That’s what it sounded like if you were at this week’s city council meeting when the Granger family expressed their discontent with the way the police department handled a raid on their home. The Grangers were allowed to go way beyond the three minute limit, taking up about the first half hour of the city council meeting, and then the city council, without hearing anything from the police department–the chief was not at Wednesday’s meeting, agreed to the unprecedented measure of paying for damages to the home made during the raid.

It may have been a good decision, maybe not, but I think they should have waited for an investigation to be completed. Even a basic investigation by the Courier and Herald revealed that the police were not looking for guns but had a warrant for a specific person with a gun, the Grangers’s grandson, who police believe live at the home, something the Granger’s deny. Either the Grangers were not told during the raid who the warrant was for–they did have a copy of the warrant in their hands, however, at the city council meeting–or they failed to mention it. The way they described it, the police were looking for guns, as though they were illegal to own.

There are really two separate issues in this case, the raid and the hurdles the police department allegedly put in the way of the Grangers filing a complaint. A raid is not done casually. I expect that our police department does its homework before it goes through the effort of planning a raid, getting the signature of a judge, and executing what can be a very risky procedure. On the matter of the raid, I give the benefit of the doubt to the police department. The latter issue, the hurdles of filing a complaint, is more important. Nobody should have to endure what the Granger’s allegedly endured, and if an investigation verifies what the Grangers reported to the city council, serious punitive measures are in order for those officers who failed to abide by the rules and procedures of the Elgin police department.

Filed under: citycouncil, politics.
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