You realize that at the time that woman was shot:
1) The boyfriend had been arrested earlier in the evening after a traffic stop.

2) The policeman fired blindly through a door and struck the woman, who was kneeling and obeying police instructions.

I would bet that if she had been the one firing blindly through the door and killed the police officer, she would be facing capital murder charges. That policeman is guilty, at a minimum of manslaughter. I would say that his actions arise to murder through depraved indifference.

***

Let’s set aside the inherent immorality and unconstitutionality of the drug war for a minute, Let’s instead look at this from the point of the Castle doctrine for a minute.

Under the castle doctrine, when a constable is given a warrant to affect an arrest or to search a property, the warrant is to be executed with the minimum of damage. It means that the constable was once required to knock on the door, and provide occupant with a chance to open the door prior to smashing down the door.

The drug warriors justify their violations of this doctrine by claiming that
1) this gives people a chance to destroy evidence
2) this gives people a chance to set up ambushes for law enforcement.

However, both claims really don’t stand up to serious analysis:
1) While your casual user can easily flush an incriminating stash of drugs, a distributor has too much to flush.
2) The drug dealer who ambushes law enforcement, while popular in movies and on TV is very rare. In fact, police serving a warrant are far more likely to be killed by someone who is unaware that they have a warrant and mistakes them for unlawful home invaders than from the occasional drug dealer who has decided to die in a blaze of glory rather than go to the joint again.

In fact, when SWAT teams fear the possibility of ambush, they refuse to enter a property at all. The suicide of the eponymously named and slightly unbalanced Libertarian Larry leaps immediately to mind – for hours the police laid siege to his house which was empty except for his slowly cooling corpse; the police had heard he had a hand gun, and limited themselves to firing numerous tear gas grenades into his house.

Law enforcement teams seem to only launch these invasions under one of two conditions:
1) Exigent circumstances , i.e. someone’s life is in danger and unless the target location is stormed immediately someone is about to be seriously hurt or killed. This is, of course, proper.

2) There is no danger to law enforcement whatsoever. These are cases that show up on shows like Dallas SWAT, where the camera crew tags along, knowing that they really face little danger.

It is clear from Radley Balko’s paper titled Overkill the vast majority of these assaults on people’s property to serve warrants are the latter case. Hell, in some parts of Virginia, *every* warrant was served by the county SWAT team. That’s how that quiet, nonviolent optometrist named Sal Culosi ended up dead.

@Mark:
It is the officers fault, all of them. They should have identified themselves before barging in. There is no chance for anyone to come out with their hands up or let the officers know they are unarmed, all this is because they don’t knock, they don’t identify themselves. The officers deserve to be shot at barging in in the middle of night knowing full well they would probably startle someone who was probably sleeping. If someone did try to surrender, there could be a reflection off of a ring or a watch making the officer think there is a weapon, BANG, “oh my bad, I was scared for my life”.

Fuck that.

The officers that shot the dogs are as much to blame. They should have called something out. They could have yelled “DOGS”, or some code that would prevent another officer from shooting, because remember, they are trained after all. By shooting those dogs, it gave the officer the impression that his life was in danger causing him to go off and take the life of an innocent person and hurting a baby.

It is also the fault of the government. These raids shouldn’t even be taking place.

They (citizens) are all guilty we just haven’t caught them yet and remember it’s always their fault for being them.

Us (the paid employees) are ALWAYS right and enjoy having our boots licked by our inferiors after we kill their pets, shoot their wives and destroy their property. Opps it may be our fault, but it sucks for you.

Zieg Heil Mark in a BrownShirt all the way. WTF?

he feared he was being shot at after the dogs were released and shot.

It’s not the boyfriends fault for releasing the dogs, its not he fault for selling drugs, it’s not his fault for putting those kids and woman in a dangerous situation. always the cops fault, never the people who create these situations.