No one has yet answered my previous diary's question
When Are You Allowed to Toss a FlashBang Grenade Into a Baby's Crib?
(Well,there's the obvious: "Any time you feel like it if you are a police officer." But beyond that...)
Today there is good news out of Georgia for the child and his family.
Bou Bou Phonesavanh, the two year-old boy rendered comatose after a SWAT team threw a grenade in his crib as part of a drug sting gone wrong has been released from the hospital, and is able to walk and talk... the hole in his chest hasn’t healed, and doctors are still not able to fully assess lasting brain damage. His family is moving back to Wisconsin, where he will continue to receive the medical care he needs.
A truly amazing recovery.
You can watch a news video (with a commericial) showing film of Bou Bou Phonesavanh walking and dancing after getting out of the hospital, at the above link.
You can view a timeline here.
Read Bou Bou's mother entire account of what happened. An excerpt:
I heard my baby wailing and asked one of the officers to let me hold him. He screamed at me to sit down and shut up and blocked my view, so I couldn’t see my son. I could see a singed crib. And I could see a pool of blood. The officers yelled at me to calm down and told me my son was fine, that he’d just lost a tooth.
Or, as an
ACLU report on excessive militarization of the police puts it
Our Homes Are Not Warzones!
All across the country, heavily armed SWAT teams are raiding people's homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs. It should enrage us that people have needlessly died during these raids, that pets have been shot, and that homes have been ravaged.
Our neighborhoods are not warzones, and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. Any yet, every year, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment flows from the federal government to state and local police departments. Departments use these wartime weapons in everyday policing, especially to fight the wasteful and failed drug war, which has unfairly targeted people of color.
We don't need a Drug War. We don't need Drug Warriors. Take the flash bangs, automatic weapons, body armor and armored vehicles and beat them into baby bottles.
Guns Into Plowshares sculpture.