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SWAT Officers Shoot Unarmed Man Wrongly Suspected as Hostage-Taker — Then Officer Blurts Out, ‘F***, Bro, F***,’ Unaware of Home Cameras: Video

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SWAT team officers in North Carolina repeatedly shot an unarmed man who was wrongly suspected of taking another person hostage, the New York Post reported. The man was subsequently accused of communicating threats and resisting arrest, but home surveillance footage may reveal a different story.

Around 11 p.m. on December 13, 41-year-old Jason Kloepfer and his wife, Alison Mahler, were awakened by SWAT team officers with the Cherokee Indian Police Department and the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office.

According to Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, they received a 911 call of shots being fired. Believing a gunman was holding another person hostage inside Kloepfer’s mobile home, authorities obtained a search warrant to enter the residence.

The sheriff’s office, not having a tactical unit of its own, requested assistance from the Cherokee Indian Police Department’s SWAT team.

In the initial press release, authorities alleged that Kloepfer “engaged in a verbal altercation with officers.” Police said they responded by opening fire on Kloepfer because he “confronted” authorities.

[Warning: video contains explicit content.]

(Read more from “SWAT Officers Shoot Unarmed Man Wrongly Suspected as Hostage-Taker — Then Officer Blurts Out, ‘F***, Bro, F***,’ Unaware of Home Cameras: Video” HERE)

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Loudoun County Superintendent Requested SWAT Team at Board Meeting

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The sheriff of Loudoun County denied the county school superintendent’s request for a standby SWAT team, riot control unit, and undercover officers at an August school board meeting.

The county has become a hotbed of controversy in recent months, with dozens of parents protesting at school board meetings over critical race theory and revelations the superintendent and board members allowed a male student charged with sexual assault to move to a different school where he committed a second assault.

Loudoun County Sheriff Michael Chapman said in emails reported by Fox News that it was “extraordinary” that Superintendent Scott Ziegler would request a K-9 unit explosive device sweep, an on-site task force, undercover officers in the public crowd, and the sheriff office’s civil defense unit and special operations team after hiring a private security company.

The civil defense unit is the sheriff’s office riot control unit, and the special operations team is the office’s equivalent of a SWAT team. (Read more from “Loudoun County Superintendent Requested SWAT Team at Board Meeting” HERE)

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SWAT Officer Ends Hours-Long Standoff by Singing ‘White Christmas’ to Suspect

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On Christmas day, Nathaniel Lewis, a 34-year-old member of the Pennsylvania National Guard, began behaving erratically after separating from his wife, authorities in the East Vincent Township in Pennsylvania said.

“An hours-long standoff ensued with Lewis firing at police officers from a second-story bedroom. Bullets struck the sides of an armored police vehicle, a civilian’s vehicle, and a nearby home,” the local CBS affiliate in Philadelphia reported. . . 

The local SWAT team was called in to handle the situation.

Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan says police initially conducted a wellness check on Lewis after his wife asked for a separation. Lewis refused to come out of the house, and then took his rifle, firing some 20 shots at officers outside.

Nearly nine hours later, Lewis demanded a negotiator sing him “White Christmas.” Four verses later, Lewis came out.

(Read more from “SWAT Officer Ends Hours-Long Standoff by Singing ‘White Christmas’ to Suspect” HERE)

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Federal Judge: Drinking Tea, Shopping at a Gardening Store Is Probable Cause for a SWAT Raid on Your Home

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In April 2012, a Kansas SWAT team raided the home of Robert and Addie Harte, their 7-year-old daughter and their 13-year-old son. The couple, both former CIA analysts, awoke to pounding at the door. When Robert Harte answered, SWAT agents flooded the home. He was told to lie on the floor. When Addie Harte came out to see what was going on, she saw her husband on his stomach as SWAT cop stood over him with a gun. The family was then held at gunpoint for more than two hours while the police searched their home. Though they claimed to be looking for evidence of a major marijuana growing operation, they later stated that they knew within about 20 minutes that they wouldn’t find any such operation. So they switched to search for evidence of “personal use.” They found no evidence of any criminal activity.

The investigation leading to the raid began at least seven months earlier, when Robert Harte and his son went to a gardening store to purchase supplies to grow hydroponic tomatoes for a school project. A state trooper had been positioned in the store parking lot to collect the license plate numbers of customers, compile them into a spreadsheet, then send the spreadsheets to local sheriff’s departments for further investigation. Yes, merely shopping at a gardening store could make you the target of a criminal drug investigation.

More than half a year later, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department began investigating the Hartes as part of “Operation Constant Gardener,” basically a PR stunt in which the agency conducts multiple pot raids on April 20, or “4/20.” On several occasions, the Sheriff’s Department sent deputies out to sort through the family’s garbage. (The police don’t need a warrant to sift through your trash.) The deputies repeatedly found “saturated plant material” that they thought could possibly be marijuana. On two occasions, a drug testing field kit inexplicably indicated the presence of THC, the active drug in marijuana. It was on the basis of those tests and Harte’s patronage of a gardening store that the police obtained the warrant for the SWAT raid . . .

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge John W. Lungstrum dismissed every one of the Hartes’s claims. Lungstrum found that sending a SWAT team into a home first thing in the morning based on no more than a positive field test and spotting a suspect at a gardening store was not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. He found that the police had probable cause for the search, and that the way the search was conducted did not constitute excessive force. He found that the Hartes had not been defamed by the raid or by the publicity surrounding it. He also ruled that the police were under no obligation to know that drug testing field kits are inaccurate, nor were they obligated to wait for the more accurate lab tests before conducting the SWAT raid. The only way they’d have a claim would be if they could show that the police lied about the results, deliberately manipulated the tests or showed a reckless disregard for the truth — and he ruled that the Hartes had failed to do so. (Read more from “Federal Judge: Drinking Tea, Shopping at a Gardening Store Is Probable Cause for a SWAT Raid on Your Home” HERE)

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Court upholds first-ever use of a DHS drone to assist in arrest of citizen inside US

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A North Dakota court has preliminarily upheld the first-ever use of an unmanned drone to assist in the arrest of an American citizen.

A judge denied a request to dismiss charges Wednesday against Rodney Brossart, a man arrested last year after a 16-hour standoff with police at his Lakota, N.D., ranch. Brossart’s lawyer argued that law enforcement’s “warrantless use of [an] unmanned military-like surveillance aircraft” and “outrageous governmental conduct” warranted dismissal of the case, according to court documents obtained by U.S. News.

District Judge Joel Medd wrote that “there was no improper use of an unmanned aerial vehicle” and that the drone “appears to have had no bearing on these charges being contested here,” according to the documents.

Court records state that last June, six cows wandered onto Brossart’s 3,000 acre farm, about 60 miles west of Grand Forks. Brossart allegedly refused to return the cows, which led to a long, armed standoff with the Grand Forks police department. At some point during the standoff, Homeland Security, through an agreement with local police, offered up the use of an unmanned predator drone, which “was used for surveillance,” according to the court documents.

Grand Forks SWAT team chief Bill Macki said in an interview that the drone was used to ensure Brossart and his family members, who were also charged, didn’t leave the farm and were unarmed during the arresting raid.

Read more from this story HERE.