zxcvbob said:
Spats McGee said:
No-knocks certainly serve a purpose in preventing the destruction of evidence.
Why is protection of the evidence more important than the lives of the officers, suspects, and bystanders involved? Is it perhaps because without finding drugs on the property they can't do a civil forfeiture of that property?
It's all about the money.
Preservation of evidence isn't more imporant than those lives. To be clear, I've never said it was. That doesn't mean that no-knocks don't serve a purpose, though. There are instances where a no-knock is (or at least can be) a much safer way for officers to make their entry, . . . at least for the officers. I have my doubts as to whether a no-knock can ever be safer for the people in the residence.
Btw, I do not doubt that civil forfeitures are part of the motivating force behind some of these. There's a huge potential for abuse in forfeitures.
Let's look at a hypothetical in which a no-knock is clearly warranted, and properly executed. If you've got a situation where the police are after known drug-running, gun-toting gang-bangers holed up in a crack house (a situation that, unfortunately, wasn't that uncommon in the 90s), a no-knock would have been the way to go. The
theory (and I stress that because these situations don't always work out ideally) was that by executing the warrant as a no-knock, both: (1) evidence would be less likely to be destroyed; and (2) the occupants would have less opportunity to arm themselves. If the evidence was destroyed, the BGs are back on the street in a couple of days, and back in business by the end of the week. If the BGs got a chance to arm themselves, police, suspects, and nearby citizens could get killed.
Problems arise when the standards for issuing no-knock warrants are too low, or they're executed improperly. That's what I saw when I looked at AB's link: wrong addresses, lack of investigation into a CI's tips, etc.
@ secret agent man -- I don't disagree with your assessment. The RKBA is in the 2nd Amendment, the right to be secure in your home, in the Fourth. I'm not sure that the Founders even considered the possibility of a no-knock warrant, though. No-knocks are a product of the 20th century. In a brief search, I find no case law reference to them before 1974 in
Gooding v. U.S., although I did spot one 1970 law review article.