Free Talk Live

Members of a SWAT team opened fire on an unarmed teenage girl this week when police officers outside of Washington, DC attempted to serve an early morning search warrant.

Jose Del Rio, a Vietnam War veteran, built a “multi-level” underground structure about 20 to 25 feet below the home, resulting in the City of Austin executing a warrant to have the police SWAT team, police bomb squad and Austin Fire’s search and rescue operations team, do a full sweep of the home.

Cheye Calvo's July 2008 encounter with a Prince George's County, Maryland, SWAT team is now pretty well-known: After intercepting a package of marijuana at a delivery service warehouse, police completed the delivery, in disguise, to the address on the package. That address belonged to Calvo, who also happened to be the mayor of the small Prince George’s town of Berwyn Heights. When Calvo's mother-in-law brought the package in from the porch, the SWAT team pounced, forcing their way into Calvo's home.

Faced with widespread public outrage and even death threats after the release of a video of a February marijuana raid in which two dogs were shot, one killed and one wounded, by SWAT team members in a family home with a young child present, the Columbia, Missouri, Police Department Monday moved to dampen the uproar. At a press conference, Chief Ken Burton announced he was immediately imposing new restrictions on the way the department serves search warrants.

SWAT team honored for breaking into wrong house. Afterwords, the police investigated the police and found that the police did nothing wrong. Big surprise.

SWAT team raids Seattle OWS organizers with a warrant looking for "anarchist materials."

In Kansas City, Missouri, the police department’s military auxiliary, the “Tactical Response Team,” produced a propaganda video intended to placate public concerns aroused by the increasingly common spectacle of armed raids in residential neighborhoods. Members of Kansas City Tactical Response Team — like their comrades across the country — have been trained by the Pentagon to follow the standard model of military occupation: Use overwhelming force to “pacify” a targeted neighborhood, then try to win the “hearts and minds” of residents to consolidate control.

Instead of bogus pizza deliveries, sending a SWAT team to your door appears to be the hip new griefing trend in online gaming. Earlier this month we told you about a gamer in Eugene, Ore. who answered the doorbell to a police raid, thanks to some douchebag he met in FortressCraft. Now it's happened to someone in Florida.

A Tucson, Ariz., SWAT team defends shooting an Iraq War veteran 60 times during a drug raid, although it declines to say whether it found any drugs in the house and has had to retract its claim that the veteran shot first.