Prince Georges county (PG county or "piggy" county to you out-of-staters) is a highly schizophrenic place. There is the PG county of bedroom suburbs of Washington, DC; places like College Park and Silver Spring. Bowie and Laurel. But much of the county sits hard against the worst and most crime-ridden Wards of DC. Places with names like Suitland and Capitol Heights. High-crime places.
But now, thanks to the PG County Sheriffs Department, the phenomena of increasingly militarized and out of control local police forces has come home to Maryland.
Don't believe me? Ask the mayor of Berwyn Heights. He's seen it, up close and personal.
When the shooting stopped, two dogs lay dead. A mayor sat in his boxers, hands bound behind his back. His handcuffed mother-in-law was sprawled on the kitchen floor, lying beside the body of one of the family pets that police had killed before her eyes.Apology? APOLOGY?!?!?! We're the Law! We don't have to apologize.
After the raid, Prince George's County police officials who burst into the home of Berwyn Heights' mayor last week seized the same unopened package of marijuana that an undercover officer had delivered an hour earlier.
What police left behind was a house stained with blood and a trail of questions about their conduct. No other evidence of illegal activity was found, and no one was arrested at Mayor Cheye Calvo's home in this small bedroom community near College Park.
This week Prince George's police arrested two men for orchestrating a plot to deliver marijuana to the addresses of unsuspecting recipients -- among them, Calvo's wife, Trinity Tomsic.
Yet neither county Police Chief Melvin C. High nor Sheriff Michael A. Jackson have apologized to him, his wife or her mother, Georgia Porter, for the raid that traumatized the family and killed their black Labrador retrievers, Payton and Chase.
Mayor Calvo is calling for a Federal investigation of the invasion. Good luck there, Mayor. Who do you think it was that provided all of those neat toys for destroying homes to the PG County Sheriffs Department in the first place?
Apparently the PG County Sheriffs Department likes to get their aggression on versus family pets.
In once such case, Prince George's sheriff's deputies executed a warrant on the home of Frank and Pamela Myers of Accokeek in November. The Myers told sheriffs that they had the wrong address as their dog began barking from the yard. The couple asked if they could retrieve their dog, but deputies refused. Minutes later, two shots were fired and the dog was killed, according to a notice of a tort claims filed by attorney Michael J. Winkelman. The Myers were never charged and nothing was seized from their house.So, what's it going to take before the sheeple are sufficiently roused to decry this Cops-vs-Citizens war that the Federales have fueled? Is it when the Stoßtruppen move beyond killing pets to killing homeowners? Oh, I'm sorry. They're already there in some parts of the country.
Wake up, people! The next house the Stoßtruppen crash could be yours!
