Don’t forget: Always Support Your Local Police
The child was asleep in her upstairs bedroom when a stranger lobbed an incendiary grenade into her home at about 6:00 a.m. October 9. Within seconds the 12-year-old girl had suffered first- and second-degree burns. Her father, who had been awakened by an insistent pounding on the front door, arrived in the living room just in time to see a wolf pack of armed intruders break it down. He dodged another grenade that “blew the nails out of the drywall” and left a “large bowl-shaped dent in the wall,” the father later recalled.
This act of state terrorism was carried out by a SWAT team attached to the City-County Special Investigations Unit (CCIU) in Billings, Montana. The CCIU is typical of the federalized einsatzgruppen engaged in the Regime’s “war on drugs.” Billings Police Chief Rich St. John insists that the assault on the home was carried out because of “hard evidence” that a meth lab existed on the premises. This is why the stormtroopers blindly hurled incendiary rounds into the residence.
St. John claims that the CCIU had “hard evidence” and “solid intel” to justify the no-knock raid, yet he insists that they didn’t know there were two children living on the premises.
“We generally do not introduce these disorienting devices when [children] are present,” St. John said regarding the flash-bang grenades used in the raid. This would mean, of course, that there are situations in which his agency uses incendiary rounds in the presence of children.
No arrests were made, and no charges were filed. Jackie Fasching, mother of the injured child, correctly points out that criminal charges should be filed against the state-employed thugs who attacked her sleeping daughter.
“I would like to see whoever threw those grenades in my daughter’s room be reprimanded,” Fasching told the Billings Gazette. “If anybody else did that it would be aggravated assault.”
With the studied indifference of a veteran bureaucrat, Chief St. John promises to investigate the matter.
“If we’re wrong or made a mistake, then we’re going to take care of it,” he said dismissively to the Gazette. “But if it determines we’re not, then we’ll go with that.”
What this means, of course, is that St. John believes that the department may be entirely blameless in a pre-dawn home invasion that left an innocent child with second-degree burns.
The Chief says that the decision to use a SWAT team “was based on a detailed checklist the department uses when serving warrants.”
What St. John refers to is a formula called the “Threat Matrix.” As I’ve previously explained, the standardized “Threat Matrix” checklist is similar in form and function to the approached used by the military and CIA to carry out “signature strikes” overseas. It takes into consideration a number of criteria to determine the level of risk to “officer safety.” The higher the Matrix score, the more militarized the police response.
In one common version of the Threat Matrix, a total of 1-16 points means that the supposed threat is considered “SWAT optional”; 17-24 points means that the SWAT commander should be consulted; if the score is 25 points or higher, SWAT deployment is “mandatory.” Some individual criteria dictate “mandatory” SWAT deployment; for instance, if the subject is believed to possess an automatic, semi-auto, or bolt/lever action rifle, or explosives. Even the use of home “fortifications” — such as burglar bars — is awarded “double point value” in calculating the potential threat to that most precious of all social goods, “officer safety.”
Somehow, it was decided that the Fasching home –—which was occupied by a family that included two young children and a father suffering from heart disease and liver failure — posed a sufficient threat to the CCIU’s intrepid armored badasses that a full-scale, pre-dawn raid was justified.
That the youngster survived the raid could be considered a species of miracle. She could easily have been murdered in her sleep, just like 7-year-old Detroit resident Aiyana Jones. Aiyana was burned by a flash-bang grenade and then shot in the head by a SWAT team staging a midnight raid for the benefits of a camera crew from the A&E cable network.
SWAT operators were deployed to arrest a homicide suspect who wasn’t present in that unit of the duplex, and who could have been arrested the following morning in a conventional, low-key fashion. It went forward despite warnings from neighbors that children were present in the home — something that should have been obvious on account of the toys scattered in the front yard. Nevertheless, the paramilitary unit chose a Fallujah-style “dynamic entry,” hurling a flash-bang grenade through a closed window and storming through the front door with guns drawn.
The murder of Aiyana Jones, like the terrorist assault in Billings, is a product of the mindset described by Gabe Suarez, who spent 12 years as a police officer in Santa Monica: “When I was on [the] SWAT [team] our view [was] that ‘We will always win….even if we have to burn down your entire house by bombing it….we will win’.”
Never forget: Police are trained to see Mundanes not as citizens whose rights must be protected, but rather as a threat to be subdued and an enemy to be conquered.
3:39 pm on October 12, 2012
