Topic: WorldNetDaily
Having apparently grown at least temporarily bored with its "big lists" of female teachers who have sex with students and "black mob violence," WorldNetDaily is starting up another one: "SWAT raids on the innocent." Jack Minor explains in a July 28 WND article:
WND has been reporting on the trend to militarize local police departments for more than a decade. Here is a list of reports on the trend, which recently has begun to garner significant additional attention:
WND founder and CEO Joseph Farah wrote in a 1998 column titled “The cops are out of control” that while in years past seeing a police officer gave him a sense of security, it was no longer the case because of recent actions at the time by SWAT teams.
So, actually, it's not so big -- Minor doesn't list that many, and he has to go back to 1998 to compile as many as he does. And at least one of the cases he cites is not as "innocent" as he portrays. He writes:
In 2008, WND reported an incident involving SWAT members of a Colorado sheriff’s department who stormed a family’s house and held them at gunpoint to take custody of an 11-year-old for a medical exam sought by social services.
The 11-year-old, Jonathan Shiflett, had suffered bruises while horsing around in a mobile home park near New Castle where the family lives. But his father, Tom Shiflett, refused to allow paramedics who arrived after a neighbor apparently called 911 to treat his son. The father refused to allow the ambulance crew to take Jonathan to a hospital.
Multiple visits by police officers and sheriff’s deputies brought the same response, as did a visit from Social Services employees, who reported to court authorities:
“Thomas Shiflett shouted at this worker and advised this worker that if he obtained a court order, he better ‘bring an army,’” according to an affidavit filed by Matthew McGaugh, a caseworker for the Garfield County Department of Social Services.
The statement to “bring an army” was the basis for the sheriff’s executing a SWAT raid despite a court order simply directing him to search the home and remove the child.
Minor doesn't think that Shiflett's clear threat was sufficient cause to justify an armed response to him, "innocent" or not?
Minor avoided a related controversy to this case, in which WND's Bob Unruh was accused by a county sheriff of misquoting him in a WND article. Unruh denied it of course, then attacked the sheriff for not telling him the whole story.
