Here’s a story that’s been playing out a bit in the local news. Long story short:
- Police get wind of a 20 year old college student selling drugs out of his apartment.
- They make a few undercover buys and get a warrant.
- Quasi-SWAT team comes into his apartment to serve the warrant and an officer shoots the suspect in the upper right chest.
- Student was unarmed. No word of any weapons of any kind in the apartment. Story from the student’s family is that when they shined a flashlight on him he put up his arms to shield his eyes. That’s probably what triggered the shot.
- Drugs are found but the police aren’t saying how much. The student’s attorney says it was about 3 tablespoons of marijuana.
Today the shooting officer was charged with reckless discharge of a firearm resulting in injury or death.
This is certainly an interesting one to watch. What’s entertaining me, if you could call it that, is the local reaction.
It’s a really conservative area and it’s not uncommon to find comments attached to the articles from locals lamenting the fact that the student didn’t just die right then and there for heinous crime of selling pot to college students. Seriously. People are actually rather fond of the idea that a local drug enforcement team would enter a college apartment with guns drawn and just execute the suspected dealer.
In other news we’ve got a local quasi-SWAT team for drug warrants. I didn’t know that before now. The weird thing is they whip that unit out to serve a warrant on what looks like a kid that just buys and smokes a heck of a lot of pot and sells some here and there. I guess they don’t have any evidence on the actual drug dealers with ties to Mexico around here. If I know who they are then local LE has to. Not that I harbor any ill-will toward the guys or anything. They’re a pretty nice bunch for the most part. One even offered me a Mini-14 for $300 a few years back when I was back in town at a local bar. No shit. I didn’t take him up on the deal and he understood why.
Hopefully we’ll see some sort of reform in how that team is used. That’s the only positive outcome that I can hope for in this case.
