Determined to take the residents of a house containing a meth lab by surprise, the SWAT team struck before dawn. At six am they surrounded the house, knocked down the front door, and deployed a flash grenade or flash-bang at a bedroom window. This grenade explodes with a bright flash, a loud bang, and a concussive impact, all meant to disorient people.

By “deployed” I mean they put it on a boomstick, stuck it through the window, and hit the trigger. Nothing happened. So the officer, unaware that these things have a delayed action, and wishing to attach another one to the boomstick, dropped it into the room. This would be the room where two sisters were sleeping — and when the flash-bang went off it burned the 12-year-old girl it fell next to and made a crater in the wall.

Luckily, Police Chief Rich St. John of Billings, Montana, can explain.

By “explain” I mean make excuses, and utter a tragically flawed attempt at an apology. Here’s the apologyesque part: “It was totally unforeseen, totally unplanned, and extremely regrettable. We certainly did not want a juvenile, or anyone else for that matter, to get injured.” Regrettable – that the closest he gets to an apology. They regret it. I believe that. But see, I regret it, and I’ve never even been to Billings. They owe us more than “regrettable.”

As for explaining/excusing, they thought there was a meth lab in the house, and they had a warrant to look for it. (Latest reports suggest that they didn’t find a meth lab in the house. Oh well.) They have a checklist they use. A certain number of points are awarded for such things as the residents’ prior convictions, mental health histories, and previous interactions with the law. Too many points, and they order up the SWAT team. As in this case. “The warrant was based on hard evidence and everything we knew at the time,” said St. John. (Maybe they missed it. Maybe it was a tiny tiny meth lab inside a plastic horse.) He said they did plenty of homework, but “The information that we had did not have any juveniles in the house and did not have any juveniles in the room. We generally do not introduce these disorienting devices when they’re present.”

Sleep sweetly, Billings, You’re probably not on a list.

A claims process has been started with the city. St. John said it takes some time to determine whether the police department needs to make restitution. “If we’re wrong or made a mistake, then we’re going to take care of it. But if it determines we’re not, then we’ll go with that.” Right, if it determines that the 12-year-old who was treated for 1^st & 2^nd degree burns was, um, was, let’s see, a 40-year-old meth dealer with a rap sheet a mile long, posing as a 12-year old. But not enrolled in school, so not showing up when the police did their homework.

Botched raid, non-apology. Get used to it. Across the country, local police departments are being armed with heavy weaponry and home-invasion equipment, courtesy of millions of dollars of Homeland Security grants. It’s exciting stuff. And if you’ve got the tough-guy tools, you’ve just got to use them. Now, you’re supposed to know how to use them. You’re supposed to have been trained. You’re supposed to have been trained not to drop your flash-bang before it’s had time to go off.

I’d like to think they’d be trained in boring basic police work too, like finding out if there are children in the house.

Training exercise. Probably no children in this building.

But here’s a training gap: If Homeland Security is going to hand out all this weaponry and home invasion equipment they should be doing apology training. Because there’s going to be a lot of occasion to apologize.

Let us help. Police Chief St. John probably thinks he can’t apologize until an investigation has been done. He’s mistaken. You can apologize before you do the investigation. Here’s how: apologize for the part you know was wrong, and save the excuses for later. Act like a human.

You can say, “We’re so sorry. We hurt a kid. We’re supposed to protect kids, not hurt them. We don’t know yet exactly what went wrong, but we’re going to find out and make sure it never happens again. Because this isn’t right. We’re sorry.”