More SWAT antics; Another mystery solved (UPDATED)
Old Trooper sends us this article which clears up the mystery that we discussed several months ago in regards to the Department of Education need for newer shotguns;
Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as a S.W.A.T team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn.
“He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there,” Wright said.
According to Wright, officers also woke his three young children ages 3, 7, and 11 and put them in a Stockton police patrol car with him. Officers then searched his house.
As it turned out, the person law enforcement was looking for was not there – Wright’s estranged wife.
“They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids,” Wright said.
Wright said he later went to the mayor and Stockton Police Department, but the City of Stockton had nothing to do with Wright’s search warrant.
The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in the S.W.A.T for his wife’s defaulted student loans.
That the Education Department has a SWAT Team is scary enough, but to think they’d use that SWAT Team to collect on a student loan is right out of some frightening futuristic novel.
Nice intel gathering, by the way.
Maybe they could have knocked politely and asked the man if his ex-wife was there or set up surveillance on the house to catch her when she came outside. or are they just justifying the purchase of new scatter-guns and the expenditures for a useless SWAT Team.
It seems to me that the locals should have asked the feds for some sort of evidence that the lady in question was present in the target house instead of just riding along for the adventure of it all.
BooRadley sends this link to a news video.
UPDATE: OK, so the original article was yanked, so I put a link to the cache copy. Apparently it wasn’t because of a student loan…or something;
Education Department Press Secretary Justin Hamilton said in a statement to The Lookout that the department “does not execute search warrants for late loan payments.” He said the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) “conducts about 30-35 search warrants a year on issues such as bribery, fraud, and embezzlement of federal student aid funds.” Hamilton said the department cannot comment on this particular case until the investigation is over, but did add that the claim the warrant was executed for late loan payment is untrue. The raid was related to a criminal investigation of Wright’s wife.
Ya know it really doesn’t matter why…what matters is that the freaking Department of Education is executing search warrants with their own SWAT team to the wrong people. Busting down doors, dragging people out into their lawns, cuffing them and stuff them in the back of cop cars with their grade school-aged kids. The wrong people.
The Department of Education has one function – making loans and grants to students and states. WTF are they doing with a SWAT Team? They can explain the reason a hundred thousand different ways and it makes no difference to me.
And what doofus, Barney Fife MFer spends his whole life training to be on the Education Department’s SWAT Team? For f**k’s sake.
I’m waiting for the Census Bureau SWAT to raid my house because I chased off the census taker last year when she told me that the federal government needed to know who lived in my house.
Category: Shitbags
That’s unbelievable. There has to be some sort of extenuating circumstance like his ex was a violent felon or something. Please god, otherwise this is insanity.
What are the chances that the shitstain who authorized that “raid” will lose their job…yeah…
When the hell did Congress authorize the freaking Department of Education domestic law enforcement authority???? What the hell is going on with these Federal bureacrats and the need for them all to have their own private police forces like some backwater dictatorship does? My god this country is going downhill faster and faster…
re #3
Just about everyone has an IG section. It creates some silly overlap but by having an IG dedicated to each Department you create greater efficiency in dealing with Department specific issues like fraud, waste, abuse and more technical violations of the criminal code. Some of the stuff they do gets really far into the weeds.
The other reality is that if you have an LE issue specific to your agency it can be hard in the world of federal fiefdoms and zero sum budgets to get other agencies to devote their resources to your problem.
The link appears to be broken, but there is another link at Drudge to the Daily Mail’s take on it.
Left/liberal big government at work… they always need a SWAT team for your own good, just check out Nineteen Eight-Four and the Soviet Union.
A co-worker asked me how the Dept. of Education could have the authority to do such a thing. I pointed this out from the gummint website:
“The Office of Inspector General is the law enforcement arm of the U.S. Department of Education and is responsible for the detection of waste, fraud, abuse, and other criminal activity involving Federal education funds, programs, and operations. As such, OIG operates with full statutory law enforcement authority, which includes conducting search warrants, making arrests, and carrying firearms. The acquisition of these firearms is necessary to replace older and mechanically malfunctioning firearms, and in compliance with Federal procurement requirements. For more information on OIG’s law enforcement authority, please visit their Web site at : http://www.ed.gov/oig”
So, in other words “pay up sucker”!
IMO I think that these agencies need to be de-fanged. There is no reason on the planet for the DoE to have or need a fucking SWAT team or to be armed. That’s what they have other federal law enforcement agencies for. If the IG wants to have a warrant served, they can have it done by either local police or another law enforcement agency. Talk about government waste. They don’t need “full statutory law enforcement authority”.
Anyone know just how many agencies come equipped with their own fully armed police force?
Just about every agency in DC has it’s own police force. The Government Printing Office, the Library of Congress…there’s even an FBI Police.
And the GPO police are the worst of the bunch – unless it’s a real criminal. A bum tried to mug me outside of the GPO, and after I used the minimum amount of force to subdue him, I pinned him to the sidewalk while two GPO cops stood there and watched.
When I called to them to arrest the slimy POS, they scurried inside the building. So I had to let him up and send him on his way with a boot mark on his ass.
“Older and mechanically malfunctioning”? Just where do thy get these weapons they don’t need, in a dark alley in DC on Saturday from the lowest bidder? Their brains are mechanically malfunctioned and unwired from their asses. Who knew DoE needed a SWAT Team. It just gets worse and worse.
I get to thinking on then-Candidate Obama’s call to create a national force that rivals the military services.
Why create one when dozens of paramilitary units already exist? All they need is training and more ammo.
The only thing keeping a Federal Police Force from happening would be the inter-bureau/agency infighting.
Update says that it wasn’t over loans, it was some sort of criminal probe:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56530.html
The story of the raid’s purpose, and its backstory, are going to be changing. One thing that won’t change is the story that a SWAT raid was carried out against the wrong people, again.
These problems with mis-identifying targets, and with opening the action with (sometimes literal) overkill aren’t confined to one or two police forces.
Who wants to be gunned down by the SWAT from the Bureau of Weights & Measures?
Just be careful if you live near federal land. BLM SWAT might bust down your door in the middle of the night because you put a fence post up too close to BLM land!!
Uncontrollable law enforcement agencies brought to you by the federal government and civil asset forfeiture slush funds!
In reference to #12:
This is at the bottom of the report. So it sounds like a SWAT team was not actually used even though a search warrant was served.
“Correction: Contrary to earlier reports, a SWAT team did not conduct this raid.”
#1 NSOM – You got it right on the second part – insanity.
You want to get rid of these extra-curricular LE’s? Get rid of the departments and agencies.
Look to the Constitution. How many are actually authorized? For starts, the DOE ain’t.
It’s time to get rid of the department of education and get the US Government out of the loan/grant business completely.
Then let’s defund and eliminate all the other federal agencies. the Constitution permits the federal Government to do three things, and three things only: Provide for the common defense, regulate interstate commerce, and support the general welfare.
Nowhere does it allow the feds to use tax money for welfare programs, social security, medicare, food stamps. section-8 housing, etc.
@Dave-O; I just started laughing out loud over the Weights and Measures remark. Are these the folks who enforce the whole mattress tag thing? If so, I need to really watch out for the Black Helicopters because I’m a serial offender who has even incited others.
I hate to say it, practicality will almost always win over principle. The department of education shouldn’t need any law enforcement capabilty, because in principle it should be able to call upon a true law enforcement body when needed. As someone pointed out above it’s more “efficent” to give them such a power. Then it naturally progressses “if they can police their institution internally well, why not go ahead and let them do so externally then with civilians?”. No one actually thinks through on what some of the unintended consquences might be. Or what has changed so drastically in modern education administration that the Department of Educations needs a SWAT team.
I ask again, WHAT DOES THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION NEED WITH A SWAT TEAM!? Assuming that this particular SWAT team, is the one that all other agencies are inspired to emulate, is this really an intelligent use of resources? How much does that cost? How often is it used? Somehow, despite this raid, I doubt often. Maybe in their next budget they should ask for an AC-130 or Apache for close air support too.
At most a few agents with a sidearm and a badge is all they need, if that. You can always coordinate with other agencies if more might be needed. Mulder and Scully yes, SWAT no.
An IG investigates wrong doing inside an agency. When illegal acts are discovered during those investigations, law enforcement agencies are informed, with law enforcement being, at the federal level, under the Departments of Justice or Treasury. There is absolutely no need for the Department of Education to have any kind of law enforcement organization. If his wife wasn’t employed by the Department of Education, the DoED IG shouldn’t have been involved in an investigation of her, fraud alligations should have been investigated by a federal law enforcement agency.
The DOE has federal law enforcement agents through the IG’s office, if I understand correctly.
Was it a SWAT team? Perhaps the jackets didn’t say “SWAT” and the DOE might label it a “dynamic entry” or something. But a rose is a rose is a rose.