"........if you ever do this to my home you will enter to a hail of bullets that your Kevlar won’t stop......."

Via hefferman1

 

Tampa Bay Times:

Pasco SWAT team members on Tuesday broke down the door and searched an older couple’s home for their grandson. They searched for hours for Aaron Vineyard and the guns and stolen goods he allegedly was keeping, but didn’t find him or his loot in the home.

Carl Stark, 71, and his wife Juanita, 73, said they are furious that SWAT members broke into their house at 9808 Sholtz St., and shouted orders at them to get on the ground, breaking several decorations and a window in the process. They said their grandson, Vineyard, 36, lives in a trailer next door at 9812 Sholtz St., and they rarely see or speak to him.

At a news conference on Friday, Pasco Sheriff Chris Nocco said he stands behind his deputies’ actions. Before the Tuesday night SWAT raid, he said, investigators were working with an informant to bring down a 12-man crime ring of which they believe Vineyard is a member.

Nocco said his men weren’t taking chances when they decided to search the home Tuesday night. The SWAT team got the house they meant to, he said.

“I have no regrets in the operation that was performed,” Nocco said. “The fact that we put safety first, we’re not going to apologize for that.”

Sheriff’s spokesman Doug Tobin said SWAT members’ actions “ensured the safety of all of those inside the house and deputies executing the search warrant.”

Safety first.  Whose safety?  The safety of his officers.  In fact, the spokesman is lying.  This wasn’t safe for anyone.  No one benefited from these tactics, no one was caught, no evidence was flushed down the toilet, the police don’t know that the parents were connected in any way to the son’s activities regardless of what they say, and a lot of home wares were broken.

The better approach would have been to position detectives to find out when the son left his home, arrest him out in the open daylight, and execute a search warrant on the parent’s home by uniformed officers.  The fact that a SWAT team was used to do this is a testimony to stupidity and thuggery.
Moving West, the following home invasion has some instructive value for us.

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