Have the police/cos-players made a public statement trying to justify their actions? Or the restaurateur? I couldn’t find anything, which I thought was odd.
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Not having your own police department doesn’t necessarily mean not having your own police station. If the only way to guarantee a police presence is to have your own police department, that’s a political problem that politicians can solve by deciding that every community above a certain population will have its own police station.
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KBI is like FBI but for Kansas.
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… Merrick Garland will no doubt get around to dealing with this in 2026 
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This story is horrific! Still, it warms my heart to see kari newell’s 2008 conviction in this article’s being referred to as “drunken driving,” the vanishingly rare grammatically correct form.
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Okay, come on. I didn’t say the RCMP have no issues. I said it isn’t an issue that they patrol jurisdictions with different sets of laws, as was clear from the comment I was replying directly to.
Obviously the RCMP has many issues, as do other law enforcement agencies. 
The RCMP has independent accountability organizations, like any national force. If the FBI is corrupt, there’s nobody above them to help you either. Except there is, because they have accountability orgs too. Again, I am not saying these systems are perfect or work for everyone.
If you think the best solution to law enforcement accountability is ever-higher-and-larger forces to keep the ones below in check, you are describing a terrifying country.
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"We have investigated those who work at schools, churches and at all levels of public service. No one is above the law, whether a public official or a representative of the media.”
read a certain way, that’s one heck of a threat.
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It was reported that Newell admitted to the DUI during a council meeting after the newspaper decided to not pursue the story. This idiot outed herself.
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So, exactly like a typical middle- or large-sized city.
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It’s interesting that nowhere in the document is the fact that this business is a newspaper mentioned. The name of the business is listed, but “Marion County Record” doesn’t indicate that it is a newspaper (it could be a record store, and yes those do still exist.)
I’m not a lawyer but from what I’ve read getting a search warrant for a newspaper office usually has a higher bar than a general search warrant due to the First Amendment’s freedom of the press. I wonder who exactly asked the judge for this warrant and whether they “forgot” that information in their application.
And it’s almost certainly at least a little false. Otherwise we wouldn’t have so damn many “one bad apples” in law enforcement – they would have been thrown out before the gases they give off as they rot had cause other apples to go bad.
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The warrant (posted upthread) states that Judge Villar is “Judge, District Court, Marion County, Kansas”. They weren’t trying to trick a judge who didn’t know the town.
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Sorry to have triggered you but I was just pointing out that Canada is an example of the kind of problem having the national police be your local police can bring (the FBI is not a local police force like the RCMP sometimes is). And if you’re one of those caught in that situation you are indeed in deep shit. Just as deep as the shit you can be in with some small town “Boss Hogg” type in charge.
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I read somewhere that the US has 18,000 separate police jurisdictions, all with potentially different hiring and training standards.
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Wait…you’re saying some of them have standards?
TIL
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if a “standard” is an obtuse justification for injustice that defies common sense and humanity, then yes.
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I don’t get that logic. If a local police officer did something wrong where I am, I would consider it much more likely they’d be punished by the national police force they belong to, who are far away in the capital and have no local skin in the game besides not wanting to look bad for what their people do in the backwaters than by any outside agency.
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So you think local police forces in small towns in America aren’t racist? You think this is caused by the RCMP being national? I’m sorry this just isn’t the case. In fact it’s worse in the States because there’s no national standards or accountability for those local forces. There’s nowhere to go over their heads to higher management as @Doctor_Faustus says. If you think the FBI cares that the local sheriff in Podunk, Iowa is racist, you’re in for a rude surprise when you call them to complain.
I’m not here to defend the atrocities of the RCMP. They have their share of issues. But I do think it’s a much better solution than small town yahoos unaccountable to anyone running little kingdoms at great cost and inefficiently. Uvalde, Texas, a town of 2000 people, has a goddam ten-person SWAT team. This is what happens when you let small town police run amok.
Also please don’t refer to my logically addressing your poorly formed arguments as “being triggered”. It is infantilizing.
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…that did nothing when faced with a mass shooter.
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So the police chief apparently did make a statement trying to justify the raid, but he did it on Facebook.
It’s clear by the closing line “The Marion Kansas Police Department will nothing less,” it probably wasn’t reviewed before he posted it.
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