At no point in this encounter did the intruders identify themselves as police officers. Two minutes later, the SWAT team that had terrorized the Johnsons arrested the Johnsons’ neighbor, Bill Gerst, who had been accused by a woman of threatening her. Gerst was forced to crawl on his belly toward the officers in order to be handcuffed. “What’s going on?” Gerst repeatedly asked, plaintively explaining that there was nobody else in his apartment. Gerst persisted in trying to find out why the cops had laid siege to his home. “You shut your mouth!” one of the raiders snapped. The police later told the Johnsons that they were dealing with a “homicide in progress.” No firearm, and no evidence of any criminal activity, was found during the February 21, 2013 raid. According to a lawsuit filed by the Johnson family, “The information used to justify the no-warrant raid on Mr. Gerst’s apartment was shaky and legally suspect.” Specifically, it was a hearsay allegation made by someone who knew a woman named Hilda Valle, who is described in the suit as “a petty criminal who had reported to police that she had argued with Mr. Gerst and that he had threatened her with violence.” At the request of the neighboring Nampa Police Department, which received the tip, a tactical team from the Caldwell Police Department conducted what they call a “welfare check” that was actually a guns-drawn, no-knock, SWAT-style raid. The Caldwell PD claimed knowledge of “the presence of guns at the premises” – which, according to the standard “threat matrix,”supposedly justifies a paramilitary assault.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 19:09:40 +0000
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