Lest anyone think that Minneapolis has a monopoly on stupid search warrant executions, consider the thoughtful approach of the Buffalo police.  It was a textbook execution of a search warrant, according to the Buffalo News.  With shotguns poised for business, they battered the door of the lower apartment of a family of eight in search of heroin.

The problem is that the Wednesday evening raid should have occurred at an apartment upstairs.

And, that’s only the tip of the iceberg, according to Schavon Pennyamon, who lives at the mistakenly raided apartment on Sherwood Street with her husband, Terrell, and six children.

Pennyamon alleges that after wrongly breaking into her apartment, police proceeded to strike her epileptic husband in the head with the butt end of a shotgun and point shotguns at her young children before admitting their mistake and then raiding the right apartment.

Rule number 3 of executing search warrants:  Read the address on the warrant. 

Breaking down the door, harming the occupants and traumatizing the children is generally viewed as negative thing by most law-abiding people.  Especially Schavon Pennyamon, who had just moved to the apartment a few weeks earlier to escape a crime-ridden neighborhood.  She said that the police were ignorant and rude.  Hard to imagine what made her feel that way.

Police brass acknowledge that officers with the Mobile Response and Narcotics units entered the wrong apartment.

“As the officers were in the lower apartment, one of the detectives reviewed the search warrant application and realized it was for the upper [apartment],” said Dennis J. Richards, chief of detectives.

“It appears to be an honest mistake and we certainly apologize to all involved,” added Michael J. DeGeorge, Buffalo police spokesman.

How does one define an “honest mistake?”  That they didn’t break into the apartment for the purpose of “getting” the Pennyamons?  That’s likely true, though Schavon has doubts: 

She says officers told her they had “raided the house before” and she believes they felt entitled to do it again — warrant or not.  “The way they make it seem is ‘we can do whatever we want,’ ” she said.

But when given the authority to take actions as extreme as this, would it be too much to expect them to “review” the search warrant before they execute the search warrant?

There are numerous variables that can result in a raid of the wrong premise, despite competent and thorough efforts to avoid it.  The system is designed to address these variables, with the judge supposedly determining the validity of the warrant affidavit, its staleness, the veracity and reliability of the informant. 

The one variable that should never happen, that’s wholly inexcusable, is that the cops don’t bother to check the address before the execution.  This is not an “honest mistake.”  This is abject incompetence.  It seems that Schavon’s assessment, ignorant and rude, hits the bullseye.

And to add insult to injury, when the police raided the right apartment, they came up empty.