Narcotics officers and a Sheriff's Office SWAT Team in Prince George's County, Maryland violently stormed Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheya Calvo’s home and recovered a package containing 32 pounds of marijuana. When main stream media report a story in this fashion the majority of people who actually take the time to read or listen to the story believe immediately that the mayor is guilty. After all, why would the police fortify themselves with heavily armed SWAT team members if this guy wasn’t guilty? Why indeed.
The story takes on an even more “sensational” aspect (which media eats up like ‘crack’ candy) when they are able to report that officers also shot and killed Calvo's two black Labradors. Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. Mario Ellis says deputies "apparently felt threatened" by the dogs, which is just a cavalier excuse that trigger happy police always use when they want to shoot something. They get away with this lie far too often. Calvo insists the dogs were not attacking, and as one of the dogs ran away a big bad policeman chased him down and killed it as it was cowering in a corner. Labrador retrievers are not known to be aggressive dogs. They may bark up a storm but they only attack when threatened. Unlike humans.
Calvo has not been charged and he, his wife and his mother-in-law are "persons of interest". Police say the investigation into how the drugs were in his home continues. Are they identifying these people as “persons of interest” out of bravado to avoid the embarrassment of obviously terrorizing the wrong family?
The raid occurred after Calvo returned from walking his dogs and discovered the package sitting on his doorstep addressed to his wife. As any husband would, he picked up the package and brought it into his home. This was the signal the overzealous police, hiding in wait, was hoping for. They unleashed their terror on this family, breaking in the front door, screaming for everyone to get on the floor, all with semi-automatic weapons pointing at the hapless, unsuspecting family. They feel they have the ‘legal right’ to commit this terror under a no-knock warrant which absolves them of all responsibility.
This article from Police Link does nothing to present the whole story and is meant to only cast this police action in a favorable light. This amounts to propaganda for the police state of which the vast majority of citizens don’t even realize they are under.
I was going through the comments that readers post on several different sites, each with their own version of the story, and I am once again appalled at the number of people who automatically assume the guilt of Mr. Calvo just because the police say so. This gullibility is one reason why people are so easily controlled by the people who control the media and an ever-increasing police fascist mentality that is taking over this country. Don’t get me wrong, there are good people out there who have joined their local police force for the purpose of ‘helping’ people by taking bad guys off the street. And we need them. The problem comes from those little dictator types who think that by putting on a police uniform they are given total and absolute control over any private citizen.
We have all run into these little racist Hitler wannabes. Unfortunately, there are more and more of them being accepted at police academies every year.
Sometimes it is just intuition that screams at you that identifies a story as having a false element. This story is one of those. After a little research I discovered that Mr. Calvo, besides being a very anti-drug Mayor, also is a director on the board of SEED, a national nonprofit that helps urban public boarding school students prepare for college. Based on this characterization of the man, it is looking more and more like this family is the recipient of someone’s idea of revenge.
There are several personality types that would have no problem in perpetrating just such a revenge. Someone who wants to see the mayor publicly humiliated and destroyed, or someone who wants to see the police humiliated, sends the package to get them busted. Perhaps by some drug dealer seeking revenge. Or, maybe a neighbor simply had the package delivered to this address, that is usually vacant during the day, and then snags the package before the residents get home. At any rate, this tragedy could have been avoided if the police had done some homework, notified the local police chief (who reported he had not been notified ahead of the raid) and not been so hopped up on the prospect of a gunfight in which they emerge the heroes for taking yet another despicable, murdering, gun-toting, crime lord out of commission for selling “marijuana?”.
The package was discovered to contain the marijuana in an Arizona shipping facility by drug sniffing dogs. There is no indication that the package had been opened in Arizona to verify the contents actually was marijuana. It is an assumption to think cops are that thorough. This gave police in Maryland time to organize the raid. It also gave them time to do a criminal background on the current occupants of this house. Had police actually conducted this research they would have discovered this address to be the home of the city’s mayor. They would have discovered the wife is not likely to have been involved in a major drug ring. But their mentality is such that they had an opportunity to take more illegal drugs off the street before they could be used to ‘destroy’ other families lives. If the Chief of Berwyn Heights Police Department has been notified of the impending raid he could have offered some insight into the occupants of this home.
Drug raids happen quite a lot across America, and due to the sheer number of them, there are bound to be “mistakes”. I’m saying that brain work needs to be undertaken to prevent this from happening again. And in the mean time, the Narcotics officers and the Sheriff's Office SWAT Team in Prince George's County, Maryland needs to apologize for their quick use of fascist tactics and their lack of proper preparation.
The bottom line here is that police are getting way out of hand in the exercising of their powers. They are given a lot of responsibility and are under a lot of pressure to enforce drug laws, as they should be, but they also need to do some thinking instead of first reaching for their weapons and automatically assuming they are busting a major dealer inside a fortress filled with drugs, guns and money. They had plenty of time to do so and chose not to.
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