Cops had no warrant to break in door

Oops!. Prince Georges County (Maryland) cops had no warrant to break in the door of Mayor Cheye Calvo of Berwyn Heights, MD, all they had was a standard search warrant that requires the cops to "knock and announce". A PGC police officer also purjured himself to the judge by claiming he gave the mayor a copy of such a search warrant at the time of the search. In actuality, a police officer brought the warrant to the mayor's lawyer several days after the raid.

So let's summarize:

1. the PGC cops had no warrant authorizing them to break in the door and shoot the mayor's dogs. If they had executed a standard warrant, the mayor would have been able to remove his dogs from the presence of the cops. When they burst in like that and start shooting, obviously there is no such possibility.
2. the PGC cops did not coordinate with the Berwyn Heights police, who could have served the warrant for them without any fuss.
3. the PGC cops lied to a judge about serving Mayor Calvo with a warrant.
4. therefore... ponies!

Reality is that no cop will get fired for lying to a judge, no cop will be fired for illegally entering a home, and the mayor will get some money from the lawsuit against PGC but of course that won't get his dogs back. And the PGC cops will violate someone else's civil rights tomorrow, but it'll be a poor brown-skinned person so we won't hear about it. The PGC police force has been lawless for years, violating people's civil rights, forging false confessions to "solve" crimes, refusing to allow detainees to see their lawyer even when the detainee is demanding his laywer and the lawyer is standing in the lobby demanding to see his client, and otherwise behaving like a miniature Gestapo, and nobody ever does anything about it.

The sad thing is that most folks in the area don't care that the PGC cops are serving as judge, jury, and executioner -- they *want* to live in a dictatorship where the police can invade any home they feel like invading and kill anybody or anything they feel like killing regardless of whether they've been convicted of a crime or not. Democracy does not seem to be much loved in today's America, sad to say. The whole Constitution thing, with its separation of powers that says you're innocent until found guilty by a jury of your peers (or by a judge if you forgo the jury), apparently is viewed by the average American today as just a piece of fancy toilet paper, sorta like how Sheriff Joke (Joe Arpaio) gets re-elected every time in Maricopa County AZ despite having killed dozens of people in his jail who have never been convicted of any crime. But the average American apparently thinks that whole "fair trial" thingy is just a quaint tradition that is irrelevant today. Sad. Just sad. Our founding fathers gave us a Republic, and we're pissing it away because, apparently, democracy is just too much hassle for the average American today.

-- Badtux the Disgusted Penguin