A few items culled from the Justice for Sal site maintained by Culosi’s family:

1) A couple of weeks ago, the Fairfax Police Department incredulously issued a news release warning that it would be cracking down on illegal NCAA tournament pools. Three months after one of its officers shot and killed Culosi, Fairfax PD titled its press release, “Illegal Gambling Not Worth the Risk.” Words fail.

2) Here’s a very recent case from Portsmouth, Virginia in which a kid was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after accidentally shooting a friend. The case is significant because Fairfax prosecutor Robert Horan has repeatedly insisted that Virginia law won’t let him charge Officer Bullock with a crime. The facts of the Portsmouth case pretty clearly suggest otherwise.

3) The Washington Post weighs in with another editorial, this time with pointed criticism of Horan for declining to bring charges. The Post also reiterates its position against using SWAT teams for routine policing.

4) Also from the Post, Tom Jackman continues his stellar reporting on the case with another article. Jackman’s article does contain this suspicious quote:

Mary Ann Jennings, the Fairfax police spokeswoman, said the review of the department’s SWAT policies included consulting other police departments and organizations. She also emphasized that the county’s SWAT team does not handle all search warrants, only those in which commanders feel there may be an issue of officer safety or a possibility of evidence destruction. Horan said destruction of gambling evidence necessitated the SWAT team in Culosi’s case.

First, given the way the raid transpired, the “destruction of evidence” justification for a SWAT team is bogus. The undercover officer had befriended Culosi. On the night of the raid, he had called him out to his vehicle, and Culosi obliged, having no idea he was meeting a team of police officers. Culosi would have had no opportunity to run back into the house to destroy evidence.

Second, the police spokeswoman is clearly hedging. Here’s what Fairfax PD told Jackman immediately after the shooting:

Fairfax police declined to discuss their tactical unit policies. But police officials acknowledged that the tactical team, using bulletproof vests, high-powered weapons and other police tools, serves nearly all of the warrants after an investigation has found probable cause to seize evidence — whether it is bloody clothes, weapons or documents.

I suppose that if we were to get technical, the two statements could both be true. “Nearly all” and “all” aren’t the same thing, of course. But the January quote clearly implies that a very high percentage of search warrants are carried out via SWAT. And the more recent quote pretty clearly tries to imply otherwise. So which is it?

Notice also the parameters the police spokewoman gives. I’m hard-pressed to come up with any class of criminality in which police couldn’t reasonably believe a suspect might destroy evidence or get violent when faced with a search warrant.

Perhaps it’s time for the Fairfax Police Department to begin tracking its warrants. Let us know exactly what percentage of warrants, and for what crimes, are executed with SWAT teams. Let us know how many of those SWAT-executed warrants produce enough evidence to merit criminal charges. Let us know what percentage of SWAT-executed warrants are no-knocks. In fact, why not require all SWAT raids to be videotaped, to ensure that an objective record of the raid is available should things go wrong?

It’s time for some transparency and accountability. Give the public the figures. And let the public decide if Fairfax PD is using its SWAT team appropriately.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 7:10 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Gambling, Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.