Dressed as police.
So, should this be SOP? If people in police uniform come to your front door assume they are felons, not police, and act accordingly?
Well, I don't know if that is a good idea... But the attitude is partly the result of wrongly executed no-knock raids. Or rightly executed one that go all pear shaped. A totally rational response by a felon with police trying to bust in is to fight back or surrender or flee. A totally rational response of an innocent person is to fight back. In either case someone is very liable to get hurt one way or another no matter what happens. SWAT entries are dangerous, full stop. Everyone admits that, especially officers serving the warrants.
Perhaps the police need to rethink this whole "bust down the door with a heavy thing" and come in guns ablazing. Of course cops shouldn't be doing that to innocent people, but mistakes happen. And it's almost certainly a bad idea when the suspect isn't violent or wanted for violent crimes.
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Unless there is a barricaded armed suspect WITH HOSTAGES, there is no call for a dynamic entry.
That's what SWAT was designed and intended for, but there just aren't that many calls like that in any given fiscal year in most jurisdictions, so...
I read an article about a house that has been raided around 30 times, because their address was used as the default address during the testing phase of the program that prints warrants for the police, and they sometimes forget to enter the address, and by default they raid that house. You would think after the 5th wrong raid, that they would have a check system to make sure they were not going to the right address. Or that judges would notice it, and think i should make them show me why the default address needs raiding?
Radley Balko (of theagitator.com now on Huffpo) "wrote the book" on paramilitary raids back in 2006.
See his report at CATO http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/overkill-rise-paramilitary-police-raids-america.
Tam is right. There is NO justification if there are no hostages.
"Dynamic" no-knock raids are so stupid on so many levels not the least of which is that if it is coupled with a "wrong address" the innocent person is going to be brutalized in one way or another.
Also, the police actually DON'T think about the dangers of 'dynamic' entry, as Balko points out in his white paper. If they did they wouldn't want to do it at all. It actually almost guarantees that things will get violent and go all 'pear-shaped'.
JOel Stoner, if the program needed an address as a space filler, why not something innocuous, like 100 N. First St. Los Angeles, 90012. At least there they'd recognize the address as not a real target.
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