Sometimes the Canadian papers have been guilty of printing the kind of reefer madness that encourages these excesses, but they also have the honesty to report the raids. 

Dana Larsen of Cannabis Culture Magazine writes:

Here are the newspaper clippings and one TV transcript:"

Drug police burst in on children’s party

Vancouver—Police have promised to investigate how a carefully staked-out drug raid turned into a nightmarish, traumatizing assault on a children’s birthday party near here.

Instead of candles being blown out, gun-toting Abbotsford police blew away the family dog in front of a dozen horrified youngsters, splattering blood on an infant less than two months old.

While parents at the ill-fated party angrily vowed to file official complaints over the matter, police spokesman Dale Cresswell said there would be an internal investigation by the municipal force.

"Any time there are children involved, I would apologize myself in the sense that you never want children in a high-risk area," Constable Cresswell told a crowded news conference yesterday.

"It’s regrettable that it happened on a birthday."

He said police were shocked when they found a children’s birthday party going on.

"This was just bad timing," declared Sergeant Bill Emery, saying police would never have burst in when they did if they had known the situation ahead of time.

Those at the Sunday-afternoon party and at least one neighbour were enraged by the police behaviour.

"They shot the dog in front of all the children. There’s blood on the baby, blood on the children, all these screaming children," Jennifer Fraser told a local television station, adding that her niece and nephew originally thought their father had been shot.

In another interview, parent Jason Rowsom said there was immediate mayhem when police wearing black uniforms burst into the living room where the party was going on.

"It was instant screaming. My seven-year old daughter dove over the end table and behind the couch and was screaming in the corner."

He said police trained an automatic weapon on him while he cradled his baby daughter. Other adults in the house were beaten, he charged. Television pictures after the raid showed one man being wheeled into a waiting ambulance.

"I want answers. My children want answers. If we don’t get answers, then lawsuits are going to come," said Mr. Rowsom, four of whose children, aged nine to six months, were at the party.

He questioned police statements that they didn’t know children were in the house, pointing to a Happy Birthday banner hung in the living-room window and an earlier road hockey game that included himself and several youngsters, held in the car port.

"I think it stinks what the police did," added neighbour John Eadie, 50. "If they had surveillance on the house, how could they not have picked up the fact kids were there? Those kids went through hell."

Mr. Eadie lives next door to the raided house in the west end of Abbotsford, a sprawling Fraser Valley community about 80 kilometres west of Vancouver.

"Suddenly, there was a whole bunch of police outside and I heard all these little kids screaming ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ Then Ron [Raber, who rented the house] kept shouting ‘Why the dog? They killed the dog.’"

Neighbour Stanley Mitchell said one police officer had been hiding behind his trailer, gun in hand. "He told me quietly to go back into the house," he said. "Then I heard what sounded like a cap gun, a lot of shouts and all these kids and women started screaming.

"One of the women came in to use my bathroom. She said there was blood all over the place. She was pretty shaken up."

The dog shot by police is said to have been a pit bull that lunged toward them when they burst into the living room.

But Mr. Eadie described the dog as "friendly as hell. He didn’t seem like an attack dog." Ms. Fraser said the dog was only protecting the children and bitten no one.

However, Constable Cresswell said one of the two officers in the room was bitten on the arm by the dog, causing the other officer to fire "two shots directly into the animal at point-blank range."

A preliminary investigation indicates the officer who fired acted correctly, he added.

The tumble-down house rented by Mr. Raber had been raided in November by police, who said they found weapons and drugs at the time. That is why they brought in the emergency response team for Sunday’s follow-up raid, Sgt. Emery explained.

Mr. Raber, 31, who already faces two charges of possession of marijuana for the purposes of trafficking from the previous raid, was scheduled to appear in court yesterday to face several more charges.

A children’s birthday party yesterday in Abbotsford turned into a police bust and parents are steaming mad about the behaviour of the emergency response team.

The six-member team burst into what they termed a "known drug house" after a two-hour surveillance. One officer was attacked by Kona, a part pit-bull, and another officer shot the dog three times in front of the 13 kids at the party, who were just about to dig into their cake. Kona later died.

"A two-week-old baby got blood spattered in its face," said Abbotsford resident Jason Rowsom, 28, who was at the party with his four children. "I had an automatic weapon trained on me when I had my six-month-old daughter in my arms.

"What they did was just inexcusable. My kids are really traumatized."

Sgt. Bill Emery, the Abbotsford investigating officer in the case, said surveillance only indicated two children were playing in the yard. But Rowsom said: "I watched them drive by and at one point I had eight of the kids out playing hockey."

Said Emery: "If we had known there was a party going on, we would not have gone in. We regret it happening. This was just bad timing."

Rowsom and Surrey mom Kim Raber, whose two children were also at the party, are both planning on filing complaints.

Four people were arrested but only one, an occupant of the house, was detained and may face narcotics and weapons charges.

The man detained was admitted to MSA Hospital and was spitting up blood, said Emery, who did not know the reason for the condition. Witnesses said the man and several others were beaten by police.

Narcotics and weapons previously were seized at the same residence. Emery also said there was evidence of marijuana at the time of this bust.

Victims’ services workers were called to the scene.

Another failed police pot raid in Vancouver

Transcript from BCTV News Hour Final
Transcribed by Dana Larsen
BCTV News jocelyne_gaumond@bluezone.net
BCTV Online Forum: http://www.tv4bc.com/bctv/post/content/newscom/newscom.htm
Monday, January 4, 1999

VOICE OVER: This cute bungalow was raided by the Vancouver Police Emergency Response Team at 10:15am on Sunday. The resident was downstairs bathroom getting ready for church when the VERT smashed the door open with a battering ram.

MAN IN HOUSE: I saw four men in the living room, in the dining room, heavily armed like a SWAT team. And there’s also one man there, also holding a gun. And I was in a panic. All I could do was shake my hands, I put my hands up and then just as I get into the dining room they said "Don’t move! We have a warrant to search this house!" and I said "For what?

Can I see the warrant?" he said "In a minute."

VOICE OVER: Police passing by earlier apparently smelled marijuana, and suspected a grow operation. Darcey Houdena (sp?) says he’s a god-fearing taxpayer. He’s been a nurse at St Paul’s Hospital for 22 years, his religious pictures went flying when the ERT crashed in on him So how could police get a search warrant to break into his home when there was nothing there at all? Police say there were a number of grounds to support the warrant.

POLICE SPOKESPERSON, CONSTABLE ANNE DRENNAN: First of all, there was what they felt was the smell of marijuana, a fairly strong smell of marijuana, in the area of the house itself. There were fairly large bags of fertilizer in the yard of the house...

VOICE OVER: They also say there was a lot of heavy condensation on windows, common with grow operations.

Darcey wonders if his spicy cooking for Philipinno relatives on New Year’s Day, followed by burning some incense, led to the raid.

CONSTABLE ANNE DRENNAN: I can tell you quite honestly there was no grow operation found. So in this case those factors didn’t add up to the end result that we normally achieve. But we apologize profusely to this man, and we will make sure the damages are repaired.

ANCHOR TED CHERNICKI: Even worse, is that this frightening experience happened to a man with a heart condition, and today Darcey Houdena had to miss work for a doctor’s appointment.

Yes, police are only human and they do make mistakes. Their decisions are based on the best information available to them at the time. But in police work, good information can be a matter of life and death. Now remember in 1992, police raided a house in Vancouver and found only a few ounces of marijuana, but 22 year old Daniel Possee was killed. It’s that kind of mistake that has police openly critical of the law.

GIL PUDER, VANCOUVER STREET POLICE: Why is it that we’ve created a hugely lucrative criminal black market? Why don’t we start some slow progressive decriminalization, take away the money and take away the violence. We don’t need any more Daniel Possee’s.

Saturday, January 2, 1999

A pair of seniors claim they were victimized by police who smashed their way into the couple’s inner-city rooming house yesterday to arrest two other tenants.

Ron Davies, 65, says he is planning to file a complaint against the police after his handicapped common-law wife, Julia Johnson, 64, was handcuffed during a drug raid in the rooming house at 10710 103 St. around 3 a.m. yesterday.

Johnson said the handcuffs caused a hand to swell and she may have to see a doctor. "She’s in shock right now," said Davies of his common-law wife of 29 years. "She can’t even move her fingers. They should never have tied her up."

Davies is asking that the police be held accountable for the damages they caused to the house when they smashed the front window and the door to get inside.

The pensioner claims his landlord has threatened to evict him if he doesn’t come up with the money to fix the damage. According to Sgt. Garet Bonn, cops went to the house after they heard from several sources that two men living there may be selling drugs. They also had information to suggest they were armed and a possible threat to police, he said.

"These people live in a building where this type of activity was going on," Bonn said. "We have to go with the information we have at the time."

It is routine for tactical cops to detain everyone found in a home when doing a search of this nature to protect the investigation and the officers doing the search, he added.

There was evidence of drug use found in the house, but not enough to warrant any charges, Bonn said.

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