Florida Woman Says U.S. Marshals Pointed Guns At Her, Baby Daughter While Raiding Wrong Apartment
At this point, one can only wonder if cops just enjoy behaving like overly aggressive Neanderthals too much to learn from incidents that have become national stories.
For example, Breonna Taylor’s story involving a botched raid and a completely unnecessary shooting, as well as the unrest that followed, should have taught cops that they should probably err on the side of caution when conducting a raid on a home that has shown no immediate signs of danger—or at the very least, they should take the time to make sure they’re at the right home.
In Bradenton, Florida, U.S. Marshals arrived with guns drawn at the home of Kada Staples, a white woman who is probably lucky she isn’t Black because she got to walk away from a raid conducted by the cops who were reportedly searching for a murder suspect—at the wrong apartment.
“I cracked the door open and they pushed the door open and pushed me and my baby out of the way,” Staples told WFLA 8 while holding her three-month-old daughter. “They are holding us at gunpoint, screaming, there is a gun about a foot away from her face.”
Staples said the officers kept saying, “We know Jamar is in there,” even though no one of that name lived there.
“With that, they run in my apartment. There’s probably 6 or 7 of them out there with guns. three or four of them run into my apartment and are running around. They are still yelling at me that I’m lying,” she said.
Staples said she and her baby were taking a nap when the officers arrived and were alone in the apartment, but the officers were convinced their target was there—until they realized he wasn’t.
“Then one of the guys in the hallway is like, wait, this is apartment and then said my apartment number and then kind of repeated it again and then they ran out and said, that’s the wrong apartment,” Staples said. “No sorry, no nothing, they tell me, you’re good and another one said you’re fine.”
She also said she called the U.S. Marshals Service to ask how the hell this mixup even happened and if they could provide a mental health counselor to help her deal with the anxiety caused by the incident. She said she was told to “get over it.”
No part of this story would be particularly surprising to anyone who is Black, but especially not the part where the cops who just traumatized a mother and her infant acted like what they had done was no big deal.
Maybe the reason cops don’t learn from previous police mistakes is because they are so seldom held accountable for their actions.
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