A few weeks ago, I received an email from a guy named Michael (he asked I not use his last name, though he said he’d be happy to provide it if anyone from the media would like to verify his story). He’s a Cato sponsor, and came across my work on these raids through the Cato website.

Michael said that several years ago, in March 1999, he’d been a victim of a “wrong door” drug raid. He explained to me what happened over the phone:

Michael and an associate named Matt had started a trading company, and were running it out of a rented apartment.

On the day of the raid, Michael was sitting on a futon reading when there was a loud pounding at the door. Not a knocking, but a pounding, as if someone were trying to break it down. He says he heard no knock, and no announcement.

He called out to Matt, “Someone is beating down the door!” then ran back to the bedroom, which at the time was where they stored the fledgling company’s computers, and the two shut the door.

The police knocked the front door completely off its hinges, then made quick work of the bedroom door. By the time they entered the bedroom, Michael had called 911.

“For several seconds, all I saw was a gun,” he told me. “You see the gun, and you’re frightened and you think you’re under attack. It took a while for for me to register that they were the police.”

With this his voice breaks, and quivers a bit.

By the time all was said and done, Michael had counted 22 officers. For a 700-foot apartment.

To his credit, Michael says the officer who apprehended him seemed to realize early on that something was wrong. “It didn’t look like a drug den. We had about eight computers and monitors in there. It looked like an office. He went pretty easy on me. I think it may also have been because I told him I had called 911.”

His business associate wasn’t as fortunate. “They roughed Matt up a little. Handcuffed him. Put a foot in his back.”

The SWAT team was a joint task force, and included officers from the DEA, the FBI, and the Houston Police Department. Neighbors later told Michael they’d brought a helicopter, too.

“They searched the place from top to bottom,” he said. “I remember one cop picking through my dirty laundry with the barrel of his gun.”

The SWAT team had raided the wrong apartment. Matt and Michael rented #36. The warrant was for #38. “It’s clear as day,” he said. “White lettering on black doors.” He’d later learn that just seconds after the raid began, the suspect the police were looking for actually came out of the correct apartment upon hearing all the commotion. He was apprehended and arrested early on in the raid, without incident.

“I’m totally shaking as I tell you this,” he said. “It’s seven years later, and I still can’t tell the story without shaking.”

When the police realized they’d made a mistake, they gave him an apology, but he says it was almost rote. “It was something like, ‘What we’re supposed to say in situations like this is…we’re sorry…’ It was like they were reading it.”

Michael was also told that there was nothing he could do about it.

As they were leaving, he says he asked one officer why they didn’t announce before entering. “He told me they did announce, but that they do it at the same time they hit the door with the battering ram. So it’s not surprising that I didn’t hear them.”

I asked him why he didn’t sue, or go to the press.

“A lawyer told me I didn’t have a chance with a lawsuit. As for the press, I was told they probably wouldn’t care. I was also just starting a business. Even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, I was still afraid someone might see it and think I was somehow involved with drugs. I didn’t want my landlord to see it. Or my clients. I was also scared. And embarassed.”

Weird twist: Michael’s wife works at a law firm. At a reception, he was talking to the husband of one of her co-workers. The guy identified himself as a Houston narcotics cop. Michael told him the raid story.

The cop replied, “I was the third one through the door.”

A few notes:

1) Imagine what might have happened if Michael and his associate had had a gun in the apartment for protection. My guess is that he wouldn’t be around seven years later to tell me the story. At the time this raid happened, there were several incidents in and around the Houston area in which thugs posing as police were breaking into people’s homes to rob them.

2) These guys were upper middle class businessmen. And they were too frightened and embarassed to go to the media. Imagine how reluctant, say, a poor, low-income black family in the city might be — who, also, tend to be the focus of most of these raids. Another data point supporting my firm belief that this kind of thing happens far more often than what we read in the newspaper.

3) Unfortunately, since Michael didn’t want to give me his last name (which is understandable, of course), I can’t really add him to the map.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 at 10:45 am 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.