TheAgitator.com
More Kathryn Johnston Fallout
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008Another nacotics cop pleads guilty to covering up botched drug raids:
A 23-year Atlanta Police Department veteran pleaded guilty on Monday to conspiring to violate civil rights by searching a private residence without a warrant, federal prosecutors said.
Wilbert Stallings, 44, of Conyers, a sergeant in the department’s narcotics unit, faces up to 10 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.
[...]
Prosecutors said that in October 2005, Stallings led a narcotics team executing a search warrant at an apartment on Dill Road in Atlanta.
Also on the team was Gregg Junnier, one of two narcotics officers who have pleaded guilty to charges in Johnston’s death. Junnier had obtained the warrant for one apartment in the 2005 incident, prosecutors said. The team found some marijuana behind the apartment but not inside, they said. Stallings and Junnier then decided to search an adjoining apartment but no one was home and they found nothing inside.
Stallings told the team to leave the apartment and shut the door so it would appear there had been a break-in, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors argued the the incident was part of a pattern of conduct by Stallings and his team, which included misrepresenting unregistered drug informants as registered ones in order to secure warrants.
Seems Atlanta PD’s narcotics division went about breaking down doors whenever its officers damned-well pleased.
It’s good that all of this is coming out. But other cities should take a lesson, and not wait for someone to be killed before looking at their own narcotics divisions, and the way warrants are served. For example, it’s troubling that the city of Houston doesn’t even track the number of times its narcotics officers mistakenly raid the wrong house. Had Atlanta’s department required its officers to track the number of times they raided a house in which no drugs turned up (one of the recommendations I make in my Overkill paper), they may have been clued in that something was wrong well before the raid on Kathyrn Johnston’s home.
There’s no reason why large cities shouldn’t keep a database that tracks every search warrant from the time it’s requested through its execution. That database should be available not only to the police, but also to judges, who could consult it to see if a particular officer or unit has a history of taking shortcuts or of executing fruitless raids. It should also be subject to open records requests. I don’t mind keeping the names of informants secret, but they should at least be assigned identifying numbers, so we can see if the same informant has a history of giving bad information, and if police are continuing to use that informant, anyway.
It was something of a fluke that all of this has come out about Atlanta. As we’ve seen in other cities where a botched raid has inspired further investigation, these sorts of shortcuts in the investigations leading up to home-breaching drug raids are disturbingly common.
Excellent recommendations Radley. I also find it disturbing that basic quality control measures aren’t in place. All departments should track this kind of data, not to mention info on officers that get a disproprtionate number of citizen complaints. Early warning systems should be commonplace in law enforcement! Its tough to find a silver lining in this terribly depressing story, but perhaps cases of extreme corruption and criminal behavior by police such as this will finally wake people up to the futile and dangerous nature of the drug war. When will we learn? RIP Kathryn.
Sad to say, but the beat goes on, and on, and on!
That substance prohibition spawns corruption of the very legal system charged with that prohibition’s prosecution should be obvious to any and all; it follows as night does day. From top to bottom, wherever you look, there’s rot.
But with an entire (Prison/Industrial) industry whose profits are based upon denial of that and other salient facts about chemical prohibitions…an industry that is effectively able to lobby lawmakers using the money it has received from citizens…an industry that tirelessly works to defeat any legislative or referendum efforts that threaten that meal ticket…then it should become equally obvious that the kind of ’special interests’ that that industry lobbies for are essentially inimical to the commonweal, as well as democratic principles in general.
At what point will the sheer weight of the whole corrupt mass begin to press downwards into the collective consciousness of the American citizen? What will be the tipping point? How many bodies? (The last time we tried this, at least there was a body count.)
Or will it take a 1929-type crash, as it did the last time with alcohol Prohibition, to cause the gore-trailing DrugWar Juggernaut to finally lurch and squeal to a stop? What will it take? Since it seems it won’t be the number of innocents being slaughtered or jailed, reputations being trashed, careers ruined, life-savings being stolen by Gub’mint agents, etc. my money’s on the money…
It’ll take Georgie W leaving office for starts. Then begins the oversight committees. As always…tis the “$$$$$ stupid” ,or otherwise. Sooner is better and certain.