The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) are no strangers to the finer arts of propaganda.  What else do you call an official press release that claims “operational success” after launching a stun grenade into the wrong address and then holding an innocent man at gunpoint?

Well, I personally would start with “incompetent“.

Incompetent is a good word for not being able to get the address correct.

Naturally the press release was pulled from their website as soon as news of what really happened got out.  At least that’s the conclusion I must come to after being unable to find any mention of the botched raid on their website.

How can they claimed success when they raided the wrong address?  That’s easy.  They eventually arrested the right guy.

As Sameer Vasta wrote:

If you have 20 people on an advanced tactical squad participating in a take-down, you would expect one of them would read the warrant, at some point in their “tactical” planning, to make sure they were targeting the right home.

Yup.  You’d sure think so.

How incompetent must your team of twenty police be in order to raid the wrong address?

Why doesn’t anyone double-check the address beforehand to make sure they’re actually at the right place?

Both good questions, and ones that will never be answered.

Thankfully they didn’t do any major damage to anyone, but that’s not through good police work.  Had Carrigan’s son been home and sleeping, the stun grenade would have exploded right on him.

“There’s 20 of them., They couldn’t get the right place?”
— Steven Carrigan

The fact that their error was not malicious does not mean a thing to Carrigan.  Me either for that matter.

Carrigan should get an apology from OPP Commissioner Chris Lewis personally and, of course, be reimbursed for all the damage the OPP did to his home.

Carrigan has no recourse through the courts, since there isn’t a court in the land that will hold police accountable for their actions in cases like this.   The police claim they were acting in good faith, despite the inability to read the address correctly and that’s the end of it.

It’s also wrong.

There should be some mechanism in place to hold police accountable when they screw up this badly.

What if they’d killed Carrigan?  They didn’t, but they easily could have.  How would that press release have read in the absence of anyone to tell the truth?

Comments on news stories made it clear the citizens of this good nation are sick of this sort of police incompetence.

“Police state”

Just another example of how the police are allowed to run rampant and do not have to be accountable for their actions. This was not simply knocking on the door or a forced entry, this was a full blow armed assault.

Private Sector won’t tolerate this level of incompetence

With this level of incompetence, you & I will be fired on the spot in private sector.

Unfortunately, you & I still have to pay these incompetent people & to compensate the wrongfully arrested man for emotional distress, etc…..

TomLeger comments:

The fact that they’ll shell out tax payer’s hard-earned dollars in civil suits and not criminally prosecute or at least internally discipline these officers is a real slap in the face to all of us taxpayers. I wish I didn’t fear the police but I do and have good reason to. I’m not a criminal, either.

Well said by all three posters.

Accountability.  It’s sadly lacking in ALL our police forces.

Shelling out taxpayer dollars to compensate the victims of such gross incompetence is not the solution.  Hold the individual cop in charge accountable for the screwup and see how fast these sorts of things stop.

I mean really… how much time does it take to read the address on a warrant and compare it with the door you’re about to smash through?

At the very least you don’t go issuing press releases claiming what a great success you are after terrorizing an innocent man at the wrong address!

But then I’m not the OPP… clearly I have no idea what I’m talking about.