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Police: 'Threat matrix' dictated Swat team response at Powell Avenue home

Stephanie Milan, 18, was relaxing in her family’s living room at 616 E. Powell Ave. watching the Food Network Thursday when a heavily armed unit of Evansville Police Department officers arrived on the front porch.

Dressed in full protective gear, police broke the storm door — the Milans’ front door was already open on the hot summer day. They also broke a front window. They tossed a flashbang into the living room. Police had invited along a local television crew to videotape what took place.

After speaking to Milan and her mother, Louise, police determined they had nothing to do with the online threats against police that the department said it is investigating.

Stephanie Milan said she managed to remain calm because she knew her family hadn’t done anything wrong. Still, she and her mother were stunned and confused.

Police had obtained a search warrant for computer equipment, which they said was used to make anonymous and specific online threats against police and their families on the website topix.com.

“I think it was a show of force that they are not going to tolerate this,” said Ira Milan, Stephanie Milan’s father and owner of the property for many years. “But what about the residents and what they have to tolerate?

“I’ve been here 30 years,” Ira Milan said. “No one has ever been arrested at my house.”

Police Chief Billy Bolin said Friday while he agreed with Milan, he added that police searched their records of everybody associated with the address and learned that there were relatives attached to it who had criminal histories.

Ira Milan said the perpetrator of the threats likely used his daughter’s internet service connection from an outside location, which led police to the East Powell Avenue address.

But Bolin said, “We have no way of being able to tell that,” and the concerning Internet posts “definitely come back to that address.”

A law enforcement threat matrix was used by the police department in deciding how to respond to information in the posts. One post mentioned explosives, and another specifically named Bolin and referenced the area where he lives. But no other officers’ names or addresses were identified.

Sgt. Jason Cullum, a police department spokesman, said one person had posted that he possessed explosives, and that “Evansville is going to feel the pain.” That threat, Cullum said, played a major role in dictating the police response.

Bolin refused to release the search warrant because, he said, it might contain information that would compromise the investigation. However, he said the document didn’t contain names of any suspects.

“We have an idea in our mind who it is, but we don’t have evidence yet,” Bolin said. Vanderburgh County Proseuctor Nick Hermann also refused to release the warrant.

Workers were at the Milan home on Friday repairing the storm door and broken window. The carpet was stained with black residue from the flashbang.

Ira Milan said police offered to pay for the damage. Laptops and a cell phone belonging to Stephanie Milan — a May graduate of Signature School who will attend the University of Southern Indiana this fall and major in radiology — were seized in the raid and remained in police possession.

“The front door was open. It’s not like anyone was in there hiding,” Ira Milan said. “To bring a whole SWAT team seems a little excessive.”

Bolin said the SWAT team used its standard “knock and announce” procedure of knocking on the wall and repeating the words “police search warrant” three times before entering.

The police chief said the procedure doesn’t require officers to wait for a response.

“It’s designed to distract,” he said.

Cullum\ said the conversation at topix.com which concerned officers began under a blog headline.

“It said, ‘EPD leak: Officers’ addresses given out,’ or something along those lines. There were some generalized comments about people not liking the police, and that didn’t really concern us,” Cullum said, but then the threats became more specific and suggested officers’ families could be at risk.

Time stamps on the postings indicated that they were made Wednesday evening. Cullum defended the department’s action.

“We brought them out and talked to them,” Cullum said of the Milans. “They were released at the scene. Investigators felt they were not involved in the posting.

“This is a little more difficult that a traditional crime scene, because we’re dealing with the Internet. They definitely weren’t expecting (a SWAT team at the door). The reason we did that is the threats were specific enough, and the potential for danger was there.

“This is a big deal to us,” Cullum said. “This may be just somebody who was online just talking stupid. What I would suggest to anybody who visits websites like that is that their comments can be taken literally.”

Mayor Lloyd Winnecke said Friday he had spoken to Bolin about the incident and was satisfied that police were justified in forcibly entering the home.

“They had what they thought were very specific threats against police officers, their families and the communities,” Winnecke said.

He said police told him that the Milans’ storm door and window were being repaired at city expense.


My first thought was dang, internet much? Yeah there's always a kid somewhere figures he can get some attention by saying stupid ****. No one here really thinks though. Where would a kid get explosives? Most all the ingredients that can make explosives have either been watered down, had chemical signatures put in them to make them tracable, or have been banned from the store shelf. It's not like there is going to be another Timmy McVeigh incident, where some numbskull is going to blow up floor after floor of a building.

But let me take you a little deeper into the war on drugs. What I'm fixing to tell you should raise your eyebrows and become concerned. Just like the Milan family here, this is not an isolated, once in a while incident and many of them have far more serious outcomes.

The training to be a SWAT member is usually provided through government programs. The idea is drug enforcement. The government will assist a city in developing, training, and equipping a SWAT team. Part of the final training is that sometime within a year, the new SWAT team must preform a real-life raid in order to finalize the training and make the team, "Official".

Here is where the rub comes in. Under pressure to keep the equipment and to have the prestige of saying they have a SWAT team, the city/police must come up with a suspect within a time frame. Maybe they have one, maybe they don't, but they will get one. I read somewhere that there was a rough estimation of 50,000 raids done in the last year, across the nation. Not all of them turned out like this one.

The outcomes read of dead pets, raids at the wrong address and shooting the resident, sometimes killing them, sometimes not. The knock and saying of police, doesn't have to come at the top of the voice. It can be a whisper. Now you take a law such as 'Stand your ground' where you can legally shot some one breaking in as self-protection and see where that goes.

You can find out where it goes by reading this article:

Code: [Check Download Links]

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2011/may/13/tucson_swat_team_kills_armed_hom
or this one:
http://reason.com/blog/2008/01/06/lima-ohio-drug-raid-gone-bad

These are only two examples from across the nation. Most of them are treated as very quiet, 'We don't wanna talk about it' by the city SWAT teams. When they come out like these two, I wonder why?

There's a whole lot of rush to use force and very little thinking before about what might happen later. Military style armaments and tactics have no business being applied to civilians.

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