Our gift to the world: paramilitary police teams. You go, America.

Time has a photo essay.

Sorta’ related: A question during my speech tonight at the University of the South reminded me this YouTube video. I’ve posted it before. It looks like some overdone, overly sensationalized take on SWAT teams from someone not fond of them. Then I plugged around a bit, and discovered that the guy who made the video was actually on the SWAT team.

Anyway, I just checked the guy’s My Space page again, and it now looks like he’s the police chief in the town. This was the guy who said his love of SWAT raids stemmed form his fondness of “buyin’ dope and kickin’ down doors.”

Yes. Let’s put that guy in charge. I can’t see what could possibly go wrong.

ATF agents raid the wrong home.

There appears to have been one in Alabama, too, but I don’t have a subscription to the Clarke County Democrat.

…this week is on the unfortunate resurrection of the Byrne Grant, the anti-drug piece of federal pork responsible for Tulia, unaccountable drug task forces, and all sorts of other drug war mayhem.

This time, it’s the Democrats who are stirring up bad criminal justice policy.

What could possibly go wrong?

…comes the new Spike TV series DEA, a macho, ass-kicking, reality series that glorifies the government’s 30-year-war on American citizens. Check out the hand-job promo copy:

DEA agents put their lives in the hands of a drug and weapons trafficker turned informant as they mount an operation to burrow deep into Detroit’s drug underworld. Each undercover buy and daring raid brings them one step closer to a deadly showdown with a violent drug kingpin.

Or with an unarmed mother of six. Or a 92-year-old-woman. Or a meek amateur gardener. Or a middle-aged mother of two who led prayer groups on her lunch breaks. Maybe they’ll show a bunch of DEA agents handcuffing a post-polio medical marijuana patient to her bed while they shove assault weapons in her face. Or storming the home of a paraplegic with multiple sclerosis because he had the audacity to try to treat his own pain.

But hey. It’s all about protecting the kids from drugs, right?

Seriously, what’s the fallout for a show like this? It’s clearly a recruiting video for the DEA. But if the show focuses on door-smashing, head-bashing, and ass-kicking, exactly what kind recruits are they drawing?

Tellingly, the series is doing promo on sites like.…military.com. Remember that the next time someone argues that there’s nothing paramilitary about the drug war.

And yes, the fat weatherman is behind all of this.

Oh, and a reader sends in this early review of the series, snapped on an NYC subway car:

The police chief in Chesapeake, Virginia is retiring. Probably for the better, given this bit from the article:

He helped create six community advisory groups but stopped short of citizen oversight, which would have allowed citizens to investigate policy and complaints.

That did not sit well with the Chesapeake chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. March Cromuel Jr., president of the chapter at the time, said he believed oversight would build community trust.

“I would like to see cameras in all police cars and a citizen review board before he leaves,” Cromuel said.

Justice opposed it, and still does. “At any time, a complaint can be lodged against us that can bring in the state police, the FBI. The department is open. We don’t operate in any clandestine fashion now. We can’t have citizen groups running a police department,” he said.

Never mind that the police department actually works for the citizens. So no cameras in patrol cars, and no citizen review boards.

And I’d beg to differ about Chesapeake PD not operating in a “clandestine fashion.” A few weeks ago, based on a tip from some people I spoke with during my visit to Chesapeake, I filed an open records request asking for any internal investigations of “wrong door” raids conducted by Chesapeake PD. I also asked for any complaints filed against Det. Shivers. My interest is to see if there’s a pattern of the department’s narcotics officers taking shortcuts, and conducting forced entries raids without doing the appropriate corroborating investigation, as certainly seems to be the case in the raid on Ryan Frederick’s home.

I was told that all personnel matters at the department are confidential. All complaints against individual officers are confidential, all internal investigation into officers misconduct are confidential, and any records of internal investigation into mistaken or botched narcotics raids are confidential. It’s all confidential. Not only that, but that confidentiality follows an officer to the grave. And it applies even in cases like Ryan Frederick’s, where the suspect is facing life in prison or the death penalty, and where the case boils down to weighing the suspect’s credibility against that of the police officers who raided his home. All confidential.

It’s probably good for Chesapeake that this guy is retiring. And even better that the city manager has ordered a top-down review of police department procedures.

Two, actually. Both involve police intercepts of packages using the DHL delivery service on the campus at Duke University.

In the latest, police intercepted a package of marijuana bound for a fraternity house, then raided the place in full SWAT attire when one of the fraternity members signed for it. One of the residents describes the raid:

I am writing to share both my relief over the dropped charges against my housemate, senior Eric Halperin, as well as my continued anger at the blatant abuse of power by the Durham Police Department. On the morning of Feb. 27, our home off East Campus was raided by a team of State Bureau of Investigation agents and members of DPD. Without warning, our front door was knocked down and a handful of fully armed officers entered our home. Subsequently, we were ordered to the ground at the behest of assault rifles, dragged across the floor, hand-cuffed and forced to strip naked. In carrying out their search warrant, police officers destroyed hundreds of dollars of our personal property. Upon failing to find anything incriminating, my friend, Halperin, was falsely charged with drug trafficking without any investigation or evidence, except his signing for a DHL package not addressed to him.

It took a month, but police have now dropped all charges against Halperin. The earlier incident followed almost the same formula, except it took place in a dorm room. In that case too, the charges against the Duke student were dropped.

Even assuming it’s appropriate to arrest a college student who signs for a package of marijuana addressed to someone else, why the SWAT tactics? Did the police department really think the fraternity was going to put up a fight? (Note: It was also the Durham police department that gave us this photo—discussion on that here.) Last month, there was a similar incident at LSU, in which a SWAT team raided a college student’s home based on an anonymous tip that there might be some pot inside. They found nothing.

For some righteous outrage on the case, check out the "Liestoppers Board," a site set up by the parents of the wrongly accused Duke lacrosse team.

Another 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.

Arcata, California (population 17,294, with one murder since 2002) will have a town hall meeting tonight to determine if the town needs a SWAT team.

Owner won’t be charged for his dog attacking cops during drug raid. Happened in Britain, which may have something to do with why the dog isn’t dead. Money quote:

PC Clark admitted the scene had been peaceful until officers smashed the door down.

Good stuff:

I read your article on the police raid. My father was a cop for 35 years and a police chief for 20 of that. He was the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. I am also a former police officer. We both discussed many times the problems with police departments becoming paramilitary forces. He was chief in a military town and had many former military on his department. He fought constantly to keep them from becoming too military like.

One of the problems we both saw in the early 90’s were departments leaving the formal police uniforms with leather belts and holsters in favor of the dark blue fatigues with nylon mesh belts and holsters. This put police in a more fighting posture.

The final point my father was adamant about was the police 7 point hat. He said this hat was unmistakable in identifying an officer in any situation. His officers were not supposed to leave their vehicles without putting on their hat. Many departments have abandoned these expensive hats in favor of baseball caps. In a crowd there may be dozens of dark ball caps.

I worked as an officer in Wilmington NC where that college kid was killed. In the early 90’s both the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Dept and the Wilmington Police Department were heading toward the more aggressive styles of uniforms and tactics.

Thanks for the article. I do not think most people realize the value of good cops and the danger of bad ones.

I get into this a bit in Overkill. Even subtle changes toward a more militaristic culture can have a lasting effect on the type of mindset with which police officers approach their jobs. I’ve heard this complaint before from older cops–that the switch to more military-style fatigues also accompanied a shift to a more aggressive form of policing.

Only with misdemeanors, but to be honest, I’m a little surprised.

I actually don’t know whether this is appropriate or overly lenient. The reason it’s hard to tell is that we’re closing in on three months now, and the Lima police still won’t say what happened to make the officers shoot an unarmed woman holding an infant.

On the one hand, I guess it’s a plus that they at least repair the damage they do to innocent people’s homes. That’s more than can be said for many police departments across the country.

On the other hand, the fact that there’s a permanent unit in place to deal with wrong-door raids (and the reporter’s seeming nonchalance about it all) suggests that we’ve reached to the point where innocent people occasionally getting terrorized—and should they have the temerity to reach for a gun to defend themselves—possibly killed, is basically an understood and accepted consequence of fighting the drug war. That’s pretty unsettling.

Note also that the article says there were at least eight wrong-door raids in L.A. last year. I don’t remember reading about any of them—and I get Google News alerts, Lexis notifications, and reader emails just about any time a botched raid makes the news. More evidence that these raids are hitting the wrong house far more often than is reported in newspapers.

Incidentally, something similar happened in New York City in the late 1990s. Civil rights groups were becoming increasingly concerned about the number of botched raids showing up in the city’s newspapers. NYPD insisted that "wrong door" raids almost never happened—until an internal memo was leaked that instructed officers how to quietly notify repair men and locksmiths to fix busted doors. The wrong-door death of Alberta Spruill in 2003 sparked promises of reform, but within a few years it was back to business as usual.

Thanks to Mike Lombino for the link. 

• A failed war carried out under false pretenses, closing in on 4,000 dead U.S. troops, corrupt officials at the highest levels of his administration, incompetence, a complete lack of transparency and accountability–yes, it’s all quite funny, isn’t it? Har!
• So the woman was only on the toilet seat for a month. But yes, “Sheriff Whipple” has now recommended charges against her boyfriend. I wonder, what exactly was he supposed to do? At what point are you supposed to call the police when your girlfriend won’t get off the toilet? Apparently, a month is too long. Frankly, given the number of incidents of I’ve seen where a loved one called the police because of a stubborn psychologically disturbed loved one then escalated into all sorts of unnecessary ugliness and confrontation, I’d have been reluctant, too. I guess I just don’t get this knee-jerk need to throw out a charge every time something unfortunate happens. These people need help, not jail time.
• John Tierney looks at the science behind “A Boy Named Sue.” My biggest problem these days is getting people to believe that “Radley Prescott Balko” is actually my real name.
• Holding the sun.
• The two brothers who were accosted by police after videotaping a drug raid have won a $1.7 million settlement from Harris County, Texas.

…this week is on the Ryan Frederic/Jarrod Shivers mess in Chesapeake.

A couple of weeks ago, I started sending off open records requests related to drug raids to various cities across the country. My initial goal was to review the warrants and return sheets for these raids, for several reasons.

First, I want to see how many times police mistakenly raid the wrong home. Second, I wanted to see just how often forced entry raids occur. Third, I wanted to see if the police are doing the proper amount of corroborating investigation before breaking into people’s homes or if they’re, as I suspect, using boilerplate language about drugs and/or weapons to get a no-knock or knock-and-announce warrant (which would technically be illegal). And finally, I wanted to see just how often police found what they claimed they were looking for in the warrants themselves.  How many of these raids actually found drugs or weapons?  How many found enough to result in something more than a misdemeanor charge?

I got my first reply back late last week, from the police department in Houston. Unfortunately, it looks as if any thorough review of search warrants, or of how many warrants hit the wrong address, is going to be cost prohibitive. My request from the Houston PD records office was for one or both of the following:

• A copy of the warrant, affidavits, and evidence return sheets for every forced-entry drug raid (no-knock or knock-and-announce) performed in the city since January 1, 2004.

• A copy of all complaints against he Houston police department regarding a narcotics warrant served on the wrong house since January 1, 2001.

Houston PD’s open records officer told me that the cost to comply with the first request would be around $45,000. The cost for the second would be $55,000. Which means a survey of the couple dozen cities I had hoped to eventually do would likely cost several million dollars.  So that won’t be happening.

Still, some interesting information did come out of the request.

First, the reason my request for the second item was so expensive is that HPD doesn’t have a code for a complaint that a warrant was served on wrong house. That in itself is pretty interesting (and should probably be remedied). So to comply with my request, they’d have to pull every complaint filed after a narcotics warrant was served, then read through the complaint to see if it was based on a "wrong door" raid.

What I did learn was that over the last seven years, there have been 43,456 complaints filed in Houston in response to the service of a warrant.  I’m guessing that includes all warrants, not just drug warrants.  Still, it’s a really high figure (17 per day?).  In fact, I thought perhaps they’d misunderstood, and run a search for all police complaints in that time.  But the records officer specifically said that those were the complaints related to warrant service.  Make of that what you will.  I’m sure a large percentage of them were frivolous.  It’s just too bad there’s no way of figuring out how many complaints are related to a wrong-door raid without shelling out $55,000.

Second, and more disturbing, I learned that HPD has served about 16,000 forced-entry narcotics warrants in the last four years. The number is an estimate because the warrants are packed up in boxes, and the compliance officer guessed by multiplying the average number of warrants per box by the number of boxes.  But it’s not likely off by too much either way.

Eastern Kentucky University’s Peter Kraska surveyed SWAT team deployments ranging from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. Kraska estimated that by the end of his survey, SWAT teams were being called out about 40,000 times per year in the U.S., a huge increase from about 3,000 times per year just twenty years prior. That breaks down to about 110 SWAT raids per day.

The data I just received from Houston suggests Kraska’s figure from about 2000 could be dwarfed yet again today. If the estimate I was given is correct, over the last four years, police have been conducting about 11 forced entry drug raids per day in the city of Houston alone.

A couple of caveats: Not all forced-entry drug warrants are served by SWAT teams, and not all SWAT deployments are for drug warrants (though a large percentage of them are) Sometimes narcotics cops kick down doors on their own. And sometimes SWAT teams are deployed for what I would consider legitimate reasons—barricades, hostage takings, bank robberies, etc.

Still, the number from Houston is pretty striking. Eleven times a day in that city alone, the police get permission from a judge to break into someone’s home to enforce a consensual drug crime.

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Ed Burns, the co-creator of HBO’s The Wire.  We covered the show, the drug war, criminal justice, police work, public education, and politics, as well as the upcoming HBO miniseries, Generation Kill.

The interview is now up at reason.