 Believe it or not, the time of day actually matters quite a bit in this case. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and I wanted to give some thoughts and hopefully some helpful and different perspective on the shooting of a mirror lock. I think that's how you pronounce it. Apologize if I'm pronouncing the name incorrectly. This happened about a week ago and I wanted to wait to kind of see if there's some more information that was gonna come out about it, and I haven't seen anything different to change my initial impression. So for those of you who don't know, this happened. So what you see there is the police entering a residence, loudly announcing themselves, and then shooting this guy who is sleeping on the couch. Now there are a couple factors here that I think make quite a big difference. Now you might ask yourself, why exactly does the time of day matter? Well, here's the deal. Most police departments, but apparently not the Minneapolis Police Department, who seems to have it together about as much as Broward County, have a policy in place that says, we don't do nighttime raids. Now there's a very, very good reason for that because if it was you or me or anybody else on the planet, and someone kicks in your door at night, you assume they are there for nefarious purposes because who else is kicking in your door in the middle of the night? And there have been multiple cases of people shooting at police officers when they kick in the door and they either don't hear them announce themselves or they don't announce themselves or whatever, and the shooting starts and the citizen goes to court and they win. That's happened multiple times where the police screw this up and as a result, someone starts shooting because they think they're being attacked and invaded. So the reason I bring up the time of day is that this particular raid happened at 6.48 a.m. in the morning. Now you might say, well, what's the big deal? I mean, that's, you know, it's early, but it's not too early. Well, it turns out that sunrise that day on February the second didn't happen until 7.31 a.m. Now one newspaper that I read, I think it was USA Today, called this a pre-dawn raid. There's another word for that, a nighttime raid. Now you might say, come on, Dylan, it's 6.48 in the morning. I mean, you know, that's not nighttime. Well, I would ask you, what do we call that time between when the sun sets and when the sun rises? If we don't call that nighttime, then I think we've just lost all definition of words. Now you could get upset and you could quibble and you could say, well, you know, it's the morning, it's not nighttime. Okay, however, there is a good reason, like I said, most police departments do not do raids between sunset and sunrise. Also because, you know, that's kind of like a secret police tactic that lots of evil governments have done in the past, but let's not talk about that now. I want you to imagine you're sleeping on the couch at your friend's house, you're just hanging out and all of a sudden the door flies open, people start screaming and rushing in. What are you gonna do? Well, if you happen to be sleeping next to your gun, of course you're gonna grab that until you figure out what's going on. It's a completely normal and obvious reaction, so the police burst in and they shoot this gentleman and he doesn't make it. As it of course turns out, the guy wasn't the suspect, didn't live there and had every right to purchase and own a gun. So, obviously this was really, really bad on the Minneapolis Police Department. And what can we learn from here? What are the lessons we can learn? Well, the first one is, it's pretty obvious, we need to stop no-knock warrants in the country, period. That's been a kind of an ongoing thing for a while. There was the Breonna Taylor incident about a year and a half or so ago, maybe two years now, and there was some more push to end no-knock raids, but however they're still happening. The Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, who's a complete and competent moron, came out and said, you know, we had a policy against not doing these. He obviously has no idea what he's doing, which is fairly evident. No-knock warrants, in case you don't know, started during the war on drugs. Prior to that, the police were required by law to knock and announce. You have to knock on the door and announce who you are. You cannot just burst into someone's house. This has been a thing in English common law going back to like 1604. You can look this up, the Wikipedia page on no-knock warrants, while Sparse is fairly informative, and she needed to understand that for most of human history, we didn't do this, and the only people that did do this were criminals or secret evil police, which, you know, what's the difference? If you are a millennial or around that age gap, you've lived your entire life with no-knock warrants, so to you, that just seems like a normal thing. However, prior to the war on drugs, we didn't do those in America. We did them with the war on drugs because they were afraid people were going to destroy evidence. While the war on drugs is obviously a war that America has lost worse than Afghanistan and Vietnam combined, setting that aside, you can say, all right, well, maybe it's reasonable that they would have to get in there quick so that they wouldn't destroy evidence. However, just like every good intention government program that started out well, it soon goes downhill because over time, courts have expanded the authority of the police and allowing them to execute no-knock warrants that now have nothing to do with drugs. So as a result, you have this increased militarization of the police and this increased aggression which only further divides the citizen-police partnership, which is how it should work. And now, of course, we have there's animosity and mistrust between those two groups, which leads to increasing incidents like this. It comes down to the fact that no-knock raids in 99.9% of circumstances are just bad tactics. I'm not saying that no-knock warrants would never be a valid thing to do ever. However, I am saying that in about 99.9% of cases in which they are currently executed, they are atrocious, which is why I'm for just banning them across the board. It's bad tactics because you could just wait for someone to exit. You could follow them to the gas station and pick them up there. You could go to their job and arrest them at their job. There are a lot of other creative ways to solve this problem. However, like typical Americans, we have chosen to dissolve it with more firepower, right, well, we're just gonna open the door and we're gonna bust in there and we're gonna get them. Versus just following them down the street and picking them up when they go for their morning walk with their dog. The problem, of course, is that that takes more thinking and thinking isn't something that government employees are exactly well known for. As I mentioned, even if we were to keep that 0.1% of no-knock warrants in place, we need to end entirely across the country any kind of nighttime or pre-dawn, if you will, raid. That needs to stop entirely because if someone comes into my house before the sun comes up, you better believe I'm gonna start shooting. For you on a personal note, I think this is a good idea to secure your door with something more than just a deadbolt. Had they had some kind of door bar or a night lock or something else to secure that door, the police would not have been in there. No door, of course, is impregnable. However, it does give you more time when you have more added barriers on the door. So that's just something to think about for your home security plan. You might ask Dylan, why would I need that? I mean, I'm a good guy, I didn't do anything wrong. Well, believe it or not, police officers raid the wrong house from time to time and hey, you might just not be lucky. It'd be very much better if you had something extra to secure your door so that you can have a conversation with the police and they can figure out they're in the wrong place. At the end of the day, I wanna say that everybody, the police officers, the citizens, were all victims of a really bad policy. The war on drugs, like I said, is a failed war that we need to completely give up and move on with life. In addition to that, this is just a bad policy that has expanded beyond its original intent. And because it has expanded beyond its original intent, both the police officers are victims because if you became a cop in the last 20, 30 years, you grew up thinking this is normal and you have authority to do this and you're told and trained that this is what we do and this is how we handle that problem. Again, a bad policy driving your entire thinking as a police officer. As citizens, of course, we're victims of a bad policy because then they come and no knock raid your house or your cousin's house or whatever or your friend's house who you just happened to be sleeping over at. A lot of people are gonna say, hey, we need to end no knock warrants and I 100% agree with that. However, I wanted to talk about the reasons and purposes behind that because I think that when you understand the why, it makes much more sense. At the end of the day, if I'm a police officer or if you're a police officer, of course the best thing that you would like is a partnership between the population that you're policing and yourself. If there's a good relationship between police officers and the communities, then of course everything's gonna be better and then when you need to go pick up John Smith down the way because he's suspected of whatever crime, you know John, you know where he lives, you know where he works and picking him up isn't such a big deal. You don't need to do a Waco-style raid that ends in lots and lots of problems for everybody. I hope that gives you a little bit more to chew on and a little bit more to think about when it comes to no knock raids. Do brave deeds and endure.