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Peace at any cost is a prelude to war!
Cops Seek Safest Ways To Seize Kids
Associated Press Online - April 30, 2000 12:49
By DAVID BRISCOE
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Police agencies, which rarely take children with a show of
force, say they cannot recall anything like the Immigration and
Naturalization Service operation that removed 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez from
his relatives' home using an armed assault team.
Law enforcement officials regularly face the decision of how and when to use
guns to take innocent kids into custody. While few officers openly criticize
the capture of Elian at gunpoint, they always look for nonviolent options.
Local police, who handle dangerous domestic disputes daily, avoid either a
show of force or use of force whenever they can. Most of the time, they don't
have to go in with guns drawn.
"What you've got is a child with a warrant out on him, and when is the next
time that that is going to happen?" asked Lt. Lester Bell, head of a county
Crimes Against Children unit in Georgia. Federal agents used an alien arrest
warrant that declared Elian "in violation of the immigration laws" and a
search warrant to enter the Miami house and remove the 6-year-old on April
21.
Even immigration agents, who pursue illegal aliens of all ages, have never
had to use such force to take a child, acknowledged spokeswoman Maria
Cardona.
"We serve search warrants all the time, but it's the first time we've had to
serve a search warrant to relatives who have remained unwilling to abide by
INS instructions," she said.
Still, Cardona said, the agency has enforcement agents around the country
ready to stage a similar raid if necessary.
The danger of the action was cited by family members and others in accusing
Attorney General Janet Reno of risking the boy's life to appease Cuban leader
Fidel Castro.
The Clinton administration denies that. Polls show most American cheer the
return of the boy to his father. And children's rights groups applaud both
the result and the method.
"We need Janet Reno to go into a thousand homes this week," said David L.
Levy of the Children's Rights Council. "Elian is but the tip of the iceberg."
Pamela S. Stuart-Mills, director of Parental Alienation Syndrome Research
Foundation, said she has witnessed abduction cases where authorities faced
armed guards.
But rarely, if ever, has the nation witnessed live, recorded, or in still
photographs the taking of a child with such force as the Miami operation.
Even with real-life police shows nightly taking viewers along in patrol cars,
the image of a little boy inches from the barrel of a fearsome automatic
rifle still shocked the country.
In 13 years, the nationally syndicated TV show "COPS" has never shown a child
taken at gunpoint from an adult, its producers say. COPS cameras have never
gone with immigration agents, but they have followed local police in several
U.S. cities, as well as Russia, Britain and Hong Kong.
But the show does catch children in criminal circumstances. In a recent
episode, an officer finds two toddlers outside a motel room door, their
grandmother asleep inside.
In such child neglect cases, adults rarely battle police to keep the kids.
But kidnappers, hijackers, robbers, rapists and violent parents often use
guns, and police face a hard choice.
Some are reluctant to discuss possible tactics, and others don't want to
appear critical of the INS. Asked how Seattle police would remove a child
from a home in a custody case, spokesman Clem Benton said, "We're not going
to touch that one ... We're not going to criticize other agencies or offer
any kind of comment in that area."
But police officials willing to describe their operations, said they nearly
always talk first.
In Cobb County, Ga., officers are not likely to call ahead but wouldn't come
in the middle of the night, said Bell, the children's crime unit commander.
He recalled an unpublicized case four years.
"We had an individual belonging to a paramilitary group. He had his house
fenced, with dogs, and was not sending his kids to school and was feeding
them only once a day. We had to go in and get those kids," Bell said.
Five officers were sent in - two in plainclothes, three in uniform.
"We ended up talking him into letting us in," Bell said.
Not all such confrontations end peacefully. Eighteen children were among the
80 people killed in what the government calls a mass suicide of fire and
gunfire after the FBI lobbed tear gas into the Branch Davidian cult compound
in Waco, Texas, seven years ago.
Stories of a deranged parent killing his or her children, usually followed by
a suicide, are more common than stories of police putting childrens' lives in
danger in custody cases.
Dave Wagner, deputy district attorney for California's Orange County, said he
could recall no SWAT-style raid to pick up a kid.
"Our investigators are armed but usually carry their weapons underneath their
clothing. They select the amount of force necessary to do the job and make
sure no one is hurt," Wagner said.
In Chicago, police spokesman Pat Camden doesn't recall anything similar to
the Elian incident, and the force has no specially trained unit for child
recovery.
If such a mission were necessary, "what we would end up using is our hostage,
barricade and terrorist teams," said Camden.
Police departments reveal little about such units, but they are basically
paramilitary-style outfits, with special training. In Chicago that training
doesn't include anything like going into a house and snatching a kid at
gunpoint, said Camden.
Among the most dangerous cases involving children are kidnappings, handled by
the FBI.
But even the FBI has no child rescue unit, said Chicago bureau spokesman Ross
Rice. Kidnappings for ransom are now rare in America, he said. Most involve
adults and drugs and don't lead to the need to break into a house to recover
a child.
---
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