Subject: Animal Planet 11/15/06 - Houston SPCA
Date: November 15, 2006 10:18 PM
On Animal Planet this morning, they showed the Houston, Texas SPCA execute two raids. In theory, it was identical to what 20/20 showed in June of last year. The only difference is that no one publicly challenged the actions the SPCA took against the two households.
The first raid was of an older couple - perhaps in their late 50's early 60's (I'm bad at guessing ages) - that had about 110 small crossbreed dogs. Many were loose on the fenced-in property and many were in the house. The house was cluttered, but I don't remember there being a law regarding good housekeeping.
They handcuffed the wife and put her in a car. The husband ran in the house and got his shotgun. He just stood outside, held the rifle against his side, pointed straight up. He made no threats about using it. I'm not even sure if it was loaded.
The cops, all lined up along the fence, all drew their guns quite dramatically and took a threatening shooting stance. You know the one - legs spread, knees bent, both hands on the pistol held with arms outstretched in front of them at face level. Another cop ran to his car, pulled out what looked to me like a portable canon (heavy duty rifle), jumped up on another car's trunk, then roof, and took a stance pointing it down at the man.
I understand that there was the potential of a problem, so I am not minimizing what they did --- just that it was sooooooooo dramatic and phony looking.
They called the people hoarders. The cops told him to give up the rifle and he said no, that if he did, he knows they're going to shoot him. But he did give it up - through it over (rifle still pointed upwards) to the man. They then grabbed him and slammed him down against the car's hood and handcuffed him.
The final result was that the SPCA took all the dogs - the dogs all had great weight on them BTW - and said they would put them up for adoption. The man was charged with a weapons violation but they were not charged with animal cruelty.
Ummm - is this the America our forefathers wrote about in that thing called the Bill of Rights and Constitution? Hmmm?
Then the second raid was at the home of an elderly woman. She was sitting in her living room in a rocking chair - scared to death - and holding onto two or three small dogs on her lap for dear life. Her house looked clean and uncluttered. She had a lot of cats. They all seemed to be in good shape. They said they found one cat in a room with the door closed - that the woman probably didn't know it was in there and probably hadn't fed it because it was allegedly skinny and dying. They put that one in a crate but it didn't look to me like it was anywhere near death at all. Drama - drama.
You saw how they grabbed the cats and put them in crates. One guy grabbed a cat near another guy's leg. The cat grabbed the guy's leg and scratched/bit the hell out of him. He sustained a baaaaad gash. That really had to hurt.
After all the cats were taken and loaded on the trailer, a woman from the SPCA approached the woman, bent down, and told her she could keep the dogs.
After the show was over, the cruelty investigator from the NYC ASPCA (blonde female - I forget her name - came on asking for donations. She's the one that participated illegally in a raid upstate NY a few years ago. It was early in the morning and woke up the family by banging on their window with her gun drawn. She made her and her husband come outside in their underwear (late November) and did a body search on them, feeling inside their underwear ... while the male cops watched. The female victim, in her bra and panties, asked to go inside to put some clothes on. They said no.
The eight year old daughter came outside to see what was going on. This ASPCA person pointed her gun at the child and told her to get inside.
The only good things about airing these shows is that we and the general public get to view what goes on at a raid - and some day, we will be able to use it against them. Voila! Happy day!
wjf
From Jan B
Subject: Re: Animal Planet 11/15/06 - Houston SPCA
Date: November 16, 2006 1:47 AM
This country is getting SOOO screwed up. I cannot believe that we are letting our agencies carry out little wars on citizens like this.
No wonder the Republicans lost. They have very little to offer in the way of protecting our freedoms. They just let these little agencies and bureaucrats run roughshod over little people, taking their property under false pretenses. Then they have the nerve to say that they are bringing democracy and freedom to other countries. I don't think they even know what freedom and democracy are, anymore, or what people are going through.
Out here in California they are giving out insane penalties for all sorts of things relating to code enforcement. They just make up the penalties. $600 a day or more is not uncommon. Well, we let them do it to the corporations, and now they want to do it to everyone. See how it works?
The reason that they are after old people like this is that they know they have assets which can be attached, and they know that they will never live long enough to sue them in court. So, they bully old people. Chickenshit bastards! We should have NEVER let the government have any forfeiture rights in the so-called "drug wars". If you want to see something, go look at FEAR.org. In a few places where the cops have been successfully backed off of forfeiture, these kinds of raids have all but disappeared.
These are fundraising adventures, to raise money to go directly to the agency.
Some old guy like that fella in the story is going to use his shotgun one day. It's coming to that. These guys fought in wars to defeat tyranny like this. I'm sure they know tyranny when they see it.
From Valerie
Subject: Re: Animal Planet 11/15/06 - Houston SPCA
Date: November 16, 2006 6:43 PM
When I first got sattelite (um, which was only two years ago
LOL...don't laugh, I still don't have a DVD player) I thought Animal
Planet was great, my daughter was 9 years old at the time and we
enjoyed watching Animal Precinct, or whatever it's called.
Then I started to see through it...they tell the people that they're
going to help them out, but they end up arresting them anyway. I only
remember one episode that doesn't make me sick...someone called them
on a shop owner who had a Komondor and complained that the dog was in
poor condition and was completely matted. Thankfully, the officers
knew what a Komondor was supposed to look like and they left the man
alone.
I now have Animal Planet blocked, at first my daughter complained, but
she's a little older now so I explained to her all the reasons why we
can't support that channel.
Val
From Jan B
Subject: Re: Re: Animal Planet 11/15/06 - Houston SPCA
Date: November 16, 2006 11:41 PM
This is actually very typical of interactions with police, anymore. They arrest everyone and let the courts and lawyers sort it out.
And you mentioned that they are misleading people, using the soft approach to get their confidence, then they arrest later on, after gathering information and building their case. Also, this is very typical!
This is why the criminal lawyers will always caution you never to answer any questions. Usually, it doesn't prevent arrest, and it will probably only get you deeper into trouble. Police often misquote and misinterpret statements or twist your words, so it's better just to remain silent.
You can ask if you are under arrest, and if you are not, then you should remain on your property and inside your home and DO NOT let them in. You can also order them off your property, but of course you cannot force the issue if they don't. They can only get in and arrest with "probable cause". You can ask them what their probable cause is, and it should be specific in nature. Generally, they need a warrant, OK'd by a judge (They can call in for this), OR your consent.
Once you have let them in willingly, you have waived your Fourth Ammendment rights, and sometimes this is the only thing that will get you out of trouble later on.. Reason and explanation will not likely get you out of trouble, at all. But if the cops screw up on their process, and you are not so foolish and naive as to waive your Fourth and Fifth Ammendment rights, you might be OK, based on technicalities of the arrest.
Most of us think that we can let the cops in and just talk with them. In private life they may be more reasonable, but on the job, most of them want to make sufficient arrests to make themselves look good on paper.. productive and aggressive policing, you know. They will err on the side of screwing up your life, and a lot of them have no regrets at all.. In fact, this is "fun" to them.
They may also do things like haze you or try to say tormenting things to incite you to speak or even touch them.
How do I know all of this? Because I went through it. And let me tell you what the one cop said to me, "Because of you, probably all of your dogs are going to die". When he said this to me, he was standing RIGHT next to me, and I am very sure that he wanted me to touch him, so that he could charge me for assaulting an officer. This does not have to be a strike or blow. Only a simple touch is all that it takes. I am not a touchy person with strangers, so I did not fall for it. I just looked at him like he was crazy. I really had NO idea what kind of danger my dogs were in, and actually he was right.. A lot of them DID die after they were impounded. Some from gross neglect on their part, and some because they were running up such a huge bill that I realized I had to cut some of my losses and give up the old and dogs which were not critical to my future breeding program. A lot of dogs died, but many were saved, and got out of there.. I worked to make that happen. God knows,
my lawyers didn't do much! This pissed the cops off to no end, by the way. They like to think that they run the city, for the most part, and I really put a few kinks in their tail before it was all over. The sweetest little victory was getting most of the poor dogs out.
Well, maybe some day I'll write about what happened. For now, just take my word for it. You cannot trust the police. They can lie and deceive and there is absolutely nothing you can believe or trust them in. This is all according to US Supreme Court decisions. The only thing you can safely and reasonably do is to keep your gates and doors locked and shut, do NOT let them in, make no statements to them, and have a good reference on a criminal lawyer, whose number you should know by heart, to give to a trusted friend, who should also have keys to your property. You will get one free call from jail and you need to make it count.
Oh.. About someone having keys to your property... When the police and / or animal control have rummaged all through your things and dragged all your dogs, cats and whatever off to the impound, they will generally leave your property standing wide open.. gates, doors and all, an invitation to looters, vandals and curiousity seekers. We were lucky to have a good friend to come and close our place up. What a Godsend! I still cannot believe that police do things like this, but they do, and they seem to think it's cute and clever.
Also cute and clever, they strip-searched us both.. For what, I cannot imagine. Neither of us had a criminal history at all. Again, I feel that it was done, sort of Abu-Graib style, to dehumanize and demoralize us. It was suggested to me that I take a shower in the jail, and I did, because I was in a daze and wanted to cooperate. I strongly suspect that I was recorded, naked, for later amusement and cop parties or something stupid which would interest cops off-duty.
The demoralization did work very well. I was suicidal for quite a while, but probably more because I was so distressed at the condition of my dogs, once I saw them. That was the real shocker. They were sick, miserable, wounded from fights, overcrowded, frightened, lying in runny excrement, and had puss running from their noses.
I will NEVER trust police and law enforcement again. They are a strange combination of sophomoric idiots, predators and NAZIs at heart. Some of them are better than others and have some vestige of a conscience, but seldom will they intervene. They just want to make it to retirement, so they're not going to rock the boat by doing the right thing.
The greatest irony of all in my case is that I had donated dogs to the police and US Customs in the past and was looking forward to doing more donations after I retired, oinly a few years off. Needless to say, nothing like that would happen now, even if I was still able. It is a moot question, since this screwed up my finances and retirement so badly that I could no longer afford to do it. But let's put it this way.. I get no joy from the idea of having one of my dogs put on a helpless person. And, this has been done with police K9s in the past.
I just wanted to say one thing more.. That the experience of an arrest and prosecution, even the more invasive things like strip-searching and body cavity searches would not bother the street thug or a real criminal, at all. They are made out of a different sort of stuff than the average person, which is in good part why they are what they are and why they do what they do. There have been a lot of studies on sociopathy and criminal behavior to back this up.
But to the person of average senstivity, or great sensitivity, this process can be so brutalizing, so humiliating and degrading, that it can trigger profound depression and even suicidal tendencies. Don't let anyone tell you that the animal rights activists have not killed anyone, yet. They have, and through legal process! Because there are two aspects of activism.. One is underground and subversive in nature, using clandestine movements and activities such as sabotage and arson. The other is legal activism. And this is by far the most serious kind, but it is completely unaddressed by our society.
There are already several instances of attempted and successful suicides of people who were arrested for animal cruelty, usually because they were operating breeding kennels or rescues, with many animals. The victims are usually older people. Interestingly, these people may be at a much higher risk due to loss of physical and mental faculties as part of the aging process, and because they come from a time when things like this just were not seen in free societies. Often, they have a deep trust of authority and a sense of decency and pride, which, when betrayed and violated, give way to a sense of shock, shame, betrayal and grief which compells them to take their own lives.
Many years ago there was an old couple who liked to sit together in the park and feed pigeons. There was a city ordinance against feeding birds in public and some idiot city employee with an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder arrested them. When these old people went home, they talked it over and then very quietly pulled all their curtains and locked the doors and went to bed with the gas turned on.
It was the same with a famous old couple in Wales, whose "crime" was a lifetime of raising, showing and judging Cairn Terriers. After they were arrested and their dogs confiscated, the two of them held hands on a precipice overlooking a wild river and jumped.
I wonder where we are going as a society.
There are things more important than technical observations of the law and the keeping of an orderly society under efficient authority.
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