To protect and serve?
For many years, visitors to my former business location might have noticed a picture on the wall– torn from a newspaper– of a “police” checkpoint in Serbia. What captured my interest was the caption telling the reader that the picture was of a “police volunteer” manning an urban checkpoint in the early days of the gradual anarchy that was to come in that country. It always struck me that this so-called policeman, finger on trigger, had an AK47 in the nostril of some hapless guy at the wheel of his Honda Civic, and was, according to the caption, checking his identification papers.
The poor fellow in the car, aside from the fact he had the muzzle of a machine gun literally stuck in his face, looked like he could have been your average American thirty-something on his way to work at the office. In fact, the background of the photo looked like it could have been downtown Anywhere, USA, even including a uniformed police officer in the square directing traffic. Except, more striking than all of the elements of the scene, was the fact that this “policeman,” dressed entirely in black, was wearing a ski mask. “Not good,” I always thought, when looking at the picture.
That picture hung stapled to the old shop wall for years, and many conversations were held about it. When events like the Elian Gonzalez seizure and the Branch Davidian raid took place, parallels were drawn. As it turned out, most that viewed the old picture agreed, if we ever come to a point when the police here in the States were to start wearing ski masks to hide their identities during the conduct of their duties, things would be getting pretty bad. Thankfully though, we were in America, where such things could never happen, right?
According to documents filed at the U.S. District Court in Concord, NH at the end of July, a family from Grafton County is suing for a series of civil rights violations that allegedly occurred during an early morning raid of their Bristol apartment.
“On August 2, 2006, twenty (20) members of the CNHSOU”
(Central NH Special Operations Unit) and three members of
“the Bristol Police Department, executed an arrest and search warrant at 36 South Main Street, Bristol, New Hampshire. The residence was occupied by Thomas Mlodzinski, his wife Tina Mlodzinski, their 15 year old daughter JM, Tina Mlodzinski’s son, Michael Rothman, and Michael’s girlfriend Amy Furmanic and their two week old daughter.”
The filing states,
“Police were seeking to arrest Michael Rothman, who was then 17 years old, for assault and were looking for a baton (night stick) allegedly used in the assault. The warrants authorized the arrest of Michael Rothman only and the search of the residence and the person of Michael Rothman only.”
If you’re like me, you should be wondering why it would take TWENTY-THREE law enforcement officers to arrest a seventeen year old. He must have been heavily armed or something, right? Apparently not— nor were any of those sleeping in the apartment, either.
The lawsuit details the events as they unfolded just before 4 in the morning two years ago:
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