Analysis of “Family shattered after raid, home loss”

In my opinion, Smich’s article on the Harris home raid was as balanced as a story regarding this event could be. The entire story essentially read like a factual narrative until the very end, at which point it offered an opinion.
The raid occurred only because of an animal crime complaint. The author is right in stating that the amount of officers used for this offence was certainly overkill. In addition to this, the police were attempting to tie the family homes to allegations of gang activity in the nearby parks. If Gangster Disciples were actually operating in the area, the traditional action is to investigate with a special gang task force. Instead, for some reason, the police simply raided the home on the first minor offence they could muster.
It appears, because of this, that this action was actually the result of the clashes of two different social classes. There were other courses of action that would certainly been more appropriate regarding the animal complaints. However, it appears that the motivation behind the raid was not to correct any unlawful behavior, but rather to secure an area’s property for a particular social strata. To charge somebody with the crime of “unlawful possession of an unneutered animals by a felon” is almost unheard of. It seems to be a quite obscure law that is only enforced selectively if at all. Because of the law’s obscurity and the overall broadness of the raid, all animal related charges should be dropped and the police should issue a public apology.
Even if the surrounding neighborhood was unhappy with the condition of the Harris home, the Harris’s were never once charged with any infraction. It seems unjust and just cruel to order them to vacate, and then write them property infractions that they can correct with money that for the time being needs to go towards finding them a place to live in the meantime. The Harris family should have been issues numerous warnings before a raid of this scale if it was property infractions that were the real issue.
The issue that the police had with the Harris home was not animal related. Such an enormous amount of police force would never be needed to address such an issue. Specifically, such issues are typically addressed without neighborhood-wide attention drawn. The issue was also not property value. If that were the case, the Harris’s could have been charged with infractions at many times in the past, but they had not been. Instead, the issue seems to be “we can’t find a crime, but just get out, anyway.” It seems that developmental forces including the forces of upper class families movies into more city neighborhoods, pressuring lower class families out. While developmental freedom is important to the advancement of any city; it is important that families are not just run out of their neighborhoods for no reason and no chance to stay. This case, that of the Harris family, is a shameful example of how gentrification can sometimes circumvent the rule of law.