Most of the wrong door raids I've blogged about have been in other parts of the country.  But today, Jim Stingl has a column detailing a wrong door SWAT raid against a child pornographer.  Of course, in all of the detailed planning that is supposed to go into these highly dangerous, and volatile operations, they apparently failed to determine that he'd moved out more than a month prior to the raid:

A SWAT team from the Milwaukee Police Department burst into Denise Berndsen's apartment and turned the place upside down looking for evidence of child porn.

Oops. The man they were targeting had moved out five weeks earlier.

Instead they roughed up Berndsen, who had returned home from back surgery that day, her 74-year-old father, and a man she had just started dating and who for a few terrifying minutes wondered what he got himself into.
...
Officers rummaged through her bedroom closet, dresser drawers and kitchen cabinets, and in doing so, broke a couple of wizard figurines and cracked the headboard mirror on Berndsen's bed, she said.

They brought high-tech equipment into the apartment and hooked it up to her laptop computer to search for evidence. If they were looking for porn, Berndsen said, she found it odd that they never touched a bookcase full of DVDs and videocassette tapes in the living room.
...
"They said, 'We're sorry. I guess you're just one more of his victims,' " meaning the child porn suspect, Berndsen said. "I said, no, we're your victims."

Now that's just unbelievable.  They made a huge mistake, and they just shifted the blame.  Just the cost of police work that we should all have to bear right?  Wrong.  My question, beyond why they missed the very important fact that the target had moved more than a month prior, was why a SWAT team was being used to serve this warrant at all.

Was he considered to be heavily armed, or an immediate danger to the police, or his neighbors during the serving of the warrant?  I highly doubt it.  SWAT teams are over used in our communities, and contrary to what many police say, they escalate situations, and increase the odds of violence, instead of the opposite.  The victim here is lucky that she was recovering from back surgery.  Had she been a gun owner who believed in her right to protect her home from intruders, she'd more than likely be dead now.