Cops Raid Co-op For Raw Milk With Pistols Drawn

A co-op in Venice, California was raided recently with authorities looking for raw milk.

With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.

Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

Emphasis mine.





You can go to the site linked above and watch video from the co-op's surveillance camera of the police officers wandering the aisles with pistols drawn from which the still above was taken.

Did the police really anticipate such resistance that they had to have lethal force at the ready? I was reminded of a post regarding Chicago's gun registration laws at a blog by a member of the CPD. It is about the city's concern for emergency responders entering homes where residents have firearms. The writer says:

Any officer who goes into a home not thinking there might be a gun inside is forgetting one basic tenet of policing - THERE IS ALWAYS A GUN THERE. AND YOU BROUGHT IT.

Exactly. This is no doubt a great reminder for police officers but it's also important for us citizens. Any time you have an interaction with a police officer, there is lethal weaponry present and it's the police that have brought it.