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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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I'd... argue otherwise.

It's especially bad here, where the alleged source was almost certainly a malicious or self-serving motivation behind the lurid claims, but a probable cause affidavit is just that: it's not a claim something must be wrong, but that someone could be wrong. Like a grand jury indictment, the standards for a search warrant are hilariously low, and the people signing it off and executing it have very close to cart blanche. Not everyone being searched will have evidence of a crime, and not everyone being investigated will be guilty, necessarily.

Which makes it a problem when these things are world-upending, without any valid need. There may well be a scenario that requires a six-person team with assault rifles. As with countless other examples such as Malinowski and going all the way back to Ken Ballew, it's very hard to understand what is benefit derived from those tactics here, which look to be optimizing for shock-and-awe at the cost of not just inconvenience to the suspect, but danger to the community and even alleged victims.

That's a criticism that sometimes is delivered with perfect hindsight or expecting clairvoyant police and judges, but I think it applies here even when considering the least convenient world. In an alternate universe where Foreman had been guilty and had dangerous control over kidnapped women, and had been at the residence at the time of the raid, this raid could have easily resulted in the kidnapped women turned into hostages or 'made incapable of testimony' at the first kick at the door.

This is a consideration police do take, before serving even far more strongly evidenced search or arrest warrants.

It's just really easy for them to not, when they're morons. My personal favorite example is the FBI leaking to press the location and time of the search of a suspected mad bomber, presumably not for the purpose of maximizing casualties if he went Molotov, but there's a long and storied set of examples. Some of that's bad-but-at-least-foreseeable motivations -- arrest warrants in particular tend to get served at home despite it being well-known to be dangerous as shit, because SCOTUS hasn't slapped down searches-while-executing-arrest nearly aggressively enough. A lot of it's just how things have always been done.

That's still not reason, alone, to keep doing it that way.