Dallas SWAT teams raid local poker rooms
The Dallas, Texas police department has apparently come up with a unique and innovative way to keep their SWAT teams trained for real combat situations. For the second time in two months, Dallas SWAT teams, in simultaneous raids, busted some local poker rooms.
To keep in practice, the SWAT teams broke windows, kicked down doors, and swept into the poker rooms with assault weapons drawn just as they would if they suspected that the rooms were filled with nests of terrorists cooking up weapons of mass destruction and planning to use them on innocent civilians.
Instead, they busted a bunch of people playing poker — folks like you and me — and no more a danger to anyone else than a bowling league.
Why the overkill? Estimates I've read suggest that approximately 60 SWAT team members were used to conduct these raids. If poker is illegal and the Dallas PD’s top brass feel they have to use vital and scarce law enforcement resources on this sort of crap, why not just send two officers there to knock quietly on the door, tell the players that the jig is up, and get on with whatever processing procedures they engage in once the raid is complete.
Did they expect every poker player in the room to come out shooting? Were they thinking they were going to confront Jesse James and the Younger brothers?
Why the need for SWAT teams? Their use should be reserved for really dangerous situations — where suspects are barricaded and have hostages and weapons they intend to use. A SWAT team is not for rousting poker players engaged in what’s at worst a victimless crime that’s the result of a stupid law.
Was this a training exercise? Was it simply a game of “cops and robbers” played with real guns, real cops, but nary a robber in site?
Law enforcement officials look like overbearing, brutish thugs in this situation. But I suppose they can sleep soundly knowing that residents of Dallas are safe from the specter of poker players and the dreaded dangers of a card game.
How incredibly stupid.
posted by Lou Krieger @ 11:17 AM
3 Comments:
I agreewith you of course. But this is nothing new and people are getting killed. Suggest you look up Radley Balko's work "Overkill - The Rise of Paramilitary Police raids in America", Norm Stamper's book "Breaking Ranks- A Top Cop'sExpose' of the Dark Side of American Policing" and "Abovethe Law- Police and the Excessive Use of Force" by Jerome Skolnick and James Fyfe.
Yesterday in Atlanta undercover cops with a "No-Knock" warrant kicked down a 92 year old woman's front door - whe defended herself as would anyone thinking they were being invaded/robbed. 3 "officers" were wounded (arm,leg) - she was blown away.
The SWAT teams as you noted are armed with thing like HK UMP 45's, M-4, M-16's and MP-5's. All sub-machine guns capable of firing in excess of 600 rounds per minute. 99% of SWAT team deployments are for warant work ( we used to call this "ordinary police work"). What we are seeing now is the actual deployment of paramilitary forces against U.S. citizen's - who may or may not have committed any crime at all. For example for playing poker.
The most interesting part of this entire episode was a set of statistics revealed by the Channel 11 news team that covered this violent overuse of armed force to bust a poker game.
According to the reporters, last year, 3 people were arrested and 8 citations were issued. This year, 31 people were arrested and 180 citations were issued. Now, a reasonable person might ask, what's changed from last year.
The answer, they now play poker at two Indian Casinos in Oklahoma, an hour from Dallas!
Anyone that has a hard time believing a tribe outside of Texas is not willing to spend money to stop Texas gambling from becoming legal should take a look at what went down with the Tiguas in El Paso and Jack Abramoff. The simplest way to look at this is to ask yourself a question…if playing poker becomes legal in Dallas, what do you think would happen to the casinos in Oklahoma?
What a twisted country we live in. There are rampant gang activities around the country destroying our inner cities. There are meth labs all over the country fueling a drug crisis. There are 16,000 homicides in America every year making us world leader (among industrialized western societies).
With all these facts in mind the government decides that a perfectly reasonable use of our time and resources, as a nation, is to use SWAT to bully innocent civilians. People quietly sitting in a room playing cards.
Even if we take the view that some of the card players are criminals (other than the crime of playing cards), even if we take the view that gambling corrupts people and damages society. I would far rather local criminals spend their time sitting in a room playing cards than roaming the streets committing serious crimes (against people like me).
America has some really serious problems it needs to deal with. Some guys playing poker together, is not one of these important social issues.
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