Last week, our little neck of the woods got a bit of national attention for the way law enforcement handled a home raid. To very briefly summarize, a suburban police force sent in multiple officers in SWAT gear to execute a search warrant at a house in a credit card theft and fraud case.
The homeowner and his do-gooder national blogger sympathizers questioned the heavy-handedness of the raid, including using a battering ram to open the door. The police chief countered that the homeowner was a registered gun owner, and that they used the information they had to make a decision.
You'd think the libertarian side of me would agree this was too much police force. You'd think wrong. Let's recap the what happened and the outcome:
* The homeowner admitted he had a 9mm gun that he drew but then re-holstered when he heard it was the police. And he was in the bathroom when he did this. Carries his gun everywhere, I guess.
* This suburban home had surveillance cameras outside and inside the house - what suburban Iowa home does that? Isn't that a bit of a tell that the homeowner has something to hide? The police chief noted that they disabled or covered up the cameras as standard procedure, so others could not monitor approaching officers.
* There were three other unrelated people in the house, along with the homeowner's mother, who's probably really the actual homeowner. Two of them were arrested on unrelated warrants, and time will tell if they were involved with or know who was involved in the credit card theft and fraud.
So to recap, not only was there potential criminal activity in the house, and at least one loaded weapon, there were also actual criminals. But somehow, the story is all about the manner in which the police chose to protect themselves.
We don't have a police state in Iowa (or the U.S.), and bloggers or media-types who use examples like this to say otherwise should give it a rest.
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