Wizardpc over at has a nice writeup about the Jose Guerena murder after reading the Pima County Sheriff’s Department interview of the SWAT supervisor. All in all it appears as through a combination of unfortunate events and bullshit lead to the state murdering an innocent man.
The SWAT team claims that they were using this raid as a training session which is why it appeared to be disorganized on the released video (that’s what people claim, I don’t know enough about SWAT team operations to know a disorganized raid from an organized one). At the same time the SWAT team viewed Mr. Guerena as some kind of epic killing machine for the drug cartels. Mr. Guerena on the other hand had suspicions that drug cartel members were targeting him so he suspected a potential for home invasion.
Reading that it seems to me that the SWAT team is either lying about the potential threat they thought Mr. Guerena posed or that this raid was viewed as a good training exercise. It would seem to me that you shouldn’t send an inexperienced team to deal with somebody who you assumed would be an extremely dangerous man.
Although some would view this interview as shedding light on the situation it I feel is created more questions than answers. Why did the SWAT team members put so much fire down towards Mr. Guerena without him so much as firing a shot? Why was a no knock raid even authorized in the first place (why are they ever authorized really)? Who thought it was a good idea to use a coordinated raid as training? Why is every other word out of their mouths during the interview either “um” or “uh?” OK that last question really isn’t valid to the topic at hand it just bothered me as I read through it.
No matter how you look at it this situation blows. An innocent man was killed all in the name of our stupid war on drugs.