A rather unusual thing just happened to me and my wife. It was about 6:10 am and we were near the end of our early morning walk, walking down the usually very quiet 1400 block of 18th Avenue in Moline. Two windowless vans, a white pickup and a SUV pulled up to the curb just ahead of us. About 8 men in full military gear including helmets and automatic weapons and another two men wearing bulletproof vests but no helmets or rifles, jumped out of the vehicles and started trotting toward a house just ahead of us. We had already decided to quickly turn around and head in the other direction when one of the men without a helmet and rifle suggested, with a smile, that we do exactly that. We walked quickly away but after getting a couple of hundred feet away stopped to watch and see what would happen. The group of men went up to the door of a very normal looking house in the middle of the block, shouting “Police” and “Search Warrant.” We heard a woman’s voice shouting “No” from inside. About 3 of the men entered the house while the others stood around in a group by the street. I didn’t get my camera out quick enough to catch that action but this is what it looked like just after the some of the officers entered the house while the others waited in front.
[Click on picture to see it full sized.]After a few minutes there must have been some communication from inside the house because the group outside visibly relaxed and started smiling and joking around. One of the men who had been inside the house came out and talked with the man in the in the picture in the blue tshirt. Nothing much seemed to be happening at that point and we had to get going so we continued our walk.
Does anyone know whose these guys were? Does the Moline Police Dept has a SWAT team?
Update Aug 8, 2008
On this morning's walk I met a fellow who recognized me and my wife from having seen us watching the assault weapon raid yesterday. He lives next door to the targeted house and told us he had come out on his porch to watch the proceedings. He told us that the fellow the police wanted to talk to came home while the police were there, they talked to him but did not arrest him. Huh? So what was that all about anyway? I asked him who the guys with the automatic weapons were and he said he recognized some of them from his national guard unit. So the guys in full military gear, helmets and assault weapons were not Moline Police? "Not all of them. It must have been a combined operation," he told me.
So how would you like it if a bunch of guys in full military gear came to your neighborhood just to ask one of your neighbors some questions?
6 comments:
Of course they have a SWAT-type team, although they call it the CCU "Crisis Containment Unit." It was created in 1987, and their website can be found here.
Any decent-sized city has some kind of emergency response team they can call on for hostage situations, serving high-risk warrants, etc. Davenport has the Emergency Services Team (EST), Rock Island has an Emergency Response Team (ERT), and even sleepy Bettendorf has an Emergency Response Unit (ERU). If we had any more teams in the QC they'd have to be even more creative with their acronyms.
The most common use for these teams, and probably what you saw this morning, was serving high-risk warrants. This could be trying to arrest someone who is known to go armed and/or assault police officers, or serving a search warrant on a property where those kind of people hang out, or weapons are known to be present. And of course, even in the QC, once in a while some nut barricades himself in his house with a gun, and the emergency response folks respond. The teams usually include a negotiator as well.
There you go again with your anti-police stuff...
Sometime when you actually need these guys I'm sure you won't be complaining about them. Police, even the Moline police, don't just do this stuff to harass people. Obviously the people are suspected of being into some pretty bad stuff, especially if it was MEG that was involved.
Just remember how your last automatic assumption that the police were in the wrong turned out.
qci,
What in heaven's name are you talking about?!? What assumptions have I made here?
Maybe you don't see it, but your post has a definite "What are those police up to this time?" tone to it. Maybe I'm the only one that gets that connotation.
qci,
Well yeah, I am asking that question but what assumptions am I making? In your first comment you said they were probably serving a high-risk search warrant. In my update I reported the next door neightbor saying that they came to talk to a fellow but then did not arrest him. Obviously they were not serving an arrest warrant.
"What are they up to?" seems like a rather obvious question to ask about that to me.
It strikes me that you might be the one who has a low opinion of the police with your hints that the police might do violence to me or not be there wehn I need them if I question how they are doing their jobs. That makes them sound like the Mafia, running a protection racket. I never would suggest such a thing but there you go.
A high risk warrant could also be a search warrant.
I guess I'm just sensitive to this, and especially after your defense of Trice in East Moline.
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