So let’s look at that Atlanta Journal article from this weekend in a bit more detail.

In March 2005, a team of Atlanta narcotics officers, armed with a “no-knock” search warrant, arrived at a northwest Atlanta home looking for a marijuana dealer known only as “Black.”

The door was open so the officers didn’t have to smash it down; they simply walked in and searched the home, said a resident of the house who was confronted in his living room by armed officers.

The officers found plastic bags and a small scale but no drugs, according to a police report, a point that the resident disputes. Police also did not find “Black” and made no arrests.

Let’s stop here for a minor point. The “bags and scales” line gets tossed out quite a bit after a raid that turns up little. I wonder — who doesn’t have bags and scales in their home? We have a kitchen scale. We also have sandwich bags. I’ve never possessed a gram of marijuana in my life. If my house were to be raided, would these items counts as “drug paraphernalia?” Just wondering. Let’s go on.

The house at 929 Neal St. is next door to and shares a driveway with the home of Kathryn Johnston, the elderly woman who was killed last week in a shootout with Atlanta narcotics officers who came to search for drugs.

The fatal raid, in which three officers were wounded, has shined a spotlight on how the narcotics officers target houses to raid and the tactics used in those raids.

According to police reports, warrant applications and search warrant inventories:

In each of these two cases, police said a confidential informant made a single, small drug buy at the target house.

In each case, officers had a no-knock warrant that gave permission to bust down the door.

In each case, police were looking for a man known only by a nickname who also was not found; last year it was a man named “Black,” last week it was “Sam.”

And in each case, members of the same narcotics team were involved.

So one of my recommendations to reign in these abuses is to track each warrant, from the time it’s applied for, to the time it’s executed. Every detail ought to be documented and saved, preferably in a searchable database. I also think we need to do more to hold the judges and magistrates who sign off on these warrants more accountable.

In this case, if police had applied for and obtained a no-knock warrant a year earlier for the house next door and came back with nothing, the magistrate would have been able to look that information up before approving the warrant on Kathryn Johnston’s home. And if she approved the warrant anyway, we could ask questions like, “Why did you approve two bad warrants in two years on two homes on the same block?”

Of course, this latest example also shows that contrary to what defenders of no-knock warrants would have us believe, they are quite commonly issued based on no more than a single tip from a single confidential informant. Which brings me to the next paragraph:

But these aren’t the only cases in which the team served no-knock warrants and came away either empty handed, or with little to show for their effort. Though the legal standard requires police to show special circumstances — that evidence will likely be destroyed or that weapons in the house put officers at risk — these cases and others show that short, routine descriptions and the trust of a judge is all that veteran officers need to obtain such warrants.

Which is why we need to start holding these judges accountable, too. If the standard response from law enforcement when a raid goes bad is that the warrant was sound because it was approved by a “neutral” court, then we need to start directing our questions at the courts, too. There seems to be a bad case of buck-passing going on, here. The judges say it’s not their job to double-check the police. The police say we can’t complain so long as the warrant was legal, and the warrant is legal if it was approved by a judge.

Dennis Scheib, a former police officer and now a defense attorney, said too often officers “take a shortcut” and rely only on the word of one informant, someone from the same criminal element that is being targeted for a raid.

“It’s too loosey-goosey,” said Scheib, who recently defended a client in a drug case brought by one of the officers wounded in the Johnston shooting, and has two other cases pending that involve the same officer. “They don’t have the resources. They don’t have the time to investigate in a thorough manner. They take a shortcut. They are violating constitutional rights.”

Not to toot my own horn, but this is exactly what I suspected was going on when this case first broke. Not because I’m particularly bright, but because I’ve read enough of this crap to see the same patterns, over and over again.

Scheib said that in his experience judges rarely, if ever, require proof of an informant’s credibility or even existence. He said officers have dropped cases when they’ve been pushed to produce evidence of an informant’s reliability.

“Too many times, you’ll have officers say they sent a confidential informant in and he found drugs and you don’t know who the confidential informant is and the court won’t make them tell you,” Scheib said. “I’m not saying these cops are dishonest. Too many times the officers don’t see the informant go in and don’t see the informant come out and they just take [the informant's] word for it. Our system relies on the integrity of the officers and somewhat on the integrity of the informant.”

What’s even more infuriating is when an informant’s tip leads to a wrong-door raid, and the courts still won’t let the victim’s attorneys learn of his identity. If you ask me, if a CI’s tip leads to an innocent person’s door getting kicked down, it’s time to stop using him as an informant.

At a bare minimum, though, if we’re going to use an informant system to police our unfortunate drug laws, we need a more sophisticated system than a police officer using boilerplate language on an affidavit using the word of an ex-con or drug dealer to earn a warrant to invade a private residence.

According to a sampling of records, police have gone in looking for marijuana, cocaine or other narcotics after a small buy by an informant and found nothing.

Here’s hoping someone in Atlanta goes beyond “a sampling,” and conducts a comprehensive review of how many no-knock and short-knock (my term) warrants were given out over the last few years in Atlanta, how many were given on such scant evidence, and what the results looked like. My guess is that they’ll look quite a bit like the results from similar studies, which I posted two posts down.

Atlanta police spokesman Officer Joe Cobb said there were no records showing how often that happens but “every narcotics search warrant is based on probable cause that is reviewed by a judge…

“Reviewed” obviously being a pretty subjective term, here….

….We would expect in every case to find drugs [but] there are times we don’t. But I don’t know how often that is.”

Seems like that would be a good thing we should ask our police departments to keep track of. We could call it something like, “Number of times an innocent person’s home was wrongly violated by a group of armed men working for the city…”

The rest of the article details the specifics of the raid a year ago on the home next door to Johnston’s.

One thing: The FBI has told at least one Atlanta TV reporter that they aren’t interested in other mistake raids, only the Johnston case. That’s too bad. The Johnston raid didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was an entirely foreseeable consequence of a series of misguided policies. And until the people who make decisions in Atlanta and elsewhere see that, the Kathryn Johnston’s are going to continue to pile up.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 11:00 pm 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.