Bounty Hunters kick in Istook jr's door

[Conan71]

Do you really expect to have some bondsman or his hired gun kicking in your door over a misdemeanor warrant you may not even be aware you have?

You'd know there's a warrant out for you.  These guys are collecting for the bail bondsmen, not the court.  These are people who are into a bail bondsman for $thousands, not some forgotten speeding ticket from 10 years ago.  We aren't talking about parking ticket scofflaws here.

I've ridden with a repo guy before and went to people's homes to collect when I worked in consumer lending many moons ago.  It could be an adrenaline rush, especially tracking down a deadbeat who had skipped on us.  But from that experience there's no way I'd ever have worked as a bounty hunter.  Hat's off to you Custo.

[swake]

When you sign up with a bail bondsman do you sign away your rights in some way? Is that how they can kick the door in without being prosecuted? How does bonding work?

[custosnox]

When you sign up with a bail bondsman do you sign away your rights in some way? Is that how they can kick the door in without being prosecuted? How does bonding work?

How it works is basically the bondsman is giving their word that you will be in court, and you are more or less released into their custody.  So in a sense, you do sign away a few rights (even though it's usually a loved one that originally signs).  If you fail to show for court, then that bondsman is responsible for getting you back to jail.

I've ridden with a repo guy before and went to people's homes to collect when I worked in consumer lending many moons ago.  It could be an adrenaline rush, especially tracking down a deadbeat who had skipped on us.  But from that experience there's no way I'd ever have worked as a bounty hunter.  Hat's off to you Custo.

I've done my time in the repo buisness, and I swear the people trying to keep you from taking their car tend to be a LOT more aggressive then those trying to stay out of jail.  The company I worked for didn't have a single truck that didn't have a bullet hole in it.  It was nuts.

[Breadburner]

If someone is kicking in my door and I dont see any evidence that there are uniformed police officers proximate, I would be in fear for my life, and I would be preparing to use whatever force is necessary to protect myself and family.

I would see that as no different than a home invasion,
and I would proceed under my understanding of the "stand your ground" law.

Please pull your head out...It would not matter how you see it, the court would see to it that everything you see from then on would be from behind bars....

[patric]

Please pull your head out...It would not matter how you see it, the court would see to it that everything you see from then on would be from behind bars....

So your solution is that I should open my door after midnight to someone aggressively kicking and pounding on it and just hope for the best?

[custosnox]

So your solution is that I should open my door after midnight to someone aggressively kicking and pounding on it and just hope for the best?

What else would you expect if you have skipped bail and know you have someone who is going to have to pay a lot of money if you don't go back to jail? 

[Red Arrow]

What else would you expect if you have skipped bail and know you have someone who is going to have to pay a lot of money if you don't go back to jail? 

So you are saying that bounty hunters have never made an address mistake.

[custosnox]

So you are saying that bounty hunters have never made an address mistake.

If you don't have warrants out for you and you have someone kicking in your door, then shoot first and ask questions later, plain and simple.  As far as making address mistakes, I've only known of one time hunters kicked in the wrong door (doesn't mean it hasn't happened a lot more), and because of that it has become very hard to get permission to go onto THA properties to look for someone.  Now mistaken identy has happened. Known of one twin that got picked up for the brothers warrents, and I almost grabbed a brother myself once.  Looked a lot alike.  But, when he told me he was the brother, I started checking The ID.

[patric]

If you don't have warrants out for you and you have someone kicking in your door, then shoot first and ask questions later, plain and simple.

As sad as that sounds, it's a lot more rational than acting like a sheep.

These guys have no licensing, accountability or in many cases recognized training, so could they get an address wrong?
Even the "experts" do that with regularity:
 


Chain of lies led to botched raid
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution

According to federal documents released Thursday, these are the events that led to Kathryn Johnston's death and the steps the officers took to cover their tracks.

Three narcotics agents were trolling the streets near the Bluffs in northwest Atlanta, a known market for drugs, midday on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
Eventually they set their sights on some apartments on Lanier Street, usually fertile when narcotics agents are looking for arrests and seizures.

Gregg Junnier and another narcotics officer went inside the apartments around 2 p.m. while Jason Smith checked the woods. Smith found dozens of bags of marijuana — in baggies that were clear, blue or various other colors and packaged to sell. With no one connected to the pot, Smith stashed the bags in the trunk of the patrol car. A use was found for Smith's stash 90 minutes later: A phone tip led the three officers to a man in a "gold-colored jacket" who might be dealing. The man, identified as X in the documents but known as Fabian Sheats, spotted the cops and put something in his mouth. They found no drugs on Sheats, but came up with a use for the pot they found earlier.

They wanted information or they would arrest Sheats for dealing.

While Junnier called for a drug-sniffing dog, Smith planted some bags under a rock, which the K-9 unit found.

But if Sheats gave them something, he could walk.

Sheats pointed out 933 Neal St., the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston. That, he claimed, is where he spotted a kilogram of cocaine when he was there to buy crack from a man named "Sam."
They needed someone to go inside, but Sheats would not do for their purposes because he was not a certified confidential informant.

So about 5:05 p.m. they reached out by telephone to Alex White to make an undercover buy for them. They had experience with White and he had proved to be a reliable snitch.
But White had no transportation and could not help.

Still, Smith, Junnier and the other officer, Arthur Tesler, according to the state's case, ran with the information. They fabricated all the right answers to persuade a magistrate to give them a no-knock search warrant.
By 6 p.m., they had the legal document they needed to break into Kathryn Johnston's house, and within 40 minutes they were prying off the burglar bars and using a ram to burst through the elderly woman's front door. It took about two minutes to get inside, which gave Johnston time to retrieve her rusty .38 revolver.

Tesler was at the back door when Junnier, Smith and the other narcotics officers crashed through the front.
Johnston got off one shot, the bullet missing her target and hitting a porch roof. The three narcotics officers answered with 39 bullets.

Five or six bullets hit the terrified woman. Authorities never figured out who fired the fatal bullet, the one that hit Johnston in the chest. Some pieces of the other bullets — friendly fire — hit Junnier and two other cops.
The officers handcuffed the mortally wounded woman and searched the house.

There was no Sam.
There were no drugs.
There were no cameras that the officers had claimed was the reason for the no-knock warrant.

Just Johnston, handcuffed and bleeding on her living room floor.

That is when the officers took it to another level. Three baggies of marijuana were retrieved from the trunk of the car and planted in Johnston's basement. The rest of the pot from the trunk was dropped down a sewage drain and disappeared.
The three began getting their stories straight.

The next day, one of them, allegedly Tesler, completed the required incident report in which he wrote that the officers went to the house because their informant had bought crack at the Neal Street address. And Smith turned in two bags of crack to support that claim.
They plotted how they would cover up the lie.

They tried to line up one of their regular informants, Alex White, the reliable snitch with the unreliable transportation.
The officers' story would be that they met with White at an abandoned carwash Nov. 21 and gave him $50 to make the buy from Neal Street.

To add credibility to their story, they actually paid White his usual $30 fee for information and explained to him how he was to say the scenario played out if asked. An unidentified store owner kicked in another $100 to entice White to go along with the play.

The three cops spoke several times, assuring each other of the story they would tell.
But Junnier was the first to break.

On Dec. 11, three weeks after the shooting, Junnier told the FBI it was all a lie.

[nathanm]

When they knock at your door for 20 minutes telling you that they are there to arrest you over a misdemeanor warrant . . . I would suppose so.

Even in my small home, there are plenty of places (say, in the shower, which I have been known to spend 20 minutes at a stretch in) I wouldn't be able to make out what someone at my front door was yelling at me, and if someone is yelling at my front door, there's little chance I'm opening it.

The point being that there are plausible circumstances in which one would not know the identity of an intruder despite them yelling at the front door.

The best scenario for the bounty hunter is that I call the police when I hear some lunatic pounding on my front door and they arrest me for failure to appear.

Not that I have any warrants out that I'm aware of, and I have paid all the tickets I've received.

[custosnox]

Even in my small home, there are plenty of places (say, in the shower, which I have been known to spend 20 minutes at a stretch in) I wouldn't be able to make out what someone at my front door was yelling at me, and if someone is yelling at my front door, there's little chance I'm opening it.

The point being that there are plausible circumstances in which one would not know the identity of an intruder despite them yelling at the front door.

The best scenario for the bounty hunter is that I call the police when I hear some lunatic pounding on my front door and they arrest me for failure to appear.

Not that I have any warrants out that I'm aware of, and I have paid all the tickets I've received.

Well, as I said, it's not just having warrents, it's skipping out on bail.  But, calling the police would work just as well, since if the bounty hunters play it right, they can still collect the bounty.

These guys have no licensing, accountability or in many cases recognized training, so could they get an address wrong?

This is a double edged sword.  On one side, a bunch of idiots tend to get into the field, on the other, screw up and you could be looking at serious legal trouble, depending on what has happened. That keeps most in line, but not all.

[cannon_fodder]

Hard to argue that they shouldn't be licensed somehow.  Think about it, you have to be licensed to hand over a document on behalf of the court (process server) but not to kick in a door and kidnap someone.  I imagine the more reputable bounty hunters would be OK with it, since it would give them some technical authority.

Then again, it might ruin the "wink wink" arrangement with law enforcement.

[custosnox]

I, for one, am all for licensing Bounty Hunters.  As it stands, the only law on the books (as far as I can find) is that any hunters out of state must be accompanied by a local bondsman.  But your right, I think the "wink wink" arrangement is part of the reason cops like hunters so much.

[patric]

Hard to argue that they shouldn't be licensed somehow.  Think about it, you have to be licensed to hand over a document on behalf of the court (process server) but not to kick in a door and kidnap someone.  I imagine the more reputable bounty hunters would be OK with it, since it would give them some technical authority.

Then again, it might ruin the "wink wink" arrangement with law enforcement.

When police departments redact police reports to cover their actions and identities (as in the case of the baby-tasering incident in OKC) the argument could be made that some sort of double-standard is in place.
Even if I were the king of unpaid parking tickets, I dont see where some self-proclaimed "lawman"
would have any real authority to take me from my home at gunpoint in the dead of night.

Things might change the day they mistakenly try to invade the home of a cop's family and there ends up being a body count.  It's just absurd to have something like unchecked bounty hunters in the 21st century.

[custosnox]

When police departments redact police reports to cover their actions and identities (as in the case of the baby-tasering incident in OKC) the argument could be made that some sort of double-standard is in place.
Even if I were the king of unpaid parking tickets, I dont see where some self-proclaimed "lawman"
would have any real authority to take me from my home at gunpoint in the dead of night.

Things might change the day they mistakenly try to invade the home of a cop's family and there ends up being a body count.  It's just absurd to have something like unchecked bounty hunters in the 21st century.

A couple of things on this, is first, bounty hunters in Oklahoma for the most part act on making citizens arrests, in a round about strange way.  And as stated before, they don't come after you simply because you have warrants out (if it was that way I would have tossed my ex's in every chance I got).