Wait, what? A loan is a civil matter and not actionable by the police without a court order. We've told our dispatchers/911 operators to dump callers for a lot less. Oh.
He ought to be pissed at his bitch of an ex-wife. It's not free money, and you don't get to screw the taxpayers.
Still over the top, but . . . My guess is that all this guy knows about his estranged wife's loans is that they are in default, but I see no reason to doubt that this is a case of alleged fraud and embezzlement, not a matter about a loan default.
That, and I'd be willing to bet a nickle that "SWAT Team" implies something completely different to a Brit than it does to a Murican.
This would never happen if we nationalized student loans, taking them away from greedy businesses and putting them in the control of the police state. Um, never mind.
Whether this was justified or not, I've no idea based on the information presented. But it does highlight the dangers and problems of EVERY DAMN GOVT. AGENCY having its own SWAT teams. I've heard it is a prestige and turf thing. No agency wants to go to the FBI or other agency and ask them for "help" in a potentially dangerous situation. What happens is once have a nice, shiny, highly trained and armed.......and expensive Special Weapons and Tactics Team............you naturally want to use it whenever possible. One of the greatest and truest wise sayings of all time "To A Man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail"[/B ]Reminds me when I worked for Lowe's in Tyler, TX. One day a small restaurant across the parking lot had a small grease fire. A fire truck responds. And then, right behind it one of the largest ladder trucks I've seen in my life. In person or even in books and magazines. Truly a monstrous machine. I asked one of the locals and they said that "Ever since the city bought that thing, they drag it out to EVERY call they get". An enormous ladder truck...........at a one story restaurant grease fire. An enormous ladder truck..........at a two car accident. An enormous ladder truck..........at a grass fire! (I'm not kidding).
I'm sure the original reporters saw the warrant came from the Department of Education and asked Kenneth Wright what the Department of Education would want with his wife. I'm sure he told the truth as far as he knew it, and then the reporters just passed on what he said without doing further investigation so that a story could get on the news as soon as possible. The story appears to have originated at news10.net as a local news story, where it was picked up by the Daily Mail. Per a search of the news10.net web site, the original version of the story has been scrubbed entirely and replaced with one that includes the quoted statement.
To be fair, that's the story that was originally making the rounds. The Department of Education response is a late addition to the story. I don't see any reason to believe that cpurick chose his version in bad faith. He just jumped the gun a little. Besides, a 6-AM swat team call for fraudulent embezzlement of student loans is still most likely a little ridiculous. Now it may turn out that the wife worked at a student loan company and somehow skimmed millions of dollars off other people's loans for her personal use. However, unless the story develops in that way or something similar, sending a swat team after someone who cashed a student loan check without ever intending to register for classes or pay it back is still disturbing, if not quite as disturbing as going after someone like that for a run-of-the-mill loan default.
How about doing some actual investigative work instead of just grabbing an address from somewhere and sending in the gestopo? All this should have taken is legal notices, and if need be enforcement from maybe one or two uniformed police officers.
