I can't say it much better than the Agitator did. Apparently they were worried that during the drug raid at his house he might flush the evidence.
Who knows, maybe they were administering a drug test...
The best part is the the quote from the article that states:
"Even if a raid doesn't turn up anything, presence and show of force sends a hard message to the neighborhood that gang and drug activity will not be tolerated."
GOOD! We don't want people thinking they have a right to privacy or freedom from unreasonable search. We want them fearing that the police could come in and beat them or make them piss themselves or otherwise humiliate and abuse them.
Seriously, it's despicable, disgusting, and horrible that in today's world we have people who are willing to accept the worst kinds of behavior from our police in the name of some "War on Drugs" or "War on Terror". Where are the conservatives calling out for a fundamental return to people's ability to be safe from this kind of abuse? Where are the conservatives who would have seen a photo like this from some place like East Germany or the Soviet Union and pointed and said "That's what's wrong with their thinking that the State is always right and the people have no liberties"? Where are the conservatives who really believed that to be conservative meant to be conservative on the role of government in people's lives not use the government to push their morally uptight socially repressive views on the rest of us.
How can it be wrong for a country like Belarus to throw its people in jail and abuse them while we let our cops run roughshod over the people in whole neighborhoods, locking up 1 in 6 Americans and subjecting them to all manner of abuse at the hands of the people that are ostensibly supposed to be protecting us?
-- UPDATE 1: Justin Cook, the photographer of the picture I had above contacted me and asked me to pull the picture. In part because he he said that my analysis of what was going on was underinformed (it was) and also because he didn't have written permission from the mother of the child in the picture to publish the photo. Based on those two facts and more out of how I know I would feel if a picture like that of one of my kids was being posted on the internet I took down the picture. I have more information about the raid that lead to the picture in the first place from Justin, and I'll post more about it in a bit.
