WaPo: The flashbang menace by Radley Balko: <\/p>\n
The common use of flashbang grenades has put officer safety above the safety of the citizens the police are supposed to serve.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In my hometown, no less:
\n<\/p>\nThese are the incendiary devices intended to temporarily stun, blind and deafen everyone within range. They have some limited appropriate uses, such as when police are confronting someone who is in the process of committing a violent crime. But they\u2019re used far more often than that, and there\u2019s a long trail of people injured and even killed.<\/p>\n
[I]n Little Rock, Ark., the police department is still using flashbangs on nearly every raid, according to ProPublica\u2019s analysis. Police department records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, as part of its nationwide survey of police militarization, showed that between 2011 and 2013, Little Rock police tossed flashbangs into homes on 112 occasions, or 84 percent of raids \u2014 nearly all of them in predominantly black neighborhoods.<\/p>\n
Little Rock Police Department spokesman Sidney Allen defended the practice, saying, \u201cYou may see a large number of flashbang deployments, but what we see is a large service of warrants without gunfire.\u201d But no weapons were found at three-quarters of the homes during this period, according to department records obtained by ProPublica. Most searches yielded drug paraphernalia such as small baggies of marijuana and glass pipes. Others just turned up bottles of beer.<\/p>\n
One Sunday afternoon in 2012, Sharon Kay Harris, a diminutive 54-year-old grandmother, was still in her church clothes getting a soda out of the fridge when police officers threw a flashbang into her kitchen. \u201cIt was very scary,\u201d Harris said. \u201cIt\u2019s real loud, it sounds like a gun going off.\u201d Other officers broke down her front door with a battering ram and threw a flashbang into the living room, igniting a pile of clothing. A few weeks earlier, Harris had sold a plate of food and six cans of beer without a license, a misdemeanor in Arkansas, to an undercover officer. The officer returned on a second occasion to catch Harris in another offense: selling liquor on a Sunday. During their raid on Harris\u2019 house, the police confiscated several cases of beer, which she freely admitted to selling along with hot dogs, nachos and fajitas . . .<\/p>\n
Little Rock Police Department spokesman Allen said he does not consider the force used on Harris\u2019 home to be excessive. \u201cIf she hadn\u2019t been selling illegal items out of the home, no warrant would have been served,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat you call extreme, we call safe.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WaPo: The flashbang menace by Radley Balko: The common use of flashbang grenades has put officer safety above the safety of the citizens the police are supposed to serve. In my hometown, no less:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excessive-force"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15457,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15456\/revisions\/15457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}