Quote Originally Posted by cmoney View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
BTW the search warrants with guns drawn is a lot more common than you might think. This dates back many years.

In the 1980s, a hacker friend of mine got busted. He was a minor, but that didn't stop local police from surrounding his house with guns drawn, handcuffing him, and taking all of his shit.

This was someone with zero criminal history, like most teenage hackers at the time.

He also hadn't done anything that serious, and in fact charges were ultimately dropped (and not because of any technicality).

In 1993, Heidi Fleiss was arrested for her prostitution ring. While this situation was more serious and much more high profile than the teenage hacker I knew, they also surrounded her home with guns and overdid the whole thing.

Police will defend these tactics of simply exercising caution that the suspect won't attack them during the search, but the funny thing is that you won't have nearly the same number of armed officers involved if you call 911 and report an actual violent crime occurring.

So, in short, 10 cops showing up with guns during the search is overkill, but fairly standard operating procedure.
In these white collar cases, they do it not so much because they think they are a danger, but because they want to make sure the target doesn't delete anything, or in the cases when the IRS does it , they want to make sure you dont have time to sell or conceal assets. If they give you a phone call beforehand, how many computers and hard drives would then be immediately tossed or thrown in the bathtub? a lot.

So while it is completely unnecessarily from a firepower prospective, i get why they do it .
The "give me a phone call beforehand" thing from the video was obviously ridiculous, but at the same time, they didn't need 10 officers with guns drawn.

Bringing a few officers to the door telling him to step outside while they search his place (while one or more supervises that he stays put) should have been enough. Guns should have only been drawn if he appeared to be uncooperative. That's just my opinion, though.