{"id":1616,"date":"2007-12-19T07:35:05","date_gmt":"2007-12-19T12:31:12","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-12-19T07:33:17","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=1616","title":{"rendered":"AP: “Botched Raid Terrorizes Minn. Family” — police raided wrong house"},"content":{"rendered":"

AP has this story from yesterday: Botched Raid Terrorizes Minn. Family<\/a>:<\/p>\n

With her six kids and husband tucked into bed, Yee Moua was watching TV in her living room just after midnight when she heard voices–faint at first, then louder. Then came the sound of a window shattering.<\/p>\n

Moua bolted upstairs, where her husband, Vang Khang, grabbed his shotgun from a closet, knelt and fired a warning shot through his doorway as he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He let loose with two more blasts. Twenty-two bullets were fired back at him, by the family’s count.<\/p>\n

Then things suddenly became clear.<\/p>\n

“It’s the police! Police!” his sons yelled.<\/p>\n

Khang, a Hmong immigrant with shaky command of English, set down his gun, raised his hands and was soon on the ground, an officer’s boot on his neck.<\/p>\n

The gunmen, it turned out, were members of a police SWAT team that had raided the wrong address because of bad information from an informant – a mistake that some critics say happens all too frequently around the country and gets innocent people killed.<\/p>\n

“I have six kids, and only one mistake almost took my kids’ life,” said Moua, 29. “We will never forget this.”<\/p>\n

No one was hurt in the raid Sunday, conducted by a task force that fights drugs and gangs, though two police officers were hit by the shotgun blasts and narrowly escaped injury because they were wearing bulletproof vests.<\/p>\n

Police apologized to the family and placed the seven officers on leave while it investigates what went wrong.<\/p>\n

Such mistakes are a fact of police work, some experts said.<\/p>\n

“Does going to the wrong address happen from time to time? Yes,” said John Gnagey, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association in Doylestown, Pa. “Do you corroborate as best you can the information the informant gives you? Absolutely. But still from time to time mistakes are made.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}