A civil rights activist working for the family has now called for a federal investigation. It’s unfortunate that federal oversight is so often necessary in these types of cases. But I’ve followed enough of them to know that local police often aren’t capable of properly holding themselves accountable, nor are local prosecutors, who necessarily tend to have close relationships with the police.

Meanwhile, there’s also a new detail: The drug buy at Johnston’s house took place the same afternoon as the raid — which happened at about 7pm. Which means that at most just a few hours transpired between the drug buy and the bust. How much investigation do you think the police did in that three hours to determine if the seller actually lived in the house where the buy took place, or if there might be other, innocent people inside?

Given that they knew almost nothing about Johnston, I’d say the evidence suggests they did very little.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 24th, 2006 at 9:11 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.