According to court records, a confidential informant with a criminal record told investigators that the woman “used a hiding place to hide drugs and liked to use rural areas.”

This is more or less evidence from a provincial joint force agency called the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team (ALERT) to show evidence to the judge to obtain a search warrant.

A week later, on a cold morning, at 7 o’clock in the morning, the police rushed into Bennett’s home.

Bennett and his partner Jennifer Hack said that an officer in commando equipment slammed a door and smashed a window in the living room with an armored vehicle.

“Suddenly, you heard the sound of’bang, bang, bang’ coming from the house,” Huck recalled in an interview last week. “It sounds like we were shot. They shot our house as tear gas.” She said the officials also detonated a stun grenade.

Watch | “There is a big car like a tank in my yard”:

As their home was filled with suffocating smoke, Bennett and Huck escaped to their garage. They opened the door outside, and a team of tacticians greeted them with guns at their heads.

“This is surreal,” Huck said. “It’s like something in a movie. It’s just surrounded. No one knocks, no one uses a megaphone. No one.”

“Like, I’m not Pablo Escobar, you know,” Bennett said. “All they have to do is knock on the door.”

“Where is methamphetamine?”

In Canada, paramilitary non-knocking police raids should be rare. by lawBefore executing a search warrant, the police usually need to “knock on the door and announce”-knock on the door, announce their presence as police officers, and wait a reasonable amount of time for someone to answer.

But investigators can also decide for themselves when there is an “emergency”—worrying about safety or the possible destruction of evidence—to make them deviate from the rule. An ongoing CBC News investigation found that only in the country’s six largest police forces, this happens hundreds of times a year in Canada, but there is no data on how often drugs or weapons were actually found in raids or that led to allegations. .

After the police handcuffed and took Bennett and Hacker to the waiting police car, they were taken to the Calgary Police Headquarters for 3.5 hours and interrogated.

“They asked,’Where is methamphetamine? Where is the hard drug?'” Bennett recalled.

“I said,’Okay, my drugs are downstairs in the basement.’ I have a backpack with marijuana that Jen uses to sleep at night. They came out of the investigation room and said,’We don’t care about marijuana, what about hard drugs? ‘”

As part of the same police investigation, another police squad raided the home of Bennett’s acquaintances in northwest Calgary, the house he was under surveillance a week ago. Investigators said they found half a kilogram of cocaine, 253 grams of methamphetamine, 25 grams of fentanyl and 6 kilograms of marijuana there. They charged her with drugs and weapons.

Bennett told CBC that, in fact, he did visit the lady and purchased 4 ounces (113 grams) of marijuana for his partner. He said that his partner had medical marijuana authorization. But he said that was two weeks ago. He said that a week before the raid, he came back and took some of the Lululemon sportswear she sold and put them in a black trash bag. The surveillance photo of him carrying a garbage bag is one of the evidence cited by the police to persuade the judge to grant a search warrant for his home.

Nothing was found in Bennett and Hacker’s home. They were released without any charges.

Watch | The landlord says the damage caused by the police raid is estimated at $50,000:

Based on two different repair estimates shared by their landlord with CBC News, the damage to the house they rented was later estimated to exceed $50,000. The landlord hated the money, but he kept Bennett and Hacker’s damage deposit. The City of Calgary rejected the request for compensation, saying that the police’s strategy was “necessary” to execute the search warrant and that “the police officers acted in accordance with their duties without negligence.”

Defense lawyers say lack of data will hinder accountability

The Canadian Police Force did not release statistics on how many non-knocking raids they carried out each year. Therefore, CBC News filed a request for information with the country’s largest police department in an attempt to find out.

Among the police forces that provide numbers, the Quebec police Sûreté du Québec has the largest number: 143 times last year. Followed by the Ontario Provincial Police, ranking 85th. Police in Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver and London, Ontario also provided data.

The Toronto Police Department stated that this is too difficult to count because it needs to manually check every police officer’s notes in more than 500 search warrants executed last year.However, as early as 2012, a sergeant in the tactical unit of the army Testify They conduct nearly 200 non-percussion raids each year. A Toronto police spokesperson confirmed this week that there are still hundreds of people a year.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police stated that its tactical team deployed 99 times in 2019 and the first half of 2020 to obtain so-called high-risk warrants. But it cannot explain how many of these are non-knocking operations based on search warrants rather than arrest warrants for high-risk suspects.

The reason why the police do not knock on the door and make a surprise attack—sometimes called “dynamic entry” in the language of law enforcement agencies—is that the suspect may carry weapons and is dangerous, so police officers need to be surprised, or evidence such as drugs may be washed away The toilet, if they knock on the door first.

Critics say the problem is that tactical officials breaking into someone’s home without notice can be dangerous or even fatal for civilians. And the police The same, and it has caused deep trauma to any innocent people caught in it. Toronto criminal lawyer Erin Dann told CBC News earlier this year that not knowing how often weapons or drugs are actually found means that the effectiveness of the strategy cannot be balanced with these risks.

“The only person who can go to court is for the police to go in and actually find what they are looking for,” Dann said as he fought. Recent drug attack In the Ontario Court of Appeals. “So you have this distorted idea,’Look, every time we do this, we will find drugs.'”

“These strategies are indeed risky”

There are often raids without knocking on the door Serious impact For those who are under the most surveillance by the police. CBC News found that in the past 11 years, at least four people have died in non-knock searches, of which three were Man in black In Ontario with Quebec,one of them Is a man in London, Ontario Who fights with mental health issues.

Sergeant, a spokesperson for the Vancouver Police Department, said: “We recognize that these strategies do pose risks to the public and the police.” Steve Addison responded via email about his agency’s non-knocking raid. Said when the question of position.

He said that the VPD has no specific policies and admitted that they are sometimes “necessary to protect lives or protect evidence” when executing search warrants, but pointed out that the department has not actually conducted searches in the past two years.

“VPD has been very successful in collecting evidence and convictions in organized crime cases without using dynamic entries,” Addison said, citing other “investigative techniques” that he would not elaborate on.

CBC’s recent report Fifth Manor Emphasizes a series of non-knocking attacks in Ottawa, which stemmed from bad reminders or were considered to violate constitutional rights. In March, the police were there Move to strict but temporary restrictions practice. Police Chief Peter Sloly said that this should not affect the police’s ability to investigate cases.

Ottawa was the first Canadian force that officially announced the suspension of the execution of search warrants, most of which did not knock on the door assault operations. Many US police departments have already done so after the incident. The death of Brenna TaylorIn March last year, he was killed by police in a botched drug raid in Louisville, Kentucky.

The lawyer said that the evidence is equivalent to “douzishan”

Toronto defense attorney Kim Schofield, who has handled hundreds of cases involving search warrants, said police departments must begin to retain statistical data in order to properly assess non-knock attacks.

“In order for people to have confidence in the police…In order for them to be truly accountable, we must know, in fact, what they are doing.”

CBC News asked Scofield to evaluate the warrants of the Alberta police to search Bennett and Huck’s home last year. She said that, in her view, it was “completely unreasonable” for the police to break into the home, and the sworn evidence provided by the police to the provincial court judge was equivalent to “doushan.”

“In this case, first of all, [confidential informant’s] “She said, “The prompt is not compelling. Second, the extent to which it has been proven is very limited. “

She said this is an example of what the court sometimes calls “harmless and sinister.” The police tried to use more ominous terms to explain what might be completely normal behavior-such as carrying something in a trash bag or going to someone’s house.

In an e-mail to CBC News, the ALERT agency of the joint force that performed the operation stated that the judge did approve multiple search warrants and “seized a large amount of harmful drugs” in another household. Spokesperson Michael Tucker said that calling it a “false raid” would be an “unfair distortion of the ALERT investigation.”

After the raid, Huck and Bennett said that they had to live in a trailer on their property for a month while changing windows and doors, and spent a few days trying to wipe away tear gas residue from the house.

Bennett said: “I, my family and friends are using a rag to pour milk over our faces to clean the tear gas.”

They said they were so traumatized that they had to move and now live in Lethbridge in Alta. Huck said that she hadn’t driven for almost a year after that because she was worried that she might make a small mistake, be stopped, stopped by the police, and then triggered. She said she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and no longer trusts the police.

“Those people should protect me. Unfortunately, those people hurt me,” she said. “Ask questions and conduct proper investigations. I mean, it can ruin people’s lives. It really can.”