<<No. They did not. They did not talk to him.>>
One of your problems, Prince, is that you can't recall the words of your own posts. Let me help you out here:
"They woke me up with a phone call at about 5:50 in the morning," Pyles told me in a phone interview Friday. "I looked out the window and saw the SWAT team pointing their guns at my house. ThThe officer on the phone told me to turn myself in. I told them I would, on three conditions: I would not be handcuffed. I would not be taken off my property. And I would not be forced to get a mental health evaluation. He agreed. I suppose this was a telepathic telephone conversation, a meeting of minds and exchange of thoughts without the crude resort to auditory signals relied upon by the rest of the human race. No, on second thought, I believe this was an actual TALKING kind of telephone conversation.
If I wanted to stoop to the level of "debate" preferred by some members of this group, I suppose I could legitimately call you out as a liar, because I nailed you to the wall on this, Prince, but my own common sense tells me that not every mis-statement of fact, not every paring-down-to-essentials becomes a lie, even if it's not literally true.
<<Try this: go to a person you don't know, handcuff him and use a gun for force him to leave his property, and when he complains just say "What? All I wanted to do was talk," and see what response you get.>>
Can you say, "Gross oversimplification?" I knew you could. Try this: When charged with the safety of your community and
after receiving the kind of reports the police did of a certain individual, try sending one of your brother or sister officers to walk, in full uniform or in plainclothes, up to the guy's front door one morning to ring his bell.
Are you fucking nuts??? Or maybe try tipping him off with a friendly series of telephone inquiries before surrounding his home, and then try to catch up with him afterwards if you're not exactly reassured by the conversation. Try discretely following him around and if he suddenly starts firing at the passersby, try to stop him before he hits any . . . or any more.
Prince, all I can say is that after reading your nonsense and bullshit for way longer than it's worth, I am profoundly thankful that nobody has put
you in charge of any law enforcement agency anywhere on this planet. The motto of our local police force is "To serve
and protect" and you can bet your ass I am extremely uneasy about your ability to perform the second part of that mandate.
<<all based on hearsay without investigating to see if the hearsay had any basis in fact.>>
Most of the police's preliminary information IS hearsay, Prince. The urgency of the situation as perceived by them determines how much fact they can afford to gather before acting. Depending on what the first source to inform them of the man being recently armed with semi-automatic hand-guns and rifle, and its credibility, they may or may not have decided to spend more time driving over to the local gun-shop to verify the first report. That's their call and it's easy to see circumstances where it's riskier to check out the first reports than to assume the worst. Again, serve
and protect. You just don't know the volume or the quality of the information already amassed when the decision was made to proceed as they did.
<<There is a reason why one of the foundational principles of our justice system is innocent until proven guilty.>>
You are definitely a very confused little puppy. That's the foundational principle of
one particular part of our justice system, the criminal courts. It is certainly NOT a foundational principle of good police work, which is a totally different part of our justice system.
<<What you said is certainly absurd, however it has nothing to do with what I actually said.>>
Prince, for once, just use your fucking brain. There is nobody in this group and probably no sane person in the world, who would believe that the calling in of a SWAT team is the literal equivalent of calling down a napalm strike. For one thing, the SWAT team doesn't even HAVE napalm. That was a rhetorical exaggeration of what you said, meant as such, perceived by any reasonable reader as such, the precise designation for which is a
reductio ad absurdum. If you want to persist in calling it a lie, that is your call, just as it's my call to decide if I want to continue "debating" with such a fucking idiot.
<<They erred on the side of trampling the man's rights and threatening him with extreme violence over something he had not even done. >>
They certainly took precautions which threatened him with extreme violence, but they did not necessarily trample on the man's rights. It's an interesting question, though. If the law permits them to by-pass the need for a warrant in an emergency, it must mean (IMHO) that the guy's rights were always conditional on their not being apposed to the duty of police officers in responding to a perceived emergency. The right not to be arbitrarily home-invaded, cuffed, etc. is less absolute than we think when it goes up against police responding to a perceived emergency. It WOULD be "trampling on his rights" if the perception of the emergency had not been reasonable.
<<That's not caution. That's abuse of authority. Apparently neither they nor you know the difference.>>
Actually, it seems that I know it better than you do. Whether additional facts will show that the police did in fact abuse their authority remains to be seen. From what I've seen so far, assuming the credibility of the sources, they clearly took the correct course.
<<What do you know of my views on SWAT teams? Have you asked me? Or have you taken a handful (at best) of statements about the use of a SWAT team in one situation then leaped to an irrational, illogical and nonfactual assumption about what my views on SWAT teams are? Let's see... no, you certainly did not ask me. Hm.>>
Very simply, I saw the way that you (over)reacted to the calling in of the SWAT team and I came to the obvious conclusion.
<<Michael, you and I both know the SWAT team was used as a threat of force.>>
It was used to PREVENT an outbreak of violence, part of which prevention certainly involves making the individual they were protecting the community (and themselves) against aware of the existence of a lethal counter-force to any violence that he MIGHT be contemplating himself, and yes, Prince, that is a threat of force. Comes in handy, sometimes, the threat of force. That's why we have armed our police. It's hard to see where threat of force leaves off and self-defence comes in, but the general perception seems to be that an armed police force will reduce the general level of violence. Of course, in any community foolish enough to put YOU in charge of their police services, you could persuade the force to give up its guns and thereby eliminate one "threat of force" from your unfortunate community's streets.
<<But you trying to paint
those who privately own guns as murderers and killing machines, and then accusing someone else of "irrational hysterical fears based on isolated incidents and of no general application" when you have no substantive basis for such a conclusion, now that is what is actually asinine.>>
Try to keep it honest, Prince. I don't accuse "those who privately own guns" as murderers and killing machines. I made it clear in these posts that my own father privately owned guns. You gloss over what I said, which concerned a guy who not only "privately owned guns" but was recently laid off, described as "very disgruntled" and had just substantially increased the firepower of his little arsenal. THAT adds up to much more of a threat than merely "privately owning guns." I believe most reasonable people are capable of assessing that as cause for alarm. The degree of urgency to that alarm, I believe is generally for the police to assess. Sure they MIGHT abuse that authority, but I've seen nothing to date that indicates that they have.
