I originally reported that the raid was largely conducted by the Pearl River Basin Narcotics Task Force, who asked Officer Jones to come along. That came from my conversations with Rhonda Cooper, Maye’s first attorney, as well as a December 29, 2001 article from the Hattiesburg American which said that Jones conducted the raid with “eight other officers who were also from the Pearl River Basin Narcotics Task Force and the Jefferson Davis County Sheriff’s Department.”

That article wasn’t quite right, and neither was I.

As it turns out, only one officer from the narcotics task force went along on the raid. Jones seems to have assembled an ad-hoc team of eight police officers to conduct the raid, including himself; a volunteer police officer from Bassfield named Phillip Allday; Darryl Graves, the task force officer; another Prentiss police department officer; and officers from both the Jefferson Davis County Sheriff’s department and the Bassfield department.

I think this reflects even more poorly on the way the raid was handled. Only one of the eight officers — the officer from the task force — had any narcotics training at all. He was on the four-man team who executed the warrant for the other apartment, that of Jamie Smith. Which means none of the officers who raided Maye’s home had training in serving a high-risk narcotics warrant.

Here’s another troubling tidbit — it was the ununiformed volunteer cop who kicked down Maye’s door. Also, given his volunteer status, Allday wasn’t authorized to announce “police” prior to entering the apartment.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 at 6:51 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Cory Maye. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.