The controversy over this fatal drug raid in Louisiana last August — which left a cop and a small-time marijuana pusher dead — seems to be over the relatively minor point of whether or not the guy who manned the battering ram should have been the first person in the house. No one seems to want to ask the more pertinent question, which is why were police using a battering ram to serve a marijuana warrant?

Of note:

Days before the shootout, Devai feared someone was going to rob him and seemed paranoid, according to a friend of his.

Witnesses and police accounts differ on whether officers announced themselves before breaking down the door.

It seems unlikely that a small-stakes marijuana pusher would knowingly take on an entire SWAT team by himself, doesn’t it? If it’s true that the guy was anticipating a criminal break-in, isn’t it more likely that he started firing because, without announcing, police forced their way into his home with a battering ram? Doesn’t that seem like an excessive and overly confrontational way of serving a warrant?

I realize that dope dealers aren’t the most sympathetic characters in the world. But dope dealer or not, when you knock someone’s door off its hinges in the middle of the night, if the person you’re after has a gun, there’s a pretty damned good chance they’re going to find it, and that they’re going to use it.

I suspect that had the dope warrant been served by two uniformed cops coming to the door, or better yet, by apprehending Devai as he was coming or leaving his home, Devai and Officer Melancon would still be alive.

SWAT fetishists commonly argue that so-called “dynamic entry” tactics protect cops because they take the suspect by surprise. Even if that were true, I’d argue that the rights of the people on the other side of the door ought to be taken into consideration, too.

But I’m not sure it is true. It assumes that everyone on the receiving end of a SWAT raid is a gun-waving cop-killer with a death wish. When SWAT teams were only used for hostage situations, bank robberies, and the like, that may have been true. But now that they’re mostly used for routine drug warrants, it’s just not the case. Your average pot pusher has no interest in killing a couple of police officers to protect a stash that at worst will get him a year or two in jail (of course, the more we jack up the penalties for drug offenses, the less true that becomes).

In other words, you don’t have to be a drug-waving cop-killer with a death wish to want to defend your home someone breaks down your door in the wee hours of the morning. I’d argue that, on the contrary, defending your home and your family with lethal force in such a situation would be a pretty normal reaction.

In other words, not only do SWAT teams and dynamic entry not diffuse violent situations, they very likely create them. Which means they make routine warrant service more dangerous not just for suspects, but for cops, too.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 7:13 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.