Sue the bastards

Radley already covered this recently but it's just filtering down to me and it's worth a mention that two women have filed suit against Northwest Drug Task Force agents.

According to the complaint, the women were mistreated, threatened, cursed at and terrorized during the raid by "three men dressed entirely in black with black hoods over their faces."

"At no point did any of these individuals identify themselves as law enforcement officers or members of the Northwest Drug Task Force," the lawsuit alleges.

That's bad enough but one doubts they would have filed except that they were completely innocent victims of these over-zealous prohibition profiteers. No charges have been filed since this terrorist incident occurred on July 29, 2003.

This is just another symptom of forfeiture fever. The police get to keep the seized assets but they can't spend them on say, putting more cops on the street to prevent real crime, but must use them for equipment and such. So now every podunk town is equipped for SWAT team raids. In Montana, the population averages 6.2 people per sq. mile, and the population of the entire county where the raid occurred is 10,227, spread over 2,790 sq. miles, dropping the density to 4 people per sq. mile.

You wouldn't think there would be enough crime sufficiently serious to require the use of masked men in SWAT suits in such a low density area. You would be right but since they have all this stuff, they're going to use it, as they did here - busting into the home of two women in the middle of the night. Even if they were guilty of possessing a few plants, this would seem to be a situation where ordinary uniformed cops could have made the bust in the light of day.

It's even more egregious that this addledbrained raid was made on innocent Americans. I hope the judge throws the book at them but I'm not holding my breath. Justice is so seldom served in these matters.

[hat tip to JackL]