War on Drugs: Cops force residents to take showers

[sparebulb]

Hopefully, there is some bad/incomplete reporting in this article. I'm a lot more OK with this if this was completely consensual on the part of the residents.

http://thegazette.com/2013/01/17/washington-iowa-apartment-building-evacuated-due-to-meth-contamination/


Washington, Iowa apartment building evacuated due to meth contamination
Unclear if 16-unit building will ever reopen, landlord says


Residents of the Goncho apartment building in downtown Washington were forced out of the building Thursday morning. Officials said they’re shutting down the building due to numerous safety code violations and elevated levels of methamphetamine.

More than a dozen residents were gathered in a nearby Fareway grocery store parking lot shortly after 10 a.m. Thursday. A police vehicle was brought in to help transport residents to the county jail, where they’re being required to shower and change clothes.

“They’re going to give us banana suits,” said Maurice Jones, a resident. “They want us to burn our clothes because they’re contaminated.”

Residents were not allowed to take anything with them from their apartments. There are 16 units in the building, and most were occupied.

The building’s landlord said he’s not sure if the building will ever reopen. Police are assisting the residents with temporary lodging.

[tod evans]

“They want us to burn our clothes because they’re contaminated.”



Bullshit!

I'll be the first to call media hype..

[angelatc]

Insanity. They won't ever be allowed in to retrieve their belongings? This isn't hype - it's hysteria.

[sparebulb]

Nothing like a jailhouse shower to start your day.

[Anti Federalist]

Wait, all this stuff was from a contaminated meth lab?

Why not just throw a couple of grenades in there then?

Blow them all sky high, no contamination problem, high fives and combat quals for all.




Grenade burns sleeping girl as SWAT team raids Billings home

http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/grenade-burns-sleeping-girl-as-swat-team-raids-billings-home/article_71d1f226-1474-11e2-b4b4-0019bb2963f4.html

http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/missoulian.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/c/69/c69359b2-1474-11e2-9236-0019bb2963f4/507821fbc7571.preview-620.jpg

BILLINGS A 12-year-old girl suffered burns to one side of her body when a flash grenade went off next to her as a police SWAT team raided a West End home Tuesday morning.

"She has first- and second-degree burns down the left side of her body and on her arms," said the girl's mother, Jackie Fasching. "She's got severe pain. Every time I think about it, it brings tears to my eyes."

Medical staff at the scene tended to the girl afterward and then her mother drove her to the hospital, where she was treated and released later that day.

A photo of the girl provided by Fasching to The Gazette shows red and black burns on her side.

Police Chief Rich St. John said the 6 a.m. raid at 2128 Custer Ave., was to execute a search warrant as part of an ongoing narcotics investigation by the City-County Special Investigations Unit.

The grenade is commonly called a "flash-bang" and is used to disorient people with a bright flash, a loud bang and a concussive blast. It went off on the floor where the girl was sleeping. She was in her sister's bedroom near the window the grenade came through, Fasching said.

A SWAT member attached it to a boomstick, a metal pole that detonates the grenade, and stuck it through the bedroom window. St. John said the grenade normally stays on the boomstick so it goes off in a controlled manner at a higher level.

However, the officer didn't realize that there was a delay on the grenade when he tried to detonate it. He dropped it to move onto a new device, St. John said. The grenade fell to the floor and went off near the girl.

"It was totally unforeseen, totally unplanned and extremely regrettable," St. John said. "We certainly did not want a juvenile, or anyone else for that matter, to get injured."

On Thursday, Fasching took her daughter back to the hospital to have her wounds treated.

She questioned why police would take such actions with children in the home and why it needed a SWAT team.

"A simple knock on the door and I would've let them in," she said. "They said their intel told them there was a meth lab at our house. If they would've checked, they would've known there's not."

She and her two daughters and her husband were home at the time of the raid. She said her husband, who suffers from congenital heart disease and liver failure, told officers he would open the front door as the raid began and was opening it as they knocked it down.

When the grenade went off in the room, it left a large bowl-shaped dent in the wall and "blew the nails out of the drywall," Fasching said.

St. John said investigators did plenty of homework on the residence before deciding to launch the raid but didn't know children were inside.

"The information that we had did not have any juveniles in the house and did not have any juveniles in the room," he said. "We generally do not introduce these disorienting devices when they're present."

The decision to use a SWAT team was based on a detailed checklist the department uses when serving warrants.

Investigators consider dozens of items such as residents' past criminal convictions, other criminal history, mental illness and previous interactions with law enforcement.

Each item is assigned a point value and if the total exceeds a certain threshold, SWAT is requested. Then a commander approves or rejects the request.

In Tuesday's raid, the points exceeded the threshold and investigators called in SWAT.

"Every bit of information and intelligence that we have comes together and we determine what kind of risk is there," St. John said. "The warrant was based on some hard evidence and everything we knew at the time."

But Fasching said the risk wasn't there and the entry created, for her and her daughters, a sense of fear they can't shake.

"I'm going to have to take them to counseling," she said. "They're never going to get over that."

A claims process has already been started with the city. St. John said it's not an overnight process, but it does determine if the Police Department needs to make restitution.

"If we're wrong or made a mistake, then we're going to take care of it," he said. "But if it determines we're not, then we'll go with that. When we do this, we want to ensure the safety of not only the officers, but the residents inside."

No arrests were made during the raid and no charges have been filed, although a police spokesman said afterward that some evidence was recovered during the search. St. John declined to release specifics of the drug case, citing the active investigation, but did say that "activity was significant enough where our drug unit requested a search warrant."

Fasching said she's considering legal action but, for now, is more concerned about her daughters.

"I would like to see whoever threw those grenades in my daughter's room be reprimanded," she said. "If anybody else did that it would be aggravated assault. I just want to see that the city is held accountable for what they did to my children."

[Anti Federalist]

Insanity. They won't ever be allowed in to retrieve their belongings? This isn't hype - it's hysteria.

It's police state tyranny.

That's what it is, it's here and we are living it and it's going to get out of control, it will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.

[tod evans]

And Boobus believes that Joe Junkies lab 6 doors down has "contaminated" everything in the surrounding area.

Good God does anybody research anything, or are people really so stupid that they verify cops statements by watching "The-Newz"?

[MoneyWhereMyMouthIs2]

The building’s landlord said he’s not sure if the building will ever reopen.


I wonder if there's money to be made in this nonsense. Or maybe the landlord said something else and that's how they summed it up. I can't imagine the owner of a 16 unit apartment building being ok with this.



Officials said they’re shutting down the building due to numerous safety code violations and elevated levels of methamphetamine.


What are "elevated levels of methamphetamine?"

[tod evans]

What are "elevated levels of methamphetamine?"


The "meth" is just a salt.......unless a person actually ingests it it's pretty benign.

Some of the chemicals used to synthesize meth are corrosive but by and large are no more harmful than the caustic drain cleaner used for over a century....Heck most brick masons have acids that are more harmful to humans than 75 meth-labs...

But wayward plumbers and brick masons don't justify police action...

[MoneyWhereMyMouthIs2]

The "meth" is just a salt.......unless a person actually ingests it it's pretty benign.

Some of the chemicals used to synthesize meth are corrosive but by and large are no more harmful than the caustic drain cleaner used for over a century....Heck most brick masons have acids that are more harmful to humans than 75 meth-labs...


Agree... my point here is that it doesn't sound like they're even claiming they found any kind of "lab" there or that there was even an operating lab... just a slight suggestion one may have been in the building at one point in time. And what device are they using to measure these levels?

It just sounds like an awful flimsy claim, even way worse than their normal claims.

[FindLiberty]

Creepy.

Hitler would embrace it; that sounds too much like his sort of sinister "solution" involving a portable extermination "free one-way transportation to the showers" wagon:



...residents were gathered in a nearby Fareway grocery store parking lot shortly after 10 a.m. Thursday. A police vehicle was brought in to help transport residents to the county jail, where they’re being required to shower and change clothes.
“They’re going to give us banana suits,” said Maurice Jones, a resident. “They want us to burn our clothes because they’re contaminated.” Residents were not allowed to take anything with them from their apartments. ...

[Henry Rogue]

The "meth" is just a salt.......unless a person actually ingests it it's pretty benign.

Some of the chemicals used to synthesize meth are corrosive but by and large are no more harmful than the caustic drain cleaner used for over a century....Heck most brick masons have acids that are more harmful to humans than 75 meth-labs...

But wayward plumbers and brick masons don't justify police action... That always irritated me, when the brickies were spraying their acid solution and I could feel that mist on my arms and face. Just another hazard on the job site I guess.

[pcosmar]

Bullshit!

I'll be the first to call media hype..

Media hype, Police Hype anti-drug bullshit hype.

Hype on bullshit compounded with,, "because we can".

:(

[jonhowe]

Banana suits?