For ten years, Boulder residents have staged a spontaneous “naked pumpkin run” on Halloween, in which dozens of runners (150 last year) don only shoes and a pumpkin on their head, then jog a four-block route through the city.

This year, however, Boulder police put an end to the revelry, stationing 40 cops and two SWAT teams along the route, which police chief Mark Beckner promising that anyone showing their, er, treats would land on the state’s sex offender list.

Looks like it worked. Just a few people did the run this year, and with sufficient clothing to ward off an arrest.

(Thanks to Sean McMahon for the tip.)

In my column on the police crackdown at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, I noted that one video circulating around the Internet showed a police unit of about 20 officers decked out in paramilitary garb parading around what appears to be a handcuffed protester. The kid is then propped up in front of the cops, who then pose with him while another cop snaps a photo.

We now know the police unit was from Chicago. They’d taken vacation time to provide freelance security, paid for by the city of Pittsburgh. The protester is Kyle Kramer, who was charged with failure to disperse and disorderly conduct, although he says he has yet to be formally notified of the charges. Like many of those arrested, Kramer appears to have been observing, not rioting. Excerpts from his interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Shortly after being arrested at the intersection of Fifth and Tennyson avenues around 11:20 p.m. on Sept. 25, Mr. Kramer, an English and writing major who hopes to become a journalist one day, was asked by one officer what he was majoring in.

When he told them, he said “They laughed and someone joked, ‘We’re going to give you plenty to write about tonight.’”…

“Things were happening so fast, and I didn’t know how I was going to be treated. The atmosphere was edgy, ominous, a little spooky and pretty interesting.”

There was a “weird rapport” between him and his arresting officer, “a big dude. He was kind of up and down, angry and then friendly.” When the officer told him to pose for the photo, he said, “I kind of gave him a little bit of an argument, but I told him I would be in the picture. It’s kind of hard to say how they would have reacted if I had said no.” Indeed, he said, “the only time I was really mad was when I was made to kneel like that. That made me mad. It was kind of a natural response, I guess.” At one point, he found himself discussing Chicago jazz clubs with the officer. “I figured if you can have some friendly conversation it’s a lot less likely you’ll be charged with anything extra,” although when he asked for the police officers’ names, he said, they laughed.

Pittsburgh Police Chief Nate Harper said he had no intention of looking into the video, explaining he had “more important things” to investigate. He added that the photo could merely have been “the Chicago PD’s way of documenting the fact that they effected this arrest.”

Chicago Police Chief Jody Weiss appears more concerned. Last week, he announced that his department’s internal affairs division would investigate the incident.

Last month, I posted about Johnathan Ayers, a minister in Georgia who was killed by police who confronted him in the parking lot of a convenience store. Police said the target of their investigation was a prostitute who had been in Ayers car shortly before the confrontation. They say they shot Ayers because he struck an officer with his car. The officers who confronted Ayers were in plain clothes, and emerged from a black, unmarked SUV.

Now the woman, who was later arrested on drug charges, is talking. Kayla Barrett, a 26-year-old admitted drug addict, says Ayers had no involvement in drug activity, had tried for several years to help her get her life straightened out, and was helping her get home on the day of his death. She says she isn’t a prostitute, has never been charged with that crime, and is refuting insinuation on some comment threads to news stories that Ayers was having an affair with her. Barrett says she’d had a miscarriage 11 days before Ayers was killed, and was “not capable” of sex.

Here’s her account of the day Ayers died:

Barrett said Ayers saw her walking from the Exxon station across from the Shell station (where he eventually was shot) back toward Relax Inn, where she and her fiancé were staying.

Since she had experienced a miscarriage 11 days prior and she visibly was having difficulty walking, Barrett said Ayers offered her a ride back to the motel.

“I was in his car for probably about five to seven minutes – and it was probably 20-30 minutes before he got shot,” Barrett said.

“When I got in the car, I was telling him about my recent miscarriage,” she said.

Barrett said she was paying $30 per day to stay at Relax Inn and, on Sept. 1, was three days behind. Her fiancé, who was staying there with her, had hurt his back and was unable to work, she said.

She said they had been doing “odd jobs” and “yard work” to make money.

Barrett said she asked Ayers if he could help her out with the back rent, and that he gave “all the money he had on him” – $23.

“His last words to me were I didn’t owe him anything,” Barrett said. “Probably 15-20 minutes after that I could hear the shots.”

Giving Barrett the last of his cash would explain why Ayers stopped off at the Exxon ATM in the moments before his death.

My crime column this week is on the police response to the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

MORE: Check out this video. Everything up to the macing is terrifying enough. But then there’s the macing.

So as it turns out, even the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has its own SWAT team.

You don’t need to know. You can’t know.” That’s what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.

The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris’ longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.

The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with – get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That’s right. Orchids.

By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary – based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids..

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn’t have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal – but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty’s new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: “Life sometimes presents us with lemons.” Their job was, yes, to “turn lemons into lemonade.”

Or just wait for the inevitable SWAT team to come and smash them for you.

Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo has an op-ed in the Washington Post about his experience trying to get some accountability for the violent, mistaken 2008 raid on his home.

Let me give you three specific concerns underscored by our case.

First, the Prince George’s Police Department’s internal affairs function is broken. When the Justice Department released the county police from federal supervision in February, internal affairs was the one area that was not cleared. Internal affairs division (IAD) investigations were required to take no longer than 90 days. More than a year after our ordeal, my family awaits the IAD report on what happened at our home. The statute of limitations for officer misconduct is 12 months, which means that any wrongdoers are off the hook.

Next, there is significant evidence that the county is broadly violating the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. After initially claiming that they had a “no-knock” warrant to forcibly enter our home, county police acknowledged that they did not have one. But they went on to contend that there is no such thing as a “no-knock” warrant in Maryland. But this isn’t true. A statewide “no-knock” warrant statute was passed in 2005. Effectively, the county is denying the existence of state law. We can’t get the county to say whether it has ever followed the law or, at a minimum, even acknowledges it.

Finally, and perhaps most disturbing of all, county police may be lying to cover up their civil rights violations. A county officer on the scene told Berwyn Heights police a fabricated tale to justify the warrantless entry into our home. The lie disappeared after police learned that I was the mayor. Charges of a police coverup are hardly unusual, but there is significant evidence that county law enforcement engaged in a conspiracy on our lawn to justify an illegal entry. Nothing strikes at the heart of police credibility like creative report writing and false testimony to cover up a lie or even put innocent people behind bars.

Calvo is really an impressive guy. I’ve never talked to him whether he’d ever consider running for higher office, but there’d be some poetic justice in seeing him become the next Prince George’s county executive.

When the police shot and killed the pit bull, two bullets ricocheted, striking the kids.

Developing story in Georgia, where church pastor Jonathan Ayers was shot and killed by undercover narcotics officers during a botched drug sting on Tuesday afternoon. Ayers was not the target of the investigation.

Police were apparently after a woman Ayers had dropped off just prior to stopping at the convenience store where police confronted him. Surveillance video shows a black SUV pulling up to the store, and plain-clothes officers jumping out with their guns drawn before the vehicle has stopped. Ayers’ car then backs into the picture, and the officers fire into his car as he drives off. Ayers was shot in the liver, crashed his car a short distance later, and died at the hospital the bullet wound.

A police spokesperson says the officers identified themselves as they got out of the truck, though even if they did, it isn’t difficult to see how someone in Ayers’ position might panic when confronted with armed, plain-clothes men who’d just jumped from a black SUV. He had also just returned from getting money from the store’s ATM. There were no drugs in Ayers’ car.

Ayers leaves behind a wife who is four months pregnant.

Several Seattle-area Somali immigrants are suing local police agencies, claiming they were wrongly rounded up in a massive sweep for khat done in conjunction with the DEA. Khat is a mild euphoric stimulant that’s usually chewed in leaf form. It’s illegal in the U.S. but ubiquitous throughout Africa, and common in U.S. cities with large East African immigrant populations.

Three years ago, armed agents from a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) task force crashed through the door of a Seattle apartment where Habibo Jama, a Somali refugee and U.S. citizen, lived with her brother, uncle and cousins. Jama, startled awake, opened her bedroom door in her nightshirt to find herself facing several men in black pointing guns at her and ordering her to the floor.

Almost simultaneously, at an apartment 20 miles away in Kent, Ali Dualeh, his wife and their seven children — ages 4 months to 17 years — jolted from bed when they heard a loud noise. Both parents made it to the hallway before they were tackled by agents from the Valley Narcotics Enforcement Team who had broken down their front door.

“Operation Somali Express” was a nationwide crackdown, but it’s only real achievement appears to be bad blood between police and local Somali immigrant communities. Of the 19 men arrested in Seattle, 15 were dismissed without charges. According to the Seattle Times, most of those arrested in New York, Ohio, and Minnesota were never charged either. Agents seized money and property from Somali families who were never charged, some of whom had to wait nearly a year before their savings and belongings were returned.

The paper suggests the raids may amount to yet another anti-drug operation that undermines the war on terror.

Some law-enforcement officials and Somali community leaders are saying the fallout from the operation has poisoned relations between law enforcement and the communities at a time when federal agents are looking for help.

Over the past two years, as many as 20 Somali men have disappeared from Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., apparently recruited in area mosques to wage jihad in their own country.

Some have turned up fighting for a radical Islamic group in Somalia called Al-Shabaab, which U.S. intelligence sources have tied to al-Qaida. One American youth blew himself up at a U.N. checkpoint last October, according to federal investigators…

It is a very difficult community to walk into,” said one law-enforcement official assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Seattle who spoke on condition of anonymity because he does not have permission to talk to the media. “There is a lot of mistrust there and part of it is because of these raids.”

The lawsuit also alleges the Seattle police department conducts no-knock raids (or at least knock-and-announce raids that don’t allow a long enough period of time before forcing entry) for all of its narcotics warrants. If so, the department would be in violation of the U.S. Constitution. But as is often the case with these multi-jurisdictional operations, there seems to be a lot of buck passing about whose procedures were being followed.

The city, in a response to the lawsuit, denies its practice is unconstitutional and said its officers were acting under the direction of the DEA. The DEA referred all inquiries about the lawsuit to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The agency, in court filings, said it can’t be held liable for what the Seattle police officers may have done in leading the raid on Jama’s apartment.

On the addiction/physical harm table, khat ranks below just about every other mood-altering drug available. The harm caused by overly aggressive government efforts to prevent people from chewing it is another matter.

Dear TLC,

What the hell is wrong with you?

Yours,

Radley Balko

(Snapped by a reader in New York City.)

More: Per the comments, here’s a trailer for the show. It features the lovely line: “There’s always a good time to use a Taser.”

The feds this time:

An east Charlotte woman who’s going through cancer treatment said she was startled early Wednesday morning when federal agents burst into her apartment searching for suspects in a drug trafficking ring.

“It was a case of mistaken identity,” Rosie Lee Bright told Eyewitness News.

But Federal Bureau of Investigation agents didn’t figure that out before they ordered her to lie on the floor and handcuffed her…

A spokeswoman for the FBI told Eyewitness News that the address mix-up appears to have been an honest mistake since agents had been working on the assumption they were targeting the right apartment.

Oh, well in that case…

You sort of hope they wouldn’t intentionally target the wrong apartment. There is at least this:

Bright said once they realized their mistake, agents apologized and offered to pay any medical bills she might have because of the raid.

Edward Schumacher-Matos writes in today’s Washington Post that Immigration and Customs Enforcement teams conducting immigration rates are routinely violating the Fourth Amendment. After discussing a wrong-door immigration raid on a former Marine and his wife in Arizona, Schumacher-Matos explains:

It would be easy to dismiss the episode as isolated, but 100 seven-member teams of ICE agents across the country are regularly making similar house calls, usually in the pre-dawn hours, in SWAT-like raids with shotguns and automatic rifles, sometimes crawling through open windows. In place of search warrants issued by a judge, ICE agents carry administrative warrants issued by one of their own officials that require that they “knock and talk” to gain entry into a home, a policy often abused…

The raids are supposed to be aimed at fugitive illegal immigrants who have committed criminal acts, but it appears they’re being used to rope up non-criminal undocumented workers (illegal immigration is a violation of civil law, not criminal law).

The “knock and talk” warrants require the police to get permission before entering. But that didn’t happen in the wrong-door example Schumacher-Matos used to lead off his column. And it doesn’t appear to be happening elsewhere, either.

The Cardozo study examined 700 arrests between 2006 and 2008 on Long Island and in New Jersey and found that agents said they had not received informed consent to enter the homes in 86 percent of the Long Island cases and 24 percent of the New Jersey ones. Conflicting information in the New Jersey arrest records suggests that the reported consent there was often fabricated or misreported, the Cardozo study says.

Two-thirds of the arrests were happenstance — they were mostly of Latinos whose only crime was a civil one of working here illegally. “The high percentage of collateral arrests is consistent with allegations that ICE agents are using home raids for purported targets as a pretext to enter homes” and arrest as many people as they can to meet quotas that in 2006 were increased eightfold to 1,000 a year per team, the report said.

Violations were so flagrant on Long Island that local police withdrew their support and accused ICE of being reckless and dangerous, and of undermining a relationship of trust with the Latino community that had been helping to reduce crime. Mounting evidence elsewhere suggests that the raids are out of control nationally.

It looks as if we can add “illegal immigration” to the growing list of issues so critical, they deserve exceptions to the Fourth Amendment.