Cops in Delray Beach, Florida brought the heat at a birthday party over the weekend. Police in an unmarked squad car crashed a birthday party because they “thought” they might have seen someone smoking a joint outside.
Reports from people at the party said the officers got out of the unmarked car and started shaking down more than 30 partygoers. The residents of the house told police that nobody was smoking pot at the party and the officers did not have permission to enter the home. The cop’s response was to call for back-up and to refuse to leave the property. “There was a lot of shouting back and forth,” Cory Provost, who posted a video of the incident on YouTube, told the Sun Sentinel. “The residents were asking the cops to leave the yard and they didn’t do so.”
Almost 20 people formed a human shield to stop the police from gaining control of the situation and arresting the person they “saw” smoking pot.
Police Sergeant Nicole Guerriero gave a statement to the press earlier this week and said the video taken at the party was not an accurate record of the incident as it happened. . “Someone hit [an] officer and pushed him away, they were throwing bottles, they were cursing and screaming at them,” she said. “The next thing they know, there’s 70 to 75 people out there. The officers had to use pepper spray to get people back.”
Officers did arrest several people who were charged with obstruction and assault. But nobody at the party was arrested for possession of marijuana. It’s no doubt that recent events in like the murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and Eric Garner in New York added some fuel to whole situation.
It’s hard to say if the people who were taken into custody for “obstructing” police from doing their jobs that night actually were, or if police just needed to make some arrests, even though nobody was found with pot. Either way, the whole situation happened because officers in an UNMARKED car, thought they might have seen someone smoking a plant that almost 60% of Florida residents voted in favor of legalizing just a few months ago.
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