SWAT needs a swat

This angers me on so many levels:

Nearly a dozen members of a police SWAT team in western Colorado punched a hole in the front door and invaded a family's home with guns drawn, demanding that an 11-year-old boy who had had an accidental fall accompany them to the hospital, on the order of Garfield County Magistrate Lain Leoniak.

The boy's parents and siblings were thrown to the floor at gunpoint and the parents were handcuffed in the weekend assault, and the boy's father told WND it was all because a paramedic was upset the family preferred to care for their son themselves.

Someone, apparently the unidentified paramedic, called police, the sheriff's office and social services, eventually providing Leoniak with a report that generated the magistrate's court order to the sheriff's office for the SWAT team assault on the family's home in a mobile home development outside of Glenwood Springs, the father, Tom Shiflett, told [WorldNetDaily].
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According to friends of the family, Tom Shiflett, who has 10 children including six still at home, and served with paramedics in Vietnam, was monitoring his son's condition himself.

The paramedic and magistrate, however, ruled that that wasn't adequate, and dispatched the officers to take the boy, John, to a hospital, where a doctor evaluated him and released him immediately.

The accident happened during horseplay, Tom Shiflett told WND. John was grabbing the door handle of a car as his sister was starting to drive away slowly. He slipped, fell to the ground and hit his head, Shiflett said.

He immediately carried his son into their home several doors away, and John was able to recite Bible verses and correctly spell words as his father and mother, Tina, requested. There were no broken bones, no dilated eyes, or any other noticeable problems.

You get the basic gist of the story. The father decided not to go to the emergency room at that time for fear of the bills, something he absolutely has the right to refuse. One of the paramedics gets his boxers in a bunch and calls the police; then social services get brought in; then the SWAT team barges breaks* in. The boy is taken to the hospital where they "didn't find anything wrong with him."

First of all, this absolutely reeks of nanny-statism (Knock-knock: "Hi, we're the government, we're here to help, and can do a better job of it than you can!"). How this snowballed in to a SWAT confrontation with an unarmed (!) man and his family is something I hope the local residents don't let any of the officials involved forget for a long time. And just what did the nice sheriff have to say was his reasoning for sending in the para-military unit?

The sheriff said the decision to use SWAT team force was justified because the father was a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist" and had made threats and "comments" over the years.

However, the sheriff declined to provide a single instance of the father's illegal behavior. "I can't tell you specifically," he said.

"He was refusing to provide medical care," the sheriff said.

However, the sheriff said if his own children were involved in an at-home accident, he would want to be the one to make decisions on their healthcare, as did Shiflett.

"I guess if that was one of my children, I would make that decision," the sheriff said.

But he said Shiflett was "rude and confrontational" when the paramedics arrived and entered his home without his permission.

Not because of stockpiles of weapons and explosives; not because of a history of violence; not because of threats; but because of his political views and he was rude to the men who were not invited in to his house and who kept insisting on taking his son to the hospital even after they examined him and found nothing wrong!!!

*That's right, breaks in, as in the charge breaking and entering. You do know that even the Supreme Court found it illegal for these no-knock breaches to occur? Yet he we are. Just imagine: you're sitting at home on a weeknight, drifting off watching some TV. And then - BLAM! - your door gets kicked/punched in. There was no call-out, no knock at the door. And for those that think it can't happen to them because they don't break the law, think again.