US Army Raids Wrong Boston Hotel Room

[TGS]

Another example in mistake of address, which could be reported in the papers as follows:

"A Hundred Federal Agents Raid 2 Wrong Houses in Small Cul-de-Sac"

We were on a warrant in a poor, rural area of a southern state. We hit our first house and our subject wasn't there, but the person there told us where the target was. So we go to that next house and have a local TFO do the reconnaissance on the target house. We can't figure out which lot in this community is our target; everything is unlabelled. It's a dirt road nestled back in the woods, with about 6-8 houses on it clustered in close proximity. A local sheriff's deputy with us tells us that he's familiar with the community and that the last one is our target, so we walk up and they answer the door and a peaceful arrest is made. At the same time, we were walking up to 2 other houses that are clearly, from our perspective, on the same lot: they are clustered near our target house, and look to be on the same lot, separated from the road and other houses by the same fence as the target house, and use the same driveway (of you could call it that) as the target house. More notably, several vehicles out of the 24 present are vehicles that are on our seizure list, belonging to our target, and several of those are parked up against those outlying structures. They appear to be outlying structures in the same lot, you might refer to them as mother-in-law suites.

While waiting for our telephonic search warrant for the new location from the judge, the case agent tells us that those other outlying structures are completely separate lots, not owned by the target. Woops. That could've been written in a completely different light by the press looking to make a headline, but I challenge any of you to point out how we didn't act reasonably and within good faith given the information we had at the time. It was complete dumb luck that we walked up to the right house on that property and didn't detain a completely uninvolved person who was living on, technically, a different piece of property according to county records. By the end of the day my 10-agent team had gathered about 70 LEOs total from other warrant teams which had already wrapped up, to help execute the search warrant on what we thought was going to be a giant multi-building operation. That's a lot of dudes with guns who, to the average person, appear at first sight to be making incursions on the 4th Amendment rights of totally uninvolved parties living at different addresses...anyone here reading the imaginary news paper would react, "How could they be so stupid!?"

So, it's not always as clear cut and easy as your daily life might lead you to believe. We ran into the same exact issues when I was in EMS, as well.

[TDA]

I’m not sure where in the CNN story you were getting that the Boston Police Department weren’t informed. [/B]

Fair enough, CNN doesn't say that, but I think that's the what they wanted to imply. Or possibly CNN is bad at reporting. I should know better, but for example Boston News Channel 7 said:

"The FBI said Boston police were called to confirm the situation was a training exercise."

https://whdh.com/news/delta-pilot-mi...ning-exercise/

[HCM]

Fair enough, CNN doesn't say that, but I think that's the what they wanted to imply. Or possibly CNN is bad at reporting. I should know better, but for example Boston News Channel 7 said:

"The FBI said Boston police were called to confirm the situation was a training exercise."

https://whdh.com/news/delta-pilot-mi...ning-exercise/

Most major cities have DHS grant funded intel fusion centers hosted by the largest local PD. If it be cop, encounters, someone claiming to be from some type of Occie/secret squirrel organization the first thing they’re going to do is call their own Fusion Center / intel unit because if anyone’s gonna know it’ll be the fusion guys.

Also, worth pointing out that while the military conducts overt exercises like the ones in the little bird photos, they train for lower visibility operations too.

As mentioned, there are all sorts of ways they could have wound up at the wrong hotel room and the person they would be looking for in the training scenario would likely be an outside role player not previously known to them.

[Dr_Thanatos]

https://edition.cnn.com/2002/US/02/24/soldier.killed/

Deputy kills soldier during Green Beret exercise

February 24, 2002 Posted: 9:49 PM EST (0249 GMT)

ROBBINS, North Carolina (CNN) -- A sheriff's deputy mistakenly shot and killed a U.S. soldier and seriously wounded another taking part in a role-playing field training exercise, the Moore County Sheriff's Department said Sunday.

That was a bad day at work

[Hemiram]

I'm friends with 3 retired cops, and the stories they have, and on the videos on YT about cops going to the wrong address so often just amaze me. There's a recent one where they went to the wrong address, when the number, in like 4" high digits, is on both the curb, AND above the garage. They were also on the wrong side of the street! Odds on one side, evens on the other. The correct address was on the warrant, it's mentioned over the air several times, the raid was in the daytime, and they still got it wrong. Luckily, in the incident above, nobody was hurt, just embarrassed when the old grandmother had her lunch disturbed by police screaming (Why do they do that?) "Where is ____ _____?". Of course, she had no idea who they were talking about, since they were at the wrong house, a block away and across the street from the correct house. The only injuries were to the front door the cops kicked in. They could have knocked and found out easily they were at the wrong house. What was the guy wanted for? FTA for some sort of minor fight at a bar. Simple assault. Why a big raid for something so minor? I think the answer is they like putting their gear on and playing "combat".

Yeah, sometimes the addresses are all mixed up on a street, a friend lives on one where they jump all over, or used to. But when a place has the number on the garage or whatever, what is the excuse? Laziness, just a "whatever" attitude? I don't get it.

On a happier note, I used to work in a Las Vegas hotel. One time, we had a ton of tourist buses come from LA with a few hundred people all together. Mostly retirees from city/county govt. One woman, about 65 and her daughter 43, said they didn't feel well (They had spent hours walking around downtown LV without any real water comsumption, in August). The hotel manager had a room that a bus driver had slept in only one of the two beds, and she gave it to the women to lay down in until they felt better, or it was time to get back onto the bus. Well, somehow, nobody told the incoming second shift desk clerk that that room was being occupied by the mother and daughter. The couple who was rented the room went upstairs, and opened the door to find both the mother and daughter naked. The mother was just coming out of the shower, when the door opened up. The bellhop saw them too. I was in the lobby, and the daughter's scream was from the 4th floor, but sounded like it was right above my head. "OH MY GOD!, GET OUT GET OUT!!". I go up there, and the mother is in the hallway, wrapped up in a towel, yelling at the couple and the bellhop. The daughter is in the room, curled up in the fetal position on the bed, still naked, blubbering. The mother started yelling at me, the couple did too. Why? I don't know. The hotel manager was called, she just came right back. The mother and daughter got comped a few days with food at the hotel restaurant included, along with a free Greyhound bus ticket back to LA about 4 days later. After that incident, any room occupied for any reason had a big red flag put on it on the desk "panel", so it wouldn't happen again. And yet it did. I wasn't there to see it though.

[Coyotesfan97]

I was in our Tactical Unit for twenty five years between SWAT and K9. I never put on my heavy gear thinking I was going to play “combat”. I guess unless if you consider “combat” to be standing outside in 115 degrees for hours wearing heavy shit, listening to the negotiations drag on, and waiting for the warrant to be signed. If anything you knew it was time for your low frequency/high risk game.

ETA I can only remember us going to the wrong place several times in 25 years. We had a pretty stringent scout system that got updated as needed. I’ll detail them in a later post.

[TGS]

I was in our Tactical Unit for twenty five years between SWAT and K9. I never put on my heavy gear thinking I was going to play “combat”. I guess unless if you consider “combat” to be standing outside in 115 degrees for hours wearing heavy shit, listening to the negotiations drag on, and waiting for the warrant to be signed. If anything you knew it was time for your low frequency/high risk game.

ETA I can only remember us going to the wrong place several times in 25 years. We had a pretty stringent scout system that got updated as needed. I’ll detail them in a later post.

Wearing body army is playing combat.

Because real men just like getting shot, instead.

[HCM]

Wearing body army is playing combat.

Because real men just like getting shot, instead.

“A real warrior would like to go to combat with a weapon, a loin cloth and a light coat of oil.”

- Mr. George W. Solhan, SES ... Director, Marine Corps S&T.

[Wise_A]

These things are ALWAYS DeConflicted with local agencies. I however, in a large city, just because “the agency” knows doesn’t mean every cop or dispatcher on duty knows.

Total lack of trust is real. I get it in large, underfunded agencies where dispatchers are paid less than some places pay burger flippers and have to hire what they can get. I'm not that and not even my supervisor is informed of low-level Sekrit Squirrel activities unless the guy that runs narcotics investigations tells me to sit on suspicious vehicle complaints in an area. It makes sense that the less people that know, the less information accidents can take place, but at a certain point you're shooting yourself in the foot. It's not that hard to put a piece of paper on my desk. Nobody liked it that time I pointed out how we had two units over 100 because of a "prowler" that was one of our guys, or how not knowing these things forces dispatch to play catch-up when some guy could be bleeding out on the floor.

I think that it's the result of dogshit communication in general, and a bizarre lack of redundancy and confirmation in an industry that typically lives and breathes by it.

Also, I find it abso-fucking-lutely hilarious that a bunch of guys pulling down the good money with much better retirements than me couldn't figure out how to confirm an address properly, which is the most basic and very first skill I teach a new hire in my line of work.

[Hemiram]

I was in our Tactical Unit for twenty five years between SWAT and K9. I never put on my heavy gear thinking I was going to play “combat”. I guess unless if you consider “combat” to be standing outside in 115 degrees for hours wearing heavy shit, listening to the negotiations drag on, and waiting for the warrant to be signed. If anything you knew it was time for your low frequency/high risk game.

ETA I can only remember us going to the wrong place several times in 25 years. We had a pretty stringent scout system that got updated as needed. I’ll detail them in a later post.

There should be some sort of system in place to prevent screw ups like wrong or really out of date addresses, but it seems like that's not common. Or it's ignored. When they go to the wrong house, on the wrong side of the street, or in some cases, the wrong street entirely, someone messed up, badly. I used to get mail for the house down the street from me, even though I was on the odd side, he was on the even. At least the number was close. Every mail carrier we had over almost 40 years did it. I don't know how many times I would leave for work and stop at the neighbor's house to put their main into the mailbox as I left. The names weren't similar, but it happened again and again. I don't get why, but it got to the point it was comical.

When I say "play combat", I don't mean when there is someone barricaded in a house, or a high risk suspect. It's when someone has a warrant out for a FTA on some minor thing, like a traffic ticket, and 20 guys show up in full gear, in their APC. One YT video I saw recently was a deal where the person they were looking for hadn't lived there for years(The current owners were easily found on google and the local tax site). They drove right through the gate instead of asking to come in, and even though it was late morning, they had their night vision gear on. The couple living there told them that the person they were looking for hadn't lived there for many years, but they seemed sure they were there, even though the house had changed ownership TWICE since the wanted guy's parents owned it, about 15 years ago. What was the charge? FTA for a speeding ticket and suspended license. 20 guys in full battle gear with shotguns and ARs? For that? At first I thought maybe they had problems with him getting violent in the past, but apparently, his entire record was traffic stuff, like no insurance and speeding. Knocking down the gate was a douchy move too, IMHO. Yeah, I guess they paid to fix it, but I bet it wasn't paid quickly. I don't understand the over the top raid they did at all. Kind of like the response we got at the hotel I worked at when a guest threatened suicide. Eight cars, a dozen cops, and he's sitting on the bed, eating Fritos as they knocked the door in. The PD refused to pay for the door, saying they didn't have the key. No kidding, but I DID, and I was right there, waiting to hand someone the key. The whole thing was pretty funny, but the hotel manager was not happy, as it was one of our most expensive rooms, and since they carted him off to the hospital, we got screwed on the room entirely. About 2 years later, that guy did commit suicide at the Mint, I think it was, by jumping out the window. When one of my coworkers was shot, the response by LVMPD was less than the half assed suicide "attempt".