Bounty hunters mistakenly try to raid home of Phoenix PD chief

The Phoenix Police Chief got a rude awakening Tuesday night.

Brent Farley, 43, and 10 others surrounded Chief Joseph Yahner’s home around 10 p.m. local time on Tuesday, thinking they were cornering an Oklahoma fugitive wanted on a drug charge, the department said in a statement.

“Turn your light off”, Yahner yelled in the video. When the companies were told the man wasn’t there and were asked to leave, they refused.

No less than one bondsman allegedly banged on Yahner’s door and acquired right into a verbal confrontation with Yahner. “The bounty hunters looking for a guy described as a black male, 6’3”, 300 plus pounds. Police said several of them were armed with handguns.

“Open the door”, an unidentified man repeatedly shouted as a truck pulled up and blocked the driveway. Authorities now looking into the tip that led the bounty hunters to the home of a police chief and touched off this weird case of mistaken identity. That something was a baton, Crump said.

John Burns, former president of the Arizona Bail Bondsmen Association, said Arizona is one of the few states that don’t require bail bondsmen or fugitive recovery agents to be trained or educated. The spokesman added that if the employees at the two companies did a title search on the home, then they would have realized who lived there. Burns has been working to push a bill that would require both, he said. Police said in no way did he match a description of the occupants at the home.

Investigators are now looking into the initial source of the false information, any weapons violations and statutory requirements of the bond recovery companies.

“This isn’t indicative specifically of this profession”, Crump said.

Miraculously, nobody was shot and killed or left disfigured by a flash grenade, like so many cops have done in the past during raids on the wrong houses.