Why don't we hold police responsible for mistakes like the one in the following post. If they make an error, why should the citizen pay the price of the repairs and other damages? We should expect more from our government officials. Don't you agree?
Conservative Tom
Buffalo Police To Army Vet: Oops, Wrong Apartment… Sorry We Killed Your Dog (Not)
June 12, 2013 by Ben Bullard
An Army veteran who’d been living at the same Buffalo, N.Y., address for three years got home Monday afternoon to discover that someone had torn down the door, shot up the apartment, ransacked the place and killed his dog, Cindy, who was leashed in the kitchen.
Breaking and entering in broad daylight. Animal cruelty. Adam Arroyo appeared to have been the victim of big-city crime.
But wait — whoever it was had left a piece of paper behind, a note. Not a note, a warrant. It wasn’t robbers after all; this was all police work.
The guy the cops were looking for evidently lived around the building’s corner. He was being sought on suspicion of dealing crack cocaine. The two apartments are completely separate and have separate entrances. All the cops had to do before indulging their trigger fingers was double-check the clearly marked mailbox.
According to WKBW in Buffalo, Arroyo is an Iraq combat veteran who plans to become a member of the National Guard. He told the ABC affiliate he isn’t a drug user or a drug pusher.
“Never. Never. I don’t do drugs. I’m a United States veteran. I work every day. I’m just trying to live my life… For police to wrongfully come into my house and murder my dog… It wasn’t that they felt threatened. No. They murdered my dog. That was my dog, man. That was my dog. They didn’t have to do that, you know. They didn’t have to do that.”
Arroyo now has to pay to have his pet cremated. The door repair will come out of his own pocket. He’s also had to miss work.
The Buffalo P.D. suit who talks to the media trotted out the same stale, self-justifying nonsense you always seem to hear whenever police unload on dogs that aren’t a threat.
Spokesperson Michael DeGeorge said the police “don’t believe the dog was chained or leashed” at the time they burst through the door — even though that’s how Arroyo left his pet in the morning, and how he found her when he got home.
DeGeorge also said the department’s Internal Affairs division will investigate, but that the police (somehow) believe they got the address right.
Arroyo said he plans to press charges against the city.
Pardon the off-topic post, Tom. One of the limitations of this blog format is that there is no way for readers to suggest topics and ask you about your opinions of the topic without just inserting somewhere randomly like this. I resist doing this because I know it annoys readers, including me, to have people posting off-topic messages.
ReplyDeleteI want to request that you post some article about the farm bill that was voting down in the House. This was a $1 trillion bill, and unless something is passed, the permanent law will govern. That would take us back to the law of 1938. I have a friend from Peru, and he has always been bitter about U.S. farm subsidies. He says if we had a free market, South America could underprice our farmers even including the costs of transportation. Our food prices would go down. Others say our food prices would increase without the subsidies. I don't know. The other big thing in the farm bill is food stamps. Already they get just $133 per month for food. Take that away and we might have riots like in Brazil now. That's also hard to predict.
Then, there is the politics of this. Any farm bill that would pass in the House would fail in the Senate, so it appears we are headed to a place we haven't seen in this country since 1938. Your thoughts?
--David
As far as "off the topic questions", you can send them to me at my email address, if you would rather.I will move them over to the blog or you can continue posting "off topic questions."
ReplyDeleteI have a couple biases as to the farm bill. First of all the Senate bill was the creation of Debbie "I love spending money" Stabenow, the other Senator from Michigan. She is far from my favorite Senator so....
Secondly, I grew up on a ranch in Colorado and therefore have a passing acquaintance with farm issues.
Saying both those caveats, I am not familiar with this particular bill.
I do know that farm subsidies were meant in earlier days to help keep prices up so that the family farmer could make a living. There were programs such as the "soil bank" which took farm land out of production so that there would not be an overabundance of crops. There were limits on the amount of wheat that farmers could plant for the same reasons.
The government would control the price of meat by importing from Argentina and Australia for example. That would lower the price to the butcher plants and therefore to the stores. I can remember my father saying "just as soon as the price gets where we can make some money, the government brings in more beef to lower the costs. For example when my father bought his first ranch in 1950, cattle sold for $.50 per pound. In 1970, it was $.25 per pound. The cost difference in the stores were the result of the multiple layers of people handing the product. This would include the feed lot owner, the slaughter house, the food distributor and the grocery store to name a few.
Whether your friend could underprice American farmers and ranchers is questionable due to the shipping cost and the significantly larger operations that exist today which lowers the cost of the product at the source. The other costs would remain the same.
As you say, the food stamp program is a big part of any agriculture bill and if we understand Debbie, it is filled with other garbage that doesn't belong in a farm bill. I will do some looking around to see what I can find.