TheAgitator.com
More Context for Atlanta: Other City Experiences With Informants and No-Knocks
Sunday, December 3rd, 2006The Atlanta Journal Constitution detailsyet another a failed no-knock warrant a year ago on the house right next door to Johnston’s, then jumps into a broader examination of the city’s procedures on no-knock warrants. I’ll get into a more detailed parsing of the piece in a subsequent post.
But before that, I wanted to point out that this article in itself is part of a recurring pattern. That is, when a forced-entry raid goes wrong somewhere and results in a high-profile tragedy, the local media starts investigating. And inevitably, they discover that no-knocks aren’t the infrequent, meticulously investigated, reserved-only-for-dangerous-suspects occurrences defenders of the tactic would have us believe. Rather, they find that the practice is common, the warrants are often based on scant evidence from just one informant, they’re given very little scrutiny by judges, and they frequently turn up very little in the way of evidence.
Earlier this year, for example, I reported on a massive sweep of SWAT raids in Buffalo in which police invited journalists along for the ride, and journalists responded with glowing accounts of how successful the raids turned out to be. Initial reports had police boasting of 78 arrests, and a huge seizure of illicit drugs. But subsequent reports called all of that into question. The “six pounds” of pot police claim to have seized dropped to 28 ounces. And 58 of the 78 people arrested were freed within 24 hours. Which means more than a few innocent people had their doors kicked in (and pets slaughtered), and had done nothing wrong.
When you hear defenders of paramilitary tactics talk about how rare, well-investigated, and vitally important no-knock warrants and dynamic entry are, remember the story linked above from Atlanta. Because Atlanta is far from unique. Over and over again, when a city suffers a high-profile raid ending in an unnecessary death, subsequent investigations reveal that no-knocks are routinely granted based on very little evidence (often no more than a single tip from a single informant), that they’re used on low-level dealers and users, that there’s little to any judicial oversight or scrutiny, and that they frequently turn up no evidence at all. In other words, they’re a tragedy waiting to happen.
Here are a few examples I found in researching Overkill:
Interviews with police officials, prosecutors, judges, and lawyers paint a picture of a system in which police officers feel pressured to conduct more raids, tips from confidential informants are increasingly difficult to verify, and judges spend less time examining the increasing number of applications for search warrants before signing them.
Five years later, a bad tip from an informant with a spotty record led to the raid that killed Alberta Spruill.
Nearly all of the warrants were for narcotics and were granted solely on the tip of an anonymous informant and an officer’s assertion (minus any corroborating evidence) that weapons would be found at the scene or that the suspect was likely to dispose of evidence.
If that isn’t all bad enough, consider the city’s defense: Judge Robert Patterson, the presiding judge for Denver’s criminal court system told the Post, “We are not the fact gatherers. It’s pretty formulaic how it’s done. If you sign your name 100 times, you can look away and signing the wrong place. We read a lot of documents. We may, just like anyone else, sign something and realize later that it’s the wrong place or the wrong thing. Is it wrong not to be paying attention? No. It’s just that we’re doing things over and over again.”
Keep Judge Patterson’s sage words in mind next time a defender of these tactics says we should always trust a warrant because it’s been reviewed by a “neutral judge” or magistrate.
More than 50 percent of respondents believed that at least “half of the time” the prosecutor “knows or has reason to know” that police fabricate evidence at suppression hearings. Another 93 percent (including 89 percent of the prosecutors) reported that prosecutors had knowledge of perjury “at least some of the time.” Sixty-one percent of respondents, including half of the surveyed prosecutors, believed that prosecutors know or have reason to know that police fabricate evidence in case reports, and half of prosecutors believe the same to be true when it comes to warrants.
Prosecutors also described several techniques in dealing with police that would probably surprise much of the public, including articulating cases to police in terms such as, “if this happens, we win. If this happens, we lose.”
Of 146 no-knock raids conducted in the city that year, only 49 produced charges of any kind. And of those, just 2 resulted in prison time for the targets of the raids. The paper showed the results to one former prosecutor, who responded, “When you have that violent intrusion on people’s homes with so little results, you have to ask why.”
The paper also reported:
Almost all of the 1999 no-knock cases were targeted at people suspected of being drug dealers. . . . Often the tips went unsubstantiated, and little in the way of narcotics was recovered. The problem doesn’t stem only from the work of inexperienced street cops, which city officials have maintained. Even veteran narcotics detectives sometimes seek no-knock warrants based on the word of an informant and without conducting undercover buys to verify the tips.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
