TheAgitator.com
Failing Upward: New Frontiers in Scalia’s “New Professionalism”
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008If you’ll remember, shortly after the Kathryn Johnston raid, Assistant Atlanta Police Chief Alan Dreher sprang into action to defend the actions of the police officers. Less than 24 hours after the raid, Dreher assured us that there was nothing to see, here. The police had made a controlled buy at Johnston’s home. They arrived at her house in a marked car, and came in in marked uniforms. Johnston shot at the officers, Dreher said. He later added that Johnston “should have recognized” the men breaking into her home as police officers. The cops returned fire only in self-defense, he said. Dreher even suggested that it was a police officer, not an informant, who bought the drugs from Johnston (as it turns out, no one did, the controlled buy was a lie).
Police defenders and critics of mine were quick to jump on Dreher’s statements to show that I and others were “jumping the gun” in questioning the raid. After all, if the police said they did a buy, they did a buy. If the police say they announced, then they announced. If the police infer that this 92-year-old woman was a dope dealing criminal who got what she deserved, well, then she sure as hell got what she deserved.
Well, we all now know that just about everything Dreher said was wrong. Dreher was presiding over a corrupt narcotics unit that routinely lied on search warrant affidavits, harassed and intimidated informants, covered up mistakes, and was subject to damaging arrest and raid quotas that encouraged shortcuts and circumventing the checks in place to ensure the protection of civil rights. It was Dreher who spoke too soon, propagating the lie told to him by his officers that Johnston was some sort of dope-slinging, gun-toting granny.
Dreher was acting as spokesman just after the raid because Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington was out of town. When Pennington returned, he quickly dispensed with Dreher’s clannish, old-school, blue-wall-of-silence approach. Pennington was more forthcoming, and quickly announced he’d be conducting a thorough internal investigation. Within days, Pennington turned the investigation over to federal authorities. We now know that Johnston was innocent, that there was no drug buy, and that Johnston didn’t even get off a shot. The cops were wounded by fragments from their own bullets. When they found out they had made a mistake, the narcotics team handcuffed Johnston and left her to bleed to death in her own home while they planted marijuana in her basement.
I bring all of this up because in a police environment driven by all the professional standards and accountability Justice Scalia assured us in Hudson v. Michigan dominate police departments across the country, you’d think that Dreher would have been fired. At minimum, as APD’s chief of operations, Dreher presided over an astonishingly rogue and unaccountable narcotics department that put who knows how many innocent people in jail, and subjected who knows how many people to mistaken and botched drug raids. He was either oblivious to all of the corruption, or he was complicit in it. Neither speaks well of him as a police manager or a leader. Dreher then helped disseminate an ass-covering version of the Kathryn Johnston raid that proved to be wrong in just about every way possible. Dreher’s early press statements were not only rash and wrong-headed defenses of his officers, in the process he also sullied the name of the innocent woman his officers had just killed.
But as you might have guessed by now, Dreher didn’t lose his job. It’s even worse than that. Dreher is now one of four finalists for the police chief position in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. That’s right. He’s up for a promotion. And this isn’t even the first time. He was also a finalist for police chief in Charlotte, North Carolina.
All hail the new professionalism.
UPDATE: Dreher didn’t get the job. That’s good news.
I notice in those links to Patterico’s site that he hasn’t posted corrections to the posts to clarify all the times he was wrong about the Kathryn Johnston raid.
I think I remember him putting up a post at some point admitting something about not getting the story right.
But isn’t he always criticizing the L.A. Times for not posting corrections in the same place where the errors were published?
If someone were to happen upon those posts from a Google search, they’d never know that you were completely right about the Johnston raid from the start, and that he was embarrassingly wrong.
What a fucking hypocrite that guy is.
I knew before I was half way through this post what you were going to say at the end. How the hell am I supposed to get over my cynicism if it keeps turning out to be right? Poor me. I’m doomed to be irreverently pessimistic and disrespectful of authority for the rest of my life.
There is a special place in hell for police officers and their superiors who abuse authority to such evil lows. When those we are supposed to trust with our lives take them with such malicious intent . . . where do we turn? Especially when they are seemingly rewarded for their crimes as is the case with Mr. Dreher here. What’s to stop any of them from committing more heinous acts upon the public? If there was a ever a wrong message to send. This douche bag needs to be barred from any type of police job for the rest of his fucking life. Not even meter-maid is suitable for the ass-wipe. I am literally sick to my stomach after reading that this guy is actually being considered for a promotion!
To those who think we should just ‘do what they (the police) tell you to do’ . . . if they can kill a 92 year old woman and smear her good name all to save face, can they not do the same to you?
Can’t they?
It should have been Patrick Frey who had his door kicked in by murderous lying cops, the rotten shitbag.
Seems to be the norm when you give others such power over you. We give police an exorbitant amount of power over civilians, they’re going to be corrupt. The corruption is not rare, it’s other cops willing to speak out against it that is rare.
You’re certainly not allowed to protect yourself, as we keep seeing. Heck, Patrick Lynch of the Policeman’s Benevolent Association says explicitly that if you “lift a finger you’ll die”.
LEO’s in this country are no longer Public Servants, they see themselves as a sort of ruling class and they’re granted the power and immunity to enact it.
Do the supremes have emails? Maybe we should start an email campaign to show them the error of their ways.
Seems like we should alert the press in Winston-Salem about Dreher’s conduct. Have they done any stories on the raid?
The Yes Weekly article Radley linked to addresses it, but Dreher pitches it as a few rogue officers and that he helped solve the problem.
Read the post from “Flopping Aces.”
Some unbelievably vile shit. I actually laughed it was so over the top.
Not to threadjack, but on the topic of bad police slipping through the cracks, there’s a spot of good news today. It’s not a botched raid (two officers with a history of complaints broke the jaw of a graffiti artist caught in the act, then covered up the incident), but it seems the separate recent videoed brutality beat-down in Philadelphia has given DA Lynne Abraham momentum to overrule the police union and fire and press criminal charges against bad cops in other open investigations:
http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/20080528_2_more_cops_accused_of_brutality.html
I believe that would be the guy. Funny, I’ve checked several of his posts on the Johnston raid and none of the ones I’ve checked had any updates that Balko called this one right. In one he had 5 updates, but lacking one of the most important ones, that the cops were not just dirty they were dirty as Hell and he missed an fairly obvious call (yeah, a 92 year old lady selling drugs–I know, I know he’ll dig up one case with a 92 year old woman and then demand an apology).
Oh and Curt is a despicable, vile person. Unfortunately he is a cop. He sounds like exactly the wrong guy to hand extraordinary powers too along with firearms.
Just read that blog post by Curt in Law Enforcement, it’s what I’d expect.
Use of the common, useless, and worn out knee-jerk response “I put my life on the line everyday.”
He keeps repeating “But I tell you what. If I have someone, ANYONE shooting at me, I WILL fire back at them. I will not take a bullet and be put six feet under just because the shooter is a 92 year old women. No effin way.” while ignoring all larger issues (lying, invading a sovereign citizen’s home, killing her, planting drugs, lying to cover up, the fact that it was routine, etc)
Patterico and Curt in Law Enforcement should not be lumped into the same category. Patterico has a lengthy post admitting mistakes. On April 26, 2007, Patterico said:
“When this case was first reported, I urged people not to jump to conclusions, and I continue to believe that was the right call. However, in the comment section to my posts, I made some comments to the effect that, based on the information then available (service of a valid search warrant at an address where suspected narcotics were recovered), Ms. Johnston was at fault for shooting at the police. Since that information has proven to be incorrect, those comments were wrong. Making matters worse, I didn’t qualify my statements every time I made them, so that, for example, I said: ‘If she fired first and shot 3 cops, then shooting her was eminently justified.” Well, not if they busted into her house based on a phony search warrant! — something we now know to be the case.’”
(Links didn’t work yesterday, so I’ll leave this comment link free, but the post can be easily found with a Google search. Contrary to the suggestions above, this is the first Patterico hit I got in Google, at the top of the second page of hits.)
Curt, on the other hand, did exactly was Patterico said people should not do, except from the other side of the debate. His original post referred to Johnston as “The 92 Year Old Criminal” — in the title. He also made several unqualified assertions about what happened:
“Did they have a lawful reason for being there? Yes.
Did they have a court ordered warrant to search this location without knocking? Yes.
Did the dead women have a right to shoot at these officers? No.
End story.”
Curt was not just careless in some comments. He assumed a lot and was pretty much wrong about everything. And unlike Patterico, I could find no later post or update from Curt. It was easy to find Patterico’s later post. It is true that Patterico’s update was not attached to his earlier post(s), but I don’t see this as a big failing. He did a new post, which would insure that regular readers would see it.
I rarely read Patterico, so I don’t have any strong opinions about his general views either way, but he is not in the same category as Curt in Law Enforcement on this issue.
The Google search that placed Patterico’s post at the top of the second page of hits was for “kathryn johnston.”
If you take:
“But I tell you what. If I have someone, ANYONE shooting at me, I WILL fire back at them. I will not take a bullet and be put six feet under just because the shooter is a 92 year old women. No effin way.”
And add to it “… even while I’m committing a crime against them”, then it sounds a lot like a statement right out of the violent gang culture that we’re supposed to be so on top of eradicating.
If you take:
“But I tell you what. If I have someone, ANYONE shooting at me, I WILL fire back at them. I will not take a bullet and be put six feet under just because the shooter is a 92 year old women. No effin way.”
And add to it “… even while I’m committing a crime against them”, then it sounds a lot like a statement right out of the violent gang culture that we’re supposed to be so on top of eradicating.
At the rate were going, it won’t be long before the main difference between the Crips and the Cops will be quality of their clothes.
This article seems related, Ohio: ‘Castle Doctrine’ Opposed by cops
Takes One to Catch One?…
Here in the Triad, more than a few cars have license plates beginning with the letters commonly referred to as Whiskey, Tango and Foxtrot. Mine don’t, alas, but I’ll consider trading in for plates that do if Alan Dreher, of Kathryn Johnsto…
To find out this inept idiot was almost the sheriff of one of my favorite cities instead of looking for work flipping burgers was a shock. Either he’s a liar and a dirtbag or he’s inept and neither excuse makes it look like he needs MORE responsibility.
The truly sad thing in all of this is that my generation has grown up with this since day one. I don’t have many peers my age (20s) that trust police or believe that law enforcement’s actions are in their best interest. There’s a clear “us vs. them” mentality in the police, and my generation is extremely receptive to it.
I honestly wonder if there was a time when the people could trust the police officers “to serve and protect” the citizenry. Now they just serve and protect other police officers.
What will the future bring when more individuals feel like they need to protect themselves from the police as well as the criminals.
Considering all the grief he has heaped on others for such a failing…well pot, kettle and you know the rest.
Patterico also has an annoying tendency to take mistakes and transmogrifying them into sinister ulterior motives and/or reasons to completely distrust a source on all other matters. However, when Patterico wrote on the use of DNA in criminal trials recently he was stunningly wrong. Does this mean Patterico is wrong in everything and that people should use the default assumption of “Its Patterico, he’s been wrong before so therefore he is likely wrong now”? If we were like Patterico we would.
No he isn’t. But that doesn’t mean he is above criticism.
“No he isn’t. But that doesn’t mean he is above criticism.”
Not sure where anyone said he was. I did notice that the criticism here included “what a fucking hypocrite”.
What he is, is an accessory to murder. And he should hang. None of yer sissy lethal injections.
“At the rate were going, it won’t be long before the main difference between the Crips and the Cops will be quality of their clothes.”
We’re pretty much there already, man.
[...] not how a lot of people remember it. In fact, over at The Agitator, Radley Balko sums it up thusly: Well, we all now know that just about everything Dreher said was wrong. Dreher was presiding over [...]
Verdon,
I had a post linked by Instapundit in which I set forth where I thought I had been wrong. One of the other commenters here managed to find it pretty easily. I believe Radley Balko himself went so far as to give me “kudos” for promptly acknowledging the bad police behavior; indeed, I posted about it before he did!
So: you’re full of shit. As usual.
Oh, and I wasn’t wrong about a thing on the DNA posts. Indeed, the paper today corrected one of the errors I pointed out. By contrast, you were stunningly wrong about your interpretation of what I said — so much so I’m amazed that you’re still pressing the point.
Oh, and Verdon? As far as Google searches go, the post I’m talking about is the absolute top post for “Kathryn Johnston Patterico” . . . you moron.
The only person who will be misled is someone stupid enough to trust you on anything.
Final point: If a newspaper does a correction by printing an entire new article highlighting the correction, I wouldn’t be such a douche as to bitch about how the correction didn’t make it into the old article.
And if for some reason I felt the need to point it out, I would be polite about it. I wouldn’t be some snide dickless shitbag like you were in my comments. I’d give the paper credit for a prominent correction, one way more prominent than they usually give.
Police quotas are why I left the south. When I learned that Miami, Florida police have felony quotas, I realized I wasn’t safe from them even if I obeyed the law. Toss in loss of job, loss of gf to a drunk driver, and loss of friend to a heroin OD… I moved north to Ohio, where the illegitimate government isn’t quite as desperate for funds, and I can’t say I’ve ever regretted it.
For what it’s worth, Dreher didn’t get the job. As before, Dreher is Atlanta’s problem, not ours.
I hope Radley will soon update this post to reflect the fact that Dreher didn’t “fall upward” after all. Even if he doesn’t, though, I promise not to go “Verdon” over it.
[...] Original post about Dreher’s possible promotion here. [...]
[...] not — as Justice Scalia, in the face of all contrary evidence, likes to maintain — that our police forces have become more professional. If anything, [...]