narcotics division.

But just two years after Johnston’s death, and just weeks after the last police officer involved in the case plead guilty on federal civil rights charges, Atlanta’s police department is already trying to neuter the Citizen Review Board:

The Atlanta Police Department, with the help of the city’s Law Department, introduced legislation Tuesday to amend city law regarding how the Citizen Review Board investigates complaints about Atlanta’s law enforcement officers.

The proposed change comes just as the review board has begun its work. Created in the wake of an illegal police shooting that left an elderly woman dead, the board was intended to restore the public’s trust in the police department.

The city law recently enacted to create the review board gives the board “full access” to police reports and documents. Police officials are asking the city to allow them to only turn over documents and information that are public record, which is minimal when an investigation is ongoing.

If the change is approved, it would essentially allow the police department to withhold most information from the Citizen Review Board until after the department conducts its own investigation.

Guy hits another car while doing twice the speed limit, and kills its driver, a 20-year-old college student. The student’s mother is in the passenger side, and watches her son die. Despite the fact that the guy admits he had been out drinking, the police don’t give him an alcohol test at the scene. Instead, they test the dead student’s blood (it was negative). The guy then gets caught lying to investigators about what he was doing in the hours leading up to the crash. He says he was sleeping. His cell phone records say otherwise. Guy gets off with a speeding ticket. Doesn’t even lose his job.

Oh, did I mention that the guy is a cop? And that he’s still on the job in . . . drumroll, please . . . Prince George’s County, Maryland?

“We have a lot of fatality cases where tickets are the only option for us,” Ivey said. “I think it’s wrong, and I think the law needs to change.”

Ivey said he is working for a fourth consecutive year with state legislators to draft a bill that would allow prosecutors a “middle ground” to more easily prosecute drivers who cause substantial injury or death.

The prosecutor also said his recent failure to win a conviction of Scott Campbell, a county police officer who was charged with manslaughter in an eight-car pileup last year on the Beltway, factored into his decision not to present the Chavez case to a grand jury.

Somehow, I doubt your average motorist in Prince George’s County would have gotten off so lightly. In addition to the failure of this cop’s colleagues to test him for alcohol, other key pieces of evidence seem to have wound up damaged or missing:

Gray said she is also troubled that potential evidence has never been analyzed. A black box recording device for the cruiser still sits in Detroit, where Ivey’s office says software problems have prevented technicians from retrieving the record of Chavez’s actions before the crash.

Maj. Andy Ellis, a county police spokesman, said officers who responded to the Dec. 10, 2007, crash followed state law in not testing Chavez’s sobriety. Officers at the scene reported seeing no reason to think Chavez had been drinking. He said the police department will begin an internal investigation.

Gray said her lawyer has found that a page of nurse’s notes about Chavez’s condition when he arrived at Prince George’s Hospital after the crash is missing.

Funny how that works.

Prince George’s County, Maryland officials are still refusing to hand over documents related to the botched raid on Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo.

In letters obtained by The Gazette, county lawyers rejected the mayor’s request to obtain police reports, officer accounts and other significant documents from the raid.

“We will object to any request that deals with matters that are or have been subject to investigation,” wrote Mary C. Crawford, deputy county attorney, in an Oct. 21 letter to Calvo.

Police spokesman Maj. Andy Ellis said Monday that the county is still reviewing its role in the execution of the search warrant.

“The preliminary investigation has been completed,” Ellis said. “Right now it’s in the review phase.”

Ellis said the department would likely notify Calvo of the conclusions of its internal investigation but said he wasn’t sure if police would turn over incident reports and other documents the mayor has sought.

“It’s not something we normally do,” Ellis said. “I presume he could request them, and we would consider any request. But as a matter of course, it’s not something we usually do.”

[...]

Calvo, who said he’s become increasingly concerned with the tactics officers employ in drug warrants, had also requested copies and reports from other searches the county has done in addition to his own.

Though the county agreed to give copies of the training orders and policy manuals allowed under the Maryland Public Information Act, they denied more specific information about the July 29 raid and any other raids. County attorneys also said they would charge Calvo more than $1,000 to copy the allowed records, which include police training manuals and department policy statements on how to execute search warrants.

“It will be time consuming,” Crawford wrote. “Please let me know if you want to spend the money to identify the material.”

The Maryland Public Information Act allows anyone to request copies of existing records, though exceptions are made for personnel records, privileged communication with lawyers and material that is part of an ongoing investigation.

Crawford also said budget problems would hamper the county’s ability to turn over the allowed information in a timely manner.

This is an elected official making these requests, in a case where he was terrorized and nearly killed by agents of the government, in a botched raid where he was clearly innocent, and that made national news.  And they’re still giving him the runaround.  Four-and-a-half months later, they’re still playing games. Imagine what happens when normal people try to get documents related to run-ins with the police.

About three weeks ago, a man named Sam Hicks led a gang of heavily-armed men to Robert and Christina Korbe’s house in Indiana Township. They got there at 6:03 in the morning to make sure their target would be groggy and would be less able to think quickly about the situation he was in. They knew of Robert Korbe’s reputation as a cocaine dealer and they were there to force their way into the house, take his stash of drugs, and abduct him so that they could lock him up as long as they needed to. They knocked on the door and told him who they were, and that they were there to take him and his stash of drugs, so he should open the door to avoid a violent showdown. Instead of opening the door to this gang, he bolted and tried to hide or get rid of his stash. So Sam Hicks ordered the gang to break down the door and force entry into the house. When they began to swarm into the house, Robert Korbe’s wife, Christina Korbe — who had been upstairs with her children, and who says she didn’t hear the conversation at the door — came out with a handgun that she kept for protection. Fearing for her own and her children’s safety, she fired at the first intruder charging through the door. Then she ran to call 911 and told them she had shot an intruder.

But, since Sam Hicks’ title within the gang was Special Agent, and since that gang was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and since the home invasion was dignified by the law as a SWAT raid, Christina Korbe was arrested and hauled away on a charge of murder.

Later, on the Internet, Paleoconservative Chris Roach groused — pointedly referring to Radley Balko’s long-standing and influential criticism of paramilitary SWAT raids and no-knock raids — that libertarians (by which he meant Balko) didn’t report on the story within 24 hours of when the story appeared in newspapers, and that since The arrest went down using the knock and announce tactics and non-SWAT gear that libertarians have long asked for, that somehow proves the folly of libertarian complaints about paramilitary SWAT raids. Radley Balko replied that the basic issue is not about the no-knocks. It’s about the home invasions, and that FBI Special Agent Sam Hicks is dead because (knocks or no knocks) the Feds still chose to stage a needless high-stakes, confrontational early-morning storm-trooper raid on a family’s home over an arrest for nonviolent offenses. Balko went so far as to suggest an alternate scenario [for arresting Korbe outside his house] where Agent Hicks unquestionably comes out unharmed.

All well and good, I guess. But here’s my take. FBI Special Agent Sam Hicks was a professional thug whose salary was paid by an extortion racket. He made his living invading people’s homes, rousting out harmless men and women and turning them over to a hellhole prison system that locks them in cages for years at a time even if they’ve never done anything to threaten or violate the person or property of another living soul. The morning FBI Special Agent Sam Hicks was shot, he was in the process of violently storming his way into a the Korbes’ family home, in order to take Robert Korbe’s private property by force and to abduct Robert Korbe himself, so as to lock him away in a cage for years, even though Robert Korbe was doing nothing that violated, or threatened, the person or property of even a single living soul. If anyone without a badge went around doing that sort of thing to peaceful people, we’d call him a dangerous gangster, and if he got himself shot doing it, nobody much would wring their hands about it. But taking a gangster and giving him a badge and calling what he does The Law doesn’t make him any less of a gangster or what he does any less violent and dangerous. The men and women who march under the banners of the State remain men and women, just like you and me; they are no more exempt from everyday morality than you or I are, and they have no more special right than you or I do to go around threatening, hurting, seizing, or killing innocent people — and by innocent I mean innocent of violating any individual person’s rights. Seeing as Sam Hicks was a professional thug who was shot in the course of violently enforcing a tyrannical law on an innocent man — and endangering that man’s whole family in the process — I’m glad he got himself shot while he was doing it. That was a righteous kill. If only more of his fellow gangsters had reason to fear that they might get shot whenever they attempted these storm-trooper raids on innocent families to enforce unjust laws. And I don’t even care whether FBI Special Agent Sam Hicks could have saved his own skin by enforcing that tyrannical law through other, less confrontational means.

Chris Roach’s original post complains that Even now, libertarians pretend that drug dealers’ sordid lives are equal in social value as those of FBI agents, blaming the FBI agents for their raid tactics rather than looking at the long string of criminal, illegal choices that led to the suspect’s position on the wrong end of a raid in the first place. If he means to make a statement about all libertarians, he’s wrong about that. I certainly don’t think hat the lives are of equal value. I would never presume to speak for all libertarians, and certainly not for Radley Balko. (Who I suspect disagrees entirely with me, and who would never think of saying any of the things I’ve said here.) But, speaking only for myself, as a libertarian, I think that drug dealers’ lives are worth far more than the lives of FBI agents, because at least some drug dealers make their living nonviolently, by peddling a valued product to willing customers. Whereas FBI agents, and especially FBI agents on drug task forces, make their livings by imprisoning people who have done nothing to deserve it, in the name of protecting people who never asked for it and often don’t want that kind of protection, and taking home a salary that was extracted from their protected victims at the point of a gun.

Chris Roach rejoins that It seems elementary, but highly controversial among libertarians, that so long as a law exists, it should be enforced. I don’t doubt that this seems elementary to Chris Roach; it seemed elementary to lots of people at the time that as long as the Jim Crow laws were on the books, the police ought to have enforced them, and it seemed elementary to a lot of people at the time that as long as the Fugitive Slave law existed, the slave-catchers and the federal courts should have enforced those, and it seemed elementary at the time that as long as the Nuremberg laws existed, the Gestapo should have enforced those, too. But in fact if there are any moral restraints at all, even in principle, on what governments can do to people, then there must be some moral restraints on what laws government law enforcers can rightfully enforce, and there must be at least some laws which are so unjust that no-one can be bound in conscience to enforce them — indeed, there must be at least some laws which are so unjust that everyone is bound in conscience not to enforce them, no matter who may order them to do so.

Of course, Chris Roach is free to argue that (of course, of course) he didn’t mean those kind of laws when he said that; he just meant the normal kind. And thus that there’s some important difference between Jim Crow or the Fugitive Slave Act or the Nuremberg laws, on the one hand, and U.S. federal drug prohibition, on the other. That difference may be that, in his view, drug prohibition doesn’t really violate innocent people’s rights, and that he believes in locking people in prison for years, merely for doing things he considers anti-social, whether or not they pose any threat whatsoever to anyone else’s person or property. If so, fine, let him argue that; but then his real disagreement with libertarians is over the justice of drug prohibition, and it’s disingenuous to pretend that it’s really about how we gotta enforce the laws we got. Or the difference may be that, in his view, drug prohibition does violate innocent people’s rights, but somehow doesn’t violate them badly enough that people have a moral duty not to enforce it. But then it’s up to him to explain what his standards are for making the distinction. How many years of your life would you agree to have stolen from you in a hellhole federal prison for something that really shouldn’t be a crime at all? Just how much injustice is it O.K. for someone to violently inflict so long as they’re Just Following Orders? In either case, Roach owes us an explanation and an argument that he certainly hasn’t yet given.

Unless it can be given, I see no reason to conclude anything other than that Christina Korbe is innocent of wrongdoing. Whether or not she knew ahead of time that she was shooting at an FBI agent serving an arrest warrant. FBI Special Agent Sam Hicks had no moral right to be there at all or to arrest Robert Korbe for anything, and he fully deserved to be treated like any other gangster breaking into your family’s home, for the purposes of armed robbery and abduction, would deserve to be treated. So, I repeat: I’m glad he got himself shot doing it. I don’t take any pleasure from Hicks’s suffering, and especially not from his family’s loss; it’s sad when anyone dies. But I do think that gangsters should have to fear the consequences of their reckless violence, and right now I’m a lot more concerned about the fate of the Christina Korbe, the innocent woman who now has to fear that she will end up locked in a cage for the rest of her life, for having dared to carry out an admirable and courageous act of self-defense against a gang of armed thugs invading her home and threatening to use extreme violence in the attempt to enforce a tyrannical law.

Postscript

I am sure that Chris Roach will take this as proof beyond anything he could hope for that The moral compass of libertarians is more than a little off course, and that is why they remain a fringe movement in America’s public life. The first claim is nonsense — it is libertarians who insist that men and women claiming to act with the authority of the State should be held to the same moral standards that everyone else is, and statists who insist that they be given free passes for violence against innocent people.

But I’m sure the second claim is probably true. Government depends on popular enthusiasm, or at least popular tolerance, for whatever violence it may inflict against the people it has marginalized as criminals. Armed professionals who represent the State are widely celebrated as heroes for their violent efforts to uphold the status quo, and questioning their right to inflict that violence, or holding them accountable for the injustices they participate in, is, as a general thing, no way to make yourself popular. There are some things you just can’t say in circles that accept mainstream views of the limits of acceptable dissent. Certainly that sort of thing does not square with the agendas of any of the political parties, or with the etiquette of polite society in the talking-heads political media. So there are lots of people who just cannot say this sort of thing, and lots of people who think that, if a certain handful of media figures can’t say something, that makes it obviously wrong. But that does not make it wrong, and I’ll speak up for it even if nobody else well. FBI Special Agent Sam Hicks was the criminal, not the Korbes. Christina Korbe didn’t do a damn thing wrong and she ought to be a free woman.

See also:

• GT 2008-10-24: Ending State violence against women in San Francisco
• GT 2008-09-13: Solzhenitsyn Saturday
• GT 2008-01-29: Meanwhile, in Minarchistan…

In Lawrenceville, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta:

Gwinnett County police drug investigators on Wednesday served a “no-knock” search warrant and forced entry into a Lawrenceville house, but soon discovered they were at the wrong address.

In a news release, a Gwinnett police official said it was “a case of human error and not deliberate malfeasance on the part of the investigator.”

[...]

The front door was patched with a piece of wood Wednesday night, but splinters still littered the front hallway of the home of John Louis, 38, and his girlfriend Heather James, 37.

Louis said he was upstairs working from a home office when police used a battering ram to break through the door. James and their 3-month-old daughter were asleep in separate bedrooms.

“They came in here and put guns to us. The house was full of police,” Louis said. “I’ve never had a gun in my face before. I’ve never even held a gun.”

He said that he and James, who was in a nightgown, were ordered at gunpoint to lie on the floor. When he tried to ask what they wanted, Louis said, he was told to “shut up.”

After the officers roamed through the house for a few minutes, they spotted the baby and realized their mistake, Louis said. He said they apologized and told him they confused his home with that of a neighbor two doors down, a suspected methamphetamine distributor.

Louis said he still has questions for police about how such a mistake happened.

“If you had the house under surveillance for three months, why did you come here?” Louis said. “You broke in here and put all our lives in danger, and all you can say is you’re sorry?”

Seems like we’ve reached a troubling new comfortableness with wrong-door raids when the police department’s defense is, “well, at least it wasn’t deliberate.”  I’d hope that raiding the wrong house would never be deliberate.

Video of a local news report here.

From the South Salt Lake, Utah Police Department. Have we really reached the point where no one in the department looked at this picture and said, “Uh, guys, there’s really something wrong, here”?