Informant denies buying drugs at elderly Atlantan's home
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- An informant cited in a search warrant as having purchased narcotics at an elderly Atlanta woman's house denies buying drugs there, authorities say.
Undercover officers raiding the 88-year-old woman's house shot her to death last week after she fired on them while they broke down her door in a high-crime neighborhood.
Federal prosecutors will investigate the case, Atlanta police Chief Richard Pennington announced Monday.
...
"After we brought the informant in and interviewed that informant, he told us that he had no knowledge of going into that house to purchase drugs," he said. "That's what he told us. I don't know if he went in or not. We don't know if he's telling the truth."
In an interview with Atlanta's WAGA-TV, the informant said he had never been to Johnston's house.
"I'm telling them, I never went to the house," the informant told the station. "The police can't say I ever went to the house."
The informant then said police called him and told him "you need to cover our ass.
I'm going to avoid the obvious thing, (which would be to say "Conservative apologists jumped the gun,") and just say that I await the results of this investigation with great interest. I'm not saying that police informants aren't sometimes skeezy, two-faced liars, but I'm also not saying that some police officers won't go to some byzantine lengths to cover a screwup. This cast of characters is full of human beings rather than archetypes, after all...
The apologist crowd is now going to focus on the aforementioned skeezy nature of police informants. "You can't trust them," we'll hear, "they're scum; they'll say anything."
But their word is gold when it comes to kicking in an old woman's door.
We need to put an end to the use of SWAT teams in cases like this. There was no reason to break down the door. They could have waited for mornig when she would come out of the house and done everything calmly.
ReplyDeleteThe more we use SWAT, the more innocent people are going to die.
7 possibilities:
ReplyDelete1. The Cops are Lying.
2. The Informant is Lying.
3. The Cops made a Mistake.
4. The Informant made a Mistake.
5. The Cops and the Informant are Lying.
6. The Cops and the Informant made a Mistake.
7. The Cops and the Informant are Lying and made Mistakes.
I guess I could also throw in that it could be mis-reported, but the above is enough to cover it all. Frankly, I give equal odds to all 7.
Crappy, crappy crappiness.
Lame, lame and double lame. Urging caution before the facts come out is NOT jumping the gun, and jumping the guy is jumping the gun, even if some of your wild guesses turn out to be correct.
ReplyDeleteIf Patterico had prejudged the case in the cops' favor, that would have been jumping the gun. He didn't, and has come down quite hard on the cops once any actual facts came out.
Most things I've read have been on the "poor cops" side - not me.
ReplyDeleteDivemedic
ReplyDeleteInteresting idea, the brits beat ya to it. About ten to fifteen years ago they started a program to legalize hereon. If we’ could look at that program’s successes and failure maybe we could come up with a suitable plan.
When I said successes and failure I wasn't interested in just statitics, I meant to look at the program completely. crime rates are, as I think you mean only one part of the problem, ergo only one part of a measure of success. One line of thought would be to see if it reduces the voilent crime, which should reduce the need for tactics are were used in ATL.
ReplyDeleteI'm pissed about the use of the phrase "no-knock warrant." Under federal law and the laws of most states, the manner of serving a warrant is left to the discretion of the officers serving it. The judge didn't tell the cops to enter without knocking; the cops did it on their own initiative.
ReplyDeleteThis just in:
ReplyDeleteOfficers May Face Murder Charges In Death Of Woman: Prosecutors intend to seek murder charges against three Atlanta police officers involved in the shooting death of a 92-year-old woman in her home, according to a letter sent to an attorney for one of the officers...Kathryn Johnston died and three officers were wounded in the Nov. 21 shootout when police used a no-knock warrant to search for drugs in Johnston's northwest Atlanta home.
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