Right, now I can’t even call the police if an armed intruder who is on meth breaks in, because I’ll have to worry if the cops will literally blow up my house.
“Honey, there’s a stranger with guns in the bathroom. Want to go to Applebee’s?”
8 Likes
Yeah, I honestly don’t know, it’s based on what was in the linked article, which quotes court documents.
Let’s see the the local PD deal with this door.
2 Likes
If I had to get past a door like that, I’d be wondering how strong the walls are and trying to get though there instead.
5 Likes
If only they had some explosives…
1 Like
4 Likes
Innocent but fired shots at police. Lost all my outrage when I finally got to this important piece of the story.
Or they might just kill your dog, kill your children, kill you.
1 Like
How about the fact that the perp and the homeowner are 2 different people who have no relationship whatsoever with each other. Again with the fucking cop apologists failing to see this.
How would you feel if you were at work, some rando perp got in your house and the popo then decided to blow up every room in your house? Then they say here have a check that may cover 2 to 4 weeks of hotel and expenses for for all intents destroying YOUR HOUSE.
They owe the perp nothing but they sure as hell owe the guy who owned and lived in that house a fuckton more money than $5000 for the damage caused.
ETA we are not pissed off about someone getting arrested, we are pissed off at the casual use of excessive force and the total fuck you the police are giving to the bystander who had his house fucking destroyed.
10 Likes
Not an apology at all. I’m annoyed that they buried an important piece of information that makes the police response more likely way down the article. At some point the author must have felt honor bound to mention it.
I suggest you read my response to “someguy” further down. Is this the work of a police apologist?
Does him shooting at them justify blowing up the house? If it does, then yes you are being a police apologist, if not then losing your outrage when you reach that piece of information is unjustified and ridiculous.
4 Likes
They sure didn’t bother with blowing up the house in Seattle when that happened so long ago now. They shut down I-5 which made getting home hell that day but no houses ruined. They sent a robot in room by room and tear gassed the perp who had a high powered rifle which is way more dangerous than a pistol and the Seattle PD is not known for its restraint in use of force. So I am definitely sure blowing up the house room by room was unjustified other than yeehaw we got stuff that can go boom fuck yeah.
8 Likes
They did try a robot, but it got stuck in the mess they created.
Last night, the city staged a press conference during which police representatives defended the tactics deployed during the twenty-hour ordeal as a “textbook” operation.
Textbook, right.
3 Likes
well duh robot before you use the bombs.
2 Likes
From the looks of those photos, the PD looks like they’ve excavated a hole for themselves.
1 Like
“Did you hear that? They blown out the main bathroom. We’ll be destroyed for sure. This is madness.”
1 Like
Me: checks headline
Me: Reads article, sees it doesn’t match headline
Me: Realizes the clickbait-ness of article
Me: checks article author
this is becoming a pattern with this particular BB poster.
1 Like
Really? I’d start by looking for a window…
I think the incident is still outrageous, just maybe a different headline
“Cops demolish innocent man’s house to catch suspect, hope $5000 will soothe the pain.”
In order of decreasing insanity, here are the (possible?) facts of the story:
1 - The police resorted to destroying a person’s home when other options were still available (suspect would eventually come down off his high or run out of bullets). 18 hours sounds like a long time, but it’s not really.
2 - An innocent person’s house was destroyed by police, for whatever reason, and they only received $5K.
3 - Police in a suburb have military-grade equipment (my little Canadian city of about 50,000 wants to spend $400,000 on an armored LAV)
4 - The suspect may have actually been innocent of the shoplifting charge. Even if he was, it sounds like he was armed/high, though we’re taking the court and police’s word on that.
Is this post just manufactured outrage? I don’t know. Police ethics and corruption are a topic of interest to the boing boing community, so I think the article itself is appropriate. While I feel like the headline wasn’t entirely accurate, it wasn’t inaccurate in a way that was critical to me clicking on it, if that makes sense? However, the higher standards we hold ourselves to, the better.
7 Likes
It’s not actually clear whether he did fire at the cops.
There’s an initial report of one shot being fired which the cop reporting it claimed left a hole in the garage door.
There are then further reports of a volley of four or five shots, except nobody can trace any bullet holes which would fit the claimed position of the shooter.
And at 2:23, while Officer William Woods was parking two police vehicles in the driveway to block Seacat from using any of the cars in the garage to get away, Woods reported hearing “a single gunshot” exiting the garage, forcing him to retreat to safety. In his report, Woods claimed that he could see a single bullet hole in the partially opened garage door.
Woods wasn’t the only officer who claimed to have been shot at. After entering the home, others reported a “volley of 4–5 shots” originating from upstairs where Seacat was located. Police say the shots were directed toward them downstairs, but the on-scene criminalist “could not locate any bulletholes that would have originated from the kitchen area down into the basement where the SWAT team members reported to have heard and seen what they thought were gunshots being fired towards them.”
As for being high on meth, that does seem to have been the case. He swallowed a container of amphetamines which leaked in his stomach and not surprisingly did not do good things for his health.
Maybe not planted or falsified but it does sound as though they were a little economical with the verité in that the second gun and the shotgun were present in the house but in fact belonged to the lawful occupant and it’s not clear whether Seacat knew they were there. He certainly doesn’t appear to have touched them.
It’s unlikely that these other two firearms belonged to Seacat, since John Lech reported keeping a pistol “of unknown caliber” and a 20-gauge shotgun in his home. The weapons found by police were awkwardly inventoried into evidence without much context, leaving readers with the impression that Seacat was prepared for an active shooter scenario that never materialized. But according to Lech, no ammo was missing from the box and the other firearms were still in their protective casing, suggesting Seacat never touched them during the standoff.
For those interested the complaint appears to be here:
Set your alarms for 08:00 on 1/29/2018 for the trial…
5 Likes
