Video of a minor drug bust back in February is making the rounds on the internet:
Where to start.
For starters, all they did was bust a guy for pot possession, a misdemeanor charge. Yeah, that was threatening.
Columbia over the last ten years has struggled to offset itself from the surrounding regressive redness that is central Missouri. My wife volunteers at the animal shelter there. We foster cats. We live 50 minutes away in the second reddest county in the state. We see what Columbia has tried to do and yet, actions like this underscore how far communities still must go.
Slaughtering family pets in the name of the War On Drugs does not represent progressive values. Heads should roll on this in city government but don't count on that happening. Columbia is 80K in population but still very "small town" at its core in that everybody at that level knows everybody or is married to somebody related to somebody. It's hard to hold people really accountable for reprehensible actions as shown on this tape. It sure don't reflect well on the city, that's for sure.
Now, the guy getting busted won't win any Father of the Year Awards:
http://www.columbiamissourian.com/...
and the bust was apparently for suspicion of being a "distributor". Nonetheless, nobody has come forth to say there was any suspicion of this guy being violent. Drunk, stupid, careless, most likely a small time dealer, sure. But this? Overboard, completely overboard.
UPDATE: The guy busted, Jonathan Whitworth, copped a plea to possession. He was originally charged with child endangerment, a wonderful way to coerce him into pleading to something since the threat of taking his child away would have hung over his head.
The Columbia PD is spinning heavily now that the video is out. According to Columbia PD spokeswoman Jessie Haden, an ongoing investigation of the use of firearms inside an occupied home is "expected to be completed within the next two weeks," and that "Internal Affairs is conducting the review because the incident involved multiple shots and was inside an occupied residence. This allows Internal Affairs sergeants to review the incident independent from the SWAT command."
This shows you that bullies with badges have no business packing heat...or having a badge. My father was a cop for 30 years. I saw good ones and bad ones. I subsequently grew up with a healthy skepticism of any cop I met cuz you never knew the good from the bad.
Bigger picture, it's crap like this that shows the inherent stupidity in the so-called War on Drugs.