[HanClinto]

I'm amazed at the number of people who are answering "this is just the way that it is in America".

I don't live in Adams County, but they are our direct neighbors here in rural southwest Ohio. We like Afroman over here. :)

I think the answer to your question is the warrant that they were serving involved kidnapping and an alleged torture dungeon along with drug trafficking charges. Yes, it may sound ridiculous on the surface, but an informant apparently testified to this and a judge approved it, so that's the warrant they were serving.

If one reads the warrant and considers the possibility that the testimony of the witness might have been true, then their show of force seems much less unreasonable.

Disconnecting his cameras? Stealing his money? That's absolutely not reasonable in any case. Afroman has a lot of support in our rural Ohio community, and we're all cheering for him. :)

[jrflowers]

I want to point out that no, the contents of the warrant are in no way “the reason” for this type of raid. It is factually untrue to use that detail to suggest in any way that this is not business as usual in the US.

I cannot stress enough how factually untrue the comment I’m responding to is - it is more of a prayer than a description of the reality of policing in the United States. At best what GP meant to say is that to the best of their knowledge this usually doesn’t happen in the sparsely populated handful of square miles that they’re familiar with in the time that they have lived there and mistakenly given the impression that it is categorically uncommon in the US.

It is business as usual for the entirety of the country, though it’s I guess fun for the locals (?) to see some “torture dungeon” flavor thrown in there by a ‘witness’ that the public will definitely never hear from.

Finding examples of this is trivial. It happens all the time and if Afroman were not famous this would not have risen to the level of national news. It’s even somewhat common for raids like these to happen where they get the address wrong and raid the wrong house.

[HanClinto]

> I cannot stress enough how factually untrue the comment I’m responding to is

Which fact did I report incorrectly?

I was not answering the question in generalities. I was answering the question that asked for specifics about this case ("why so many drawn guns? Fun music videos aside, what was the background here?"). The answer: serving a warrant for kidnapping and drug trafficking.

You may disagree with my :opinion: (that armed response during the serving of a warrant for kidnapping is reasonable, or that the cops should not have disconnected his cameras), but you can't just claim that I'm lying about the facts of this case and then not bring receipts.

[beepbopboopp]

Its not even police specific.

In any game, if one side has 10x more accountability for misbehavior than the other, the low consequence side will keep testing boundaries until they are stopped.

[johnnyanmac]

>but an informant apparently testified to this and a judge approved it, so that's the warrant they were serving.

And will they face repercussions for such an obviously false lead? You need a lot more than an "informant" to verify a search warrant. Especially under a local celebrity who has all kinds of people out there who want to harass them.

[markdown]

Sounds like swatting.

[embedding-shape]

"an informant apparently testified to this and a judge approved it" sounds very far away from what I understand "swatting" to mean normally.

[markdown]

AFAIK we have no idea if an informant testified to it, or even if there was an informant. Cops claimed that someone had told them about it, and the judge signed the warrant.

Swatting is the action or practice of making a hoax call in an attempt to bring about the dispatch of a large number of armed police officers to a particular address"

Either there was an informant, and the false claim was made to a police officer, or there was not informant, and the cop made a false claim to the judge. Either way, the intent was to get cops to show up and screw with Afroman, and that goal was achieved.

[HanClinto]

I agree with you. It might not be "swatting" in the crank call sense, but it definitely feels like malicious lying (on the part of _someone_) to harass or cause injury through police action. So yeah, definitely feels like swatting to me too.