1. obviously the answer here is to limit me to 6 rounds of ammo per year.

   5

   1. Considering the actual availability of ammunition right now that doesn’t really need legislation at this point.

2. 2 dead/3 injured sounds like about the expected casualties vs. even a minimally prepared defender who’s willing to resist. Seems like maybe a bad eval of the risks, or someone leaked the planned raid.

   Assuming the suspect did what they were accused of, I have no sympathy for them. I’ll say a prayer for the families of the fallen officers.

   2

   1. I’d have no sympathy no matter what the perp was accused of — provided the warrant was served in a constitutionally valid fashion. A “no knock raid” is another word for “home invasion” and dead LEOs are an expected outcome of such tactics. On the other hand, a properly issued warrant being announced and presented properly, that’s entirely different; in that case if the resident resists everything bad that happens is on his head.

      Do we have any idea which of these two scenarios is the real one?

      4

      1. it was pre-dawn (shots fired at 6am, sunrise in Miami today was 704am), so…..

         1

         1. Federal “daytime” warrants can legally be served any time between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., and the usual practice is to serve them promptly at 6:00, on the theory that the offender will either be asleep or just barely awake and is less likely to be violent. (That’s also when the offender is most likely to be home.) Take it from someone who’s served a few warrants: the early morning is the best time to do it.

            1. Well that’s an interesting tidbit

            2. It may be the normal practice but that doesn’t make it right. Rousing people out of a sound sleep is not civilized. And as for “less likely to be violent” — waking me up at zero dark hundred is more likely to get a strong reaction than ringing my doorbell when I’m already out of bed.

               If the Feds were serious about protecting their people they would abolish that bad practice and switch to serving warrants during waking hours.

               3

               1

               1. I don’t know what you mean by “civilized;” the best time to serve a warrant is when your offender is unprepared. You’re not inviting him to dinner, you’re starting the process of taking away his freedom, and the best time to do that is when he’s groggy and less likely to put up effective resistance. His convenience is immaterial.
                  As I’ve said before, I don’t know what your job is, but I’d never presume to tell you how to do it. But everyone who’s ever watched TV knows everything about how to be the police.

                  1. Whitey Bulger’s arrest (#2 FBI most wanted for 10+ years, murdered 19 people and turned an FBI agent)

                     vs

                     Roger Stone’s arrest (lying to Congress)

                     If you can explain to me why Bulger was able to be arrested by coaxing him out of his apartment with a lie about his storage locker being broken in to but Roger Stone needed an entry team with rifles and body armor at 6am, with media in tow, I’m happy to hear it.

                     From what we know right now about the case in Miami, no one was in imminent danger. The guy’s IP address was caught in an FBI honeypot, ie, someone on his wifi downloaded child porn provided by the FBI. This could have waited until the dude went out for groceries and those agents would be alive today.

                     3

                     1. It’s easy to second-guess these things. If nobody was in “imminent danger,” then how did six people get shot? Every arrest has the potential for violence, and which is preferable, to risk violence inside a building or on a public street? A guy who has a rifle ready inside his house probably also carries a pistol, so arresting him at the Publix may only transfer the violence from his home to a crowded parking lot.
                        The contrast between Whitey Bulger and Roger Stone is a false dichotomy because the Roger Stone arrest was a staged media event that was mainly unprecedented, and Whitey Bulger had been living unmolested for so long he thought he had it made and was not thinking the same way an active criminal does. (I’ve tried to lure people out of the house with a ruse. Sometimes it works, usually it doesn’t.)
                        I can’t speak for every arrest that was ever made, just as you can’t justify every action that has ever been taken in your field of work by people you don’t know and have never met. I’m only explaining how things are normally done. I can’t explain or justify everything.

                        1. So, before the feds showed up, who was in imminent danger?

                           3

                  2. 1811, Constitutionally speaking the target of a search warrant isn’t an “offender” and there is no authority in the Constitution to treat him as such.
                     For one thing, the requirement to present a valid warrant implies doing in a manner that allows the target of the warrant to examine it. Barging in on people who are asleep denies them that Constitutional right.

                     I don’t give a d*** about what TV shows say about the police. But I care deeply about what the Constitution says about the way the government is required to protect the rights of the citizens, including those who are suspected of crimes, and whether or not those protections inconvenience the government’s agents.

                     3

                     1. I gotta admit, you had me conned. I thought I was engaging in a good faith argument, but I found out I was dealing with an ideologue. But just for S and Gs, I’ll try to answer you here, and then I’m done.
                        When a person has a warrant served on them, it’s because a magistrate or a grand jury has been shown that they’re most likely a criminal. That’s what “probable cause” means. In various places around the country, they are known as suspects, subjects, offenders, or perp(etrator)s, and probably a few more I don’t know about. So that’s just semantic nit-picking. But whatever you call it, you’re not bursting in on Joe Sixpack or Mary Minivan just for the hell of it.
                        And while you may start pounding on the door while your subject is asleep, he won’t be asleep when you make your entry. That’s when you hand him the warrant. You don’t have to wait for him to read it before you effect entry, and you don’t have to wait for him to read it in front of you in order to continue your actions, be it a search or an arrest. Besides the fact that most warrant-servees aren’t Evelyn Wood graduates, they may delay reading the warrant to give others in the premises a chance to escape, destroy evidence, or prepare and mount an attack on the officers. You can’t force anyone to read it. Some do, and some just stick it in their pocket to show their lawyer, or crumple it up and throw it on the floor with appropriate verbal accompaniment. But his rights have been preserved; he has been given an opportunity to read the warrant. I’ve also never been on a warrant service where the serving officer didn’t verbally apprise the subject of the reason for the warrant. (“You’re being arrested for . . . ” or “This is a warrant to search your house for . . .”) And if I knew ahead of time that the subject didn’t speak English, I always had an agent who spoke his language on the warrant team to explain the warrant and read him his Miranda rights in his own language.
                        The rights of the subject are protected. He has been lawfully served a warrant under the Fourth Amendment, and now he gets to exercise his other rights under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.

                        1

                        1

                        1. You joke if you try think that is a fair process. Judges are rubber stamps.

                           Serving as warrants before the sun is up unconstitutional due to lack of process. It’s not hard to come up at a reasonable time. You are making the assumption they are guilty instead of that they are innocent.

                           You care more about violating rights than preserving them.

                           2

3. Any number of scenarios could have played out here but no details have been released so it’s all speculation including the thinking that the shooter actually knew what he was doing. Get a group of careless agents in a close group and you don’t have to be a sharpshooter to hit a number of them.

   Also…”The FBI is used to go after meek criminals…”

   Seriously? They have primary jurisdiction in bank robberies and terrorism investigations.

   That sentence makes zero sense.

4. So he was no sharpshooter.

   “The gunman, not yet identified by the FBI, is believed to have monitored the approach of the agents with a doorbell camera and ambushed them through the unopened door with a hail of bullets from an assault-style rifle, law enforcement sources told the Miami Herald.”

   https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article248942479.html

   Seems like the agent’s biggest mistake thus far was not noticing the outside surveillance equipment.

   1. Maybe because they are used to go after white collar offenders and meek criminals?

      QED

      1. Some are, some aren’t. The FBI, like most LE agencies, is compartmentalized, and the compartments are staffed by specialists. The white-collar squads work on and arrest white collar criminals, who may be “meek,” but the bank robbery, VICAP, terrorism, and similar squads are used to dealing with violent criminals. Plus, every large office has a SWAT team. (When FBI used to come into our office on various cases, you could always tell the SWAT guys; they always took off their jackets so you could see the SWAT-only 1911.) I think the Ring doorbell theory is probably correct. If you’re involved in “violent crimes against children,” you’re likely to be worried about the police, and the preliminaries to a raid are pretty hard to hide.

5. Sigh… Once again, US Marshals do this for a living! Why oh why, other than politics, were the Fibbies trying to do this? They have NO training!

   1

   1. Having worked with both the Marshals and the FBI, I’d rather work with the Marshals any day. But jurisdictional factors are in play here. If the FBI makes the case, they usually make the arrest; if HSI or DEA makes the case, they make the arrests, etc. The Marshals’ specialty is fugitives, which is a different category than this idiot was. Most likely, politics had nothing to do with it. The FBI arrests hundreds of violent felons every year and you never hear about it because they do it right and nothing happens. (They have lots of training. I don’t know where you heard different.) But LE is a violent business and things happen.

6. Thank you for your service, Old1811. Glad to read something here from someone who actually has been there, done that instead of folks who, for one reason or another, just like throwing around speculative theories as fact. Refreshing.

   So I guess the question is: Glynco or Quantico?

   1. Glynco. The last year of my career I was a firearms instructor there. It was a great, low-stress cap on a fun career.

      2

      1. Holy crap! You are Art Mullen! 😀

         1. No, and I don’t know him.

            1. 

               Art Mullen is a character played by Nick Searcy in the show Justified. He was a firearms instructor at Glynco.

         2. I guess I showed my cultural ignorance. I don’t watch TV and have never seen “Justified,” but I was a big fan of the Elmore Leonard books the series is based on. (If you’re not an Elmore Leonard fan, I suggest you start today. There are two types of people in the world: Elmore Leonard fans and people who aren’t worth talking to.)

      2. Was a guy by the name of Jim Lauder still on staff when you were there? Jim taught me everything I know about shooting back in the day.

         1. Fraid not. Jim Cirillo retired just before I got to Glynco, so I never met him, either. Life is cruel sometimes.

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