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.

Unfortunately, I’m not talking about Ryan Frederick.

From North Carolina:

More than a year after a law enforcement officer’s mistake left a teen dead and a family in grief, Peyton Strickland’s parents finally have found closure.

That closure came on Tuesday evening with a settlement of $2.45 million and a public apology from New Hanover County [North Carolina] Sheriff Sid Causey. Additionally, Causey agreed to an independent review of the heavily armed team responsible for Strickland’s death.

[...]

Strickland’s parents, Durham lawyer Don Strickland and his wife, Kathy, had two years from the time of their son’s death on Dec. 1, 2006, to file suit. Former New Hanover County Sheriff’s Cpl. Christopher M. Long was not charged with a crime, leaving Strickland’s family without closure.

[...]

Long shot Strickland to death in the process of a raid. The sheriff’s Emergency Response Team was in the process of arresting Strickland for armed robbery. Long mistook the sound of a battering ram for gunshots.

His gear included a hood, earpiece and helmet that he said muffled his hearing.

I don’t think Long should have been charged, either, though it’s good that he’s no longer part of the police force. I just wish prosecutors and grand juries would show the same sort of deference to the people targeted by these raids that they show to police officers. After all, unlike the police (allegedly), the targets of these raids aren’t well-trained. They don’t have the advantage of knowing the raid is about to take place. And the raids use tactics whose specific aim is to disorient and confuse the people they’re raiding. Yet Ryan Frederick, Cory Maye, and others sit in jail cells. Long merely lost his job.

Of course, the better solution would be to only use home invasion police tactics against people who present an immediate threat to others.

• Hoboken, New Jersey SWAT team sez, “We had no choice! We were forced to go to to Hooters, drink, pose with scantily-clad women, and to let them take photos holding our guns!”
• Local news cameraman gets to go on a SWAT raid. Keep in mind, this is a drug bust. The gear, the armor, the weapons–all to stop people from getting high.
• Cops in SWAT gear in Baton Rouge, Louisiana deploy a flashbang grenade and raid a college apartment, apparently based on no more than an anonymous tip that someone was smoking or growing marijuana inside. They found nothing, and made no arrests. Good way to get someone killed, fellas.
• Interesting look at the politics of SWAT teams in smaller cities. Note that the SWAT team was started not after any sort of audit or study showed the city had a high rate of violent crimes, barricades, hostage takings, or other dangerous, emergency situations, but that “the squad was formed in 2001 by a group of interested officers who volunteered their time. They bought their own uniforms and rifles and Harrington acquired grant funding to support them, he said.” A bunch of cops thought it would be fun to have a SWAT team. So they started one.

Chesapeake police have seized Ryan Frederick’s phone records from the night of the raid. I can see several reasons for this, I guess. Did the informant call Frederick that night? Did Frederick talk to anyone the police suspect of being involved with drug distribution? I remember early on reading somewhere that Frederick dialed 911 at some point during the raid, but I can’t remember where, and haven’t seen anything about it since. Of course if he did, those records would be available through the 911 line. They wouldn’t need to seize Frederick’s phone records for that.

What’s strange is that this was reported in a couple of local media outlets. Seems like this would be a pretty routine part of this kind of investigation. Perhaps it’s an indication of just how secretive the police department has been in all of this. Maybe the local media is hungry for information, caught wind that something related to the case had just been filed in court, and felt the need to report it. But the mere fact that they’re reviewing the phone records doesn’t really indicate much of anything.

In related news, the Virginian-Pilot has published a new staff editorial that’s pretty critical of the police department’s secrecy in the case. The editorial notes that public opinion is growing skeptical of the way the raid and investigation were conducted, and growing particularly wary of the way Chesapeake officials have clammed up since the raid went down. They’re calling for more disclosure.

Virginian-Pilot columnist Kerry Dougherty completely misses the point in an acerbic rant against the mounting support for Ryan Frederick.

Blogger TheHim offers a point-by-point refutation. I’ll just add a few things.

Then there’s her predictable “if you don’t like the drug laws, change them–but don’t blame cops for enforcing the law” line. Even if you agree with drug prohibition, I think many reasonable people still find the idea of using home invasions to enforce it discomforting. And even if you agree with that, there remains the problem that the police were breaking into this man’s house based only a tip from an informant, with no corroborating investigation. The major grow operation the informant said police would find in Frederick’s house wasn’t there. The only drug charge against Frederick is a misdemeanor.

Maybe Frederick shouldn’t have fired as soon as he did. But if he hadn’t, if he had met Shivers and his partner with a gun when they broke into the house, he’d likely be dead. So I guess the third option here is that Frederick should never have had a gun in his home at all. But then, it isn’t surprising that Dougherty wouldn’t be much on the Second Amendment. She doesn’t particularly like the Sixth, either:

When was the last time you heard a defense lawyer, in a highly publicized murder case, no less, say that he does not want a change of venue?

“No, no, he has too much support here,” said Frederick’s attorney, James Broccoletti, when asked if he’d like the trial moved.

If it’s unfair to have a jury pool skewed toward conviction, it should also be unfair to have one awash in sympathizers.

Dougherty’s admonition to “wait for the facts” is also off the mark. It isn’t a journalist’s job to sit around and wait for the police, the prosecutor, or other members of the government to tell us what the facts are. Our job is to go out and gather the facts on our own. As we saw in Atlanta a little over a year ago, the authorities’ account of “the facts” is often quite different than what actually happened. There are patterns that emerge in these botched raids. It’s important to hold the police and prosecutors accountable early, and to get to important information before they can find ways to bury it.

Yes, it’s tragic that a cop is dead, a woman widowed, and two kids are now fatherless. It’s also tragic that a man’s life has been ruined because of poor police work. What’s most troubling about Dougherty’s column is that when faced with the troubling facts about this case (Frederick’s lack of prior record, evidence of a sloppy police investigation, problems with the informant, the absence of any marijuana growing operation, neighbors who contradict police reports), the first reaction from Dougherty, a journalist, is to blame the people asking questions.

Yonkers man claims he was shot three times during a drug raid. The police found a small amount of drugs, and killed the man’s three dogs. Not saying this guy’s innocent, or even that he’s telling the truth. Just another unnecessarily violent raid to enforce a consensual crime.

Also, good work from a local television station looking into the wrong-door raid on a Minnesota Hmong family late last year. Looks as though the police did little to no corroborating investigation on the initial tip. It also looks as if, contrary to what they’ve claimed, there was no announcement before they began the raid.

It’s standard in cases like this to do surveillance outside a house and check for any police calls to the address.

Investigators also could have run a simple property search online and learned that the Khang family owned the house on Logan Avenue since moving there four years ago.

So far, the I-TEAM has found no evidence that any of those steps were taken on the Logan Avenue house to confirm the information provided by Brown’s girlfriend.

Finally, here’s a sensible column from the Virginian-Pilot’s Roger Chesley on the Frederick/Shivers raid.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

The state senate’s judiciary committee recently passed a bill in response to the Kathryn Johnston shooting that would…

…require officers who want to use so-called "no-knock" search warrants to go to a judge and prove that there is probable cause to believe that the officers’ lives would be in danger if they knocked first, or that there is probable cause to believe that evidence inside the home would be destroyed — such as drugs being flushed down a toilet — if they knocked first.

"For the government to go into your house, they ought to be held to a higher standard," Fort said. "To go into your house without knocking, they ought to be held to a real high standard."

While I suppose it’s a good sign that Georgia’s lawmakers want to do something, this bill would change almost nothing. It would basically mean police officers in Georgia would have to comply with the bare minimum standards for a no-knock entry laid out by the Supreme Court in Wilson v. Arkansas. That opinion required police to knock and announce before entering a home unless they could show that the suspect presented a threat to the safety of police officers or there existed the possibility that the suspect could dispose of evidence. In other words, this bill would force Georgia to comply with the minimal constitutional protections the state should have been following for 14 years.

Moreover, it’s unlikely that this would have even prevented the incident it’s responding to. While the warrant itself in the Johnston case authorized a no-knock raid, the officers who conducted the raid claimed they announced first (though just about anything these particular cops said at this point is suspect).

The difference between a "no-knock" and a "knock-and-announce" raid is basically moot for the people inside the house. I’ve talked to police who say they wait little to no time at all between announcement and entry. If you’re asleep, in a room away from the door, or hard of hearing, the difference between the two is further obscured. Keep in mind, the whole purpose of a SWAT-style raid is to catch the suspect by surprise. That’s why so many of these raids are conducted at night. A full-throated announcement with sufficient wait time for the suspect to come to the door defeats the entire purpose of catching said suspect off-guard.

The real issue here is forced entry, and the use of forced entry tactics to serve warrants for nonviolent crimes. If the Georgia legislature is serious about preventing more botched raids, they’ll strictly limit the number of situations in which police can break into someone’s home to serve a warrant. These tactics should be limited to only the most severe situations, when a suspect presents an immediate threat to the safety of others—think hostage takings, violent fugitives, or shootings. So long as the law allows cops to kick down doors in pursuit of neighborhood dope slingers, we’ll continue to have more Kathryn Johnstons. As there have been.

The sad thing is, meager as this particular bill may be, it’s the second time Georgia has tried to pass it. The original bill died last year. Even after an event as appalling and high-profile as the Johnston shooting, the state can’t even bring itself to pass a paltry effort at reform.

MORE:  Per the comments section, the bill does apparently increase the standard to obtain a no-knock from "reasonable suspicion" in Wilson to "probable cause" that the suspect might be dangerous or dispose of evidence.  In that sense, it is a bit of an improvement.  But police can still get a knock-and-announce warrant on the old standard, then merely force entry by merely announcing quietly, or at night when occupants aren’t likely to hear them.  As the sponsor of the bill himself says in the article, the state forcing its way into people’s homes is the problem, here.  Whether the police observe the formality of a cursory announcement first is beside the point.  To be effective new standard should apply any time police are forcing their way into someone’s home.

The crowd for yesterday’s Ryan Frederick rally was modest in size. I arrived at around 10:45am, and at the time there were about as many members of the media as there were supporters. A glum, cold rain might have had something to do with the turnout. I hung around until about 2, and I’d say that over that span, a total of 100 to 120 people showed up at one point or another.

The crowd was a mix of Frederick’s family, friends, and former co-workers, along with a smattering of people from the community who’d seen his jailhouse interview on television or read about him in the paper. About a half dozen local libertarian activists also showed up.

There were no dissenters while I was there. In fact, I’ve yet to see a negative word about Frederick in any of the coverage of the raid from local media, at least from anyone who knows him. The worst thing I’ve yet to read about the guy came from special prosecutor Paul Ebert—who’s never met Frederick and came to the case from the other side of the state—when at the bond hearing, Ebert called Frederick, "A potential danger to society."

Susan Milne, a woman in her 50s who worked with Frederick at the Virginia Beach Resort & Conference Center (where Frederick was a banquet manager) described him as "very passive, loving, giving, honest—I wish I had more adjectives. He’s such a sweet kid. I feel so bad for him."

Michelle Berard, a hairdresser in Virginia Beach, doesn’t know Frederick, but decided to come after seeing his jailhouse interview on the local news. "I could tell he was honest and scared," she said. "This raiding people’s houses is a failed policy, and they know it. They should admit it and let him go. What happened to that cop is sad, but two wrongs don’t make a right."

Retired naval inspector W.O. Jones showed up with his wife around noon to give $50 to Frederick’s defense fund. "New stories like this arise every day in this area," he said. "I’m tired of this. I’m here because if I was in that kid’s shoes, I’d have done the same thing."

Frederick was also recently engaged. Family friend Amy Jones, who also worked with Frederick in Virginia Beach, says Frederick’s been emotionally devastated since the raid. Others close to Frederick I spoke with say he repeteadly smacked his head against the patrol car window, and vomitted on the way to the police station. "We were afraid they were going to put him on suicide watch," Jones said. "He’s doing better now. But he doesn’t know why this happened to him."

Frederick’s neighborhood is working class. Several people described it as "rough," though, one local resident clarified, noting that I drove down from Washington, "Rough by Chesapeake standards, not by D.C. standards." Supporters who know Frederick personally also mentioned his recently deceased mother, who once worked for the sheriff’s department, explaining that he wasn’t someone with any animus toward law enforcement.

I spoke with one of Frederick’s neighbors and several farmily members, though not for attribution. Both Chesapeake police detectives and Frederick’s attorney James Broccoletti have asked neighbors not to talk to the media. In fact, both sides have told everyone close to Frederick not to talk to reporters. I found, though, that Frederick’s supporters are fairly eager to tell what they know anyway, and tend to open up with little prodding. The Chesapeake police department and Broccoletti aren’t commenting right now.

Here are a few other items that came out yesterday:

• Three separate people close to Frederick told me that Frederick and Broccoletti are now aware of the informant’s identity. All three said it’s an acquaintance of Frederick’s, that the informant has a criminal record, and that it was the informant who broke into Frederick’ house three days before the raid. Again, this hasn’t been confirmed by Broccoletti, Chesapeake PD, or Paul Ebert. But it certainly meshes with Frederick’s jailhouse interview, in which he told Virginian-Pilot reporter John Hopkins that police told him as they arrested him they knew about the prior break-in, and that they knew who had done it.

• One neighbor I spoke with said Frederick is "not—not—a drug dealer." "He’s a good kid," the neighbor said, "He’s worked hard from the time he was young. And let me tell you something. I’m not supposed to talk about the case, but all the truth isn’t out in this. You’re going to hear much, much more before this is over." This neighbor also confirmed that Frederick is an early riser, which would explain why he was sleeping at 8:30pm that night. "My husband goes to work at 4:30 in the morning. Ryan would usually be gone by the time he left. I can tell you, my husband goes to bed at 8 or 8:30, too. You have to when you get up at a quarter to four."

• Friends, neighbors, and two of Frederick’s former roommates confirmed to me that Frederick is an avid gardener. The yard behind his home includes an elaborate pond with fish, and a variety of tropical plants. Several people also confirmed that he did in fact raise Japanese Maples.

• The neighbor I spoke with says Frederick has near unanimous support from his neighborhood. I say "near" because, oddly enough, I was told Chesapeake’s police chief apparently lives one street over. But the people I spoke with say they know of no neighbors who heard any police announcement the night of the raid. The houses in Frederick’s neighborhood are spaced fairly close together. And the raid was early enough—8:30pm—that they say if the police had announced loud enough for a sleeping Frederick to hear, several people nearby should have heard something, too. Thus far, it seems that no one did.

• The same neighbor said she and Frederick’s other neighbors don’t believe Shivers was in the yard when he was shot, as Ebert asserted at last week’s bond hearing. This neighbor also says that only Shivers and his partner served the warrant, not the 13 police officers Ebert also claimed at the hearing. "When my dog started barking, I went outside," the neighbor told me. "I only saw two cops. The others only started showing up after Detective Shivers was already down."

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Ebert’s assertion that more than a dozen officers served the warrant was clearly an effort to make it seem implausible that Frederick could have mistaken the raiding police for criminals.

It’s significant that Frederick has support from the people who live around him. One woman I spoke with says there’s little tolerance in the neighborhood for drug dealing. She said she’s called the police herself on a house nearby that was known to be slinging dope. If Frederick were dealing, she says, his neighbors would be glad to have him out of the area. Instead, they’re coming to his defense.

Just judging from similar cases I’ve looked over the last few years, I’d say Frederick still has an uphill battle. But it’s notable that the community seems to be growing increasingly skeptical of the way the investigation and warrant service were handled. Comments at the Virginian-Pilot website have gone from mostly calling for Frederick’s head shortly after the raid, to a fairly healthy majority now expressing doubt about Frederick’s guilt. It helps that the Pilot’s coverage has been pretty fair—much more balanced and less deferential to the police than I’ve seen in the past after a botched drug raid leads to an officer’s death.

Prior coverage of the Frederick case here.

This morning, I drove down to Chesapeake to do some reporting on the drug raid in which Det. Jarrod Shivers was shot and killed while serving a drug warrant on Ryan Frederick.

I spoke with friends, co-workers, and neighbors of Frederick, as well as some people around Chesapeake. Lots of interesting stuff came out. I’ll have more on my trip in a bit, but first I need to make a correction.

In this post, I wrote that the police at one point said Det. Jarrod Shivers was crawling through Ryan Frederick’s lower door panel when he was shot. In this one, I referred to that same scenario as if it were undisputed. Actually, exactly where Shivers was when he was shot is a major point of contention right now. Reader Loren Collins emailed me on Friday to say he couldn’t find in any coverage of the raid where the police, city, or prosecutor say Shivers was coming through the panel when he was shot. Looking back, I can’t either. It’s mentioned several times in comments threads, both at Hit & Run and at the Virginian-Pilot. But it hasn’t been reported by any local media.

The unlikely "crawling through the door" scenario seems to be a twisted version of events culled from Ryan Frederick’s jailhouse interview, in which he said someone was pushing through one of the lower door panels when he fired his gun. That seems to be consistent with the fact that police left a battering ram at the scene. I also spoke with a neighbor of Frederick’s today who told me the lower panels to Frederick’s door were indeed broken in (the police confiscated the door shortly after the raid).

But it was incorrect for me to attribute that account of events to the police or city officials. Moreover, even Frederick’s account of events didn’t identify the officer coming through the panel as Shivers, nor did he describe that officer as "crawling"—he said they were "pushing through" the panels.

I don’t think this really effects the debate over Frederick’s justification in shooting Shivers one way or the other. But I would like to correct my error.

So my apologies. I should have been more vigilant about double-checking an assumption that somehow crept into my understanding of the case before I reported it. In addition to this post, I’ll add an addendum to both prior posts.

Give me a fucking break.

There’s nothing in this guy’s history to suggest that.

This is looking more and more like an absolute railroading. If there’s any consolation at this point, it’s that Paul Ebert has a history of incompetence. He may already be overplaying his hand in this case.

If you’re looking to raise your blood pressure, watch the video at the story linked above.

This week, Virginia’s House of Delegates indefinitely tabled a bill that would have broadened the circumstances under which a homeowner can use lethal force to defend himself.  Even though the bill is done, it’s sponsor still felt the need to clarify, in light of recent events:

Del. W.R. “Bill” Janis, R-Henrico, said his HB710 would apply to homeowners and renters who defend themselves against a person who unlawfully enters a residence.

It would not apply in the case of Ryan Frederick, the man who shot and killed Chesapeake detective Jarrod Shivers on Jan. 17 as Shivers tried to execute a drug search warrant and enter Frederick’s home, said Janis, because the police attempted to enter lawfully.

Good to know that Del. Janis knows all the particulars of this case to make such a definitive statement.  I guess he’s aware of the identity of the informant.  And he knows why the police broke into Frederick’s home, even though the alleged grow operation was in the garage.  And he knows exactly why said grow operation was never found.  He also knows for certain that the police gave the appropriate warning, and waited an appropriate amount time before entering.

I support generous home defense bills.  But their sponsors need to understand that unless they also reign in the use of forcible home entry to serve drug warrants, these bills are going to lead to more dead cops and more dead citizens.

When we were in Mississippi last December, Melissa Longino (the mother of T’Corianna, or Cory Maye’s would-have-been mother-in-law) said something I thought was pretty powerful.  She said…

“When someone busts in on you and your kids, it ain’t no five-minute world no more.  It’s a ‘now’ world.”

One thing I’ve learned from covering these tragedies:  If Ryan Frederick had held his fire and waited to see if the men breaking into his home were cops or criminals, he’d most likely be dead today.  And we wouldn’t be talking about trials or what set of charges are appropriate.  We’d be talking about the commendation given to the cop that killed him

The accused Chesapeake cop killer was denied today.

The official account of the raid seems to be changing. Special prosecutor Paul Ebert now says that Det. Jarrod Shivers was in Ferderick’s front yard when he was shot. And he said he may elevate the charge to capital murder, the knowing and intentional killing of a police officer.

Those two items raise all sorts of questions. We first heard Shivers was merely outside the door when he was shot. We then heard he was crawling through a door panel. Now we’re told he was in Frederick’s front yard. If that’s the case, where was he in relation to other officers? At what point in the raid was Shivers shot?

The suggestion of elevating the charge smacks to me of a PR move. Is Ebert really planning to argue that Frederick knowingly and intentionally took on a team of raiding cops so he wouldn’t get caught with a misdemeanor amount of marijuana?

CORRECTION: My assertion that the police at one point said Shivers was shot as “he was crawling through a door panel” is incorrect. Explanation here.

I’m very critical of the misuse of SWAT teams on this site.  But by press accounts,  L.A. SWAT member Randal Simmons seems to have been a genuinely good guy.  Simmonds died as his SWAT team entered the home of a man who had just killed two members of his family.  The suspect then fired on the SWAT officers as they entered his home, killing Simmons and wounding another officer.
This is what SWAT teams are for.  And when properly trained, it’s what they excel at–apprehending people who present a clear and immediate threat to others.

Simmons died a hero’s death.  Rest in peace.

Police make a violent entry into a couple’s home to execute a search warrant on their son. The son, who was suspected of rape, was already in police custody.

So why the forced entry?

In the process, they used a Taser on the suspect’s father, because he apparently was “cursing and carrying a fly swatter.” A fly swatter is enough now for a Taserin’. They then arrested the man they tasered for “obstructing an officer.”

This time in a suburb of Dallas.

Here’s a story that ran a month before the raid on Ryan Frederick’s home:

Marva Morris and her six children are homeless, wondering who will put their house back together after a SWAT team tore it apart this week looking for a slaying suspect.

Police stormed her South Norfolk home Wednesday night, shooting out windows and firing chemical s into the house. After surrounding the house for more than five hours and scouring the insides, police found it empty.

“Now I have no home and all of my kids are just dispersed from here to there,” Morris said Friday. “There’s a lot of stress from all of this, and nobody cares.”

Acting on a tip, Chesapeake police went to the house in the 2000 block of Stalham Road looking for Shawn Sir Charles Ward, a 21-year-old suspect in the fatal shooting of a toddler during a Nov. 10 home invasion.

Police had Morris’ home under surveillance for several days before searching it. Ward, however, was arrested the next day in a relative’s Virginia Beach home.

Morris, 44, doesn’t know why police received a tip about her home. She’s not related to Ward. In fact, she went to a magistrate earlier this year to get a warrant because Ward was “chasing” after her daughter, she said. She complained to police about him “terrorizing the neighborhood” on other occasions, she said.

I’m not sure how relevant the story is, other than that it suggests an eagerness on the part of Chesapeake PD to break down doors without doing an adequate investigation.

This comment to the story is chilling:

I just read through most of the comments. I want to say quit whining, learn how to spell and use proper grammar. The police were doing their job like they are supposed to. Thank you to the police officers. I am sorry the house is in shambles, but get over it. Bad things happen to lots of people. If you want more protocols against the police tell the liberals, so we can start getting all the officers killed here at home similar to Iraq.

Better protocol would have saved Det. Jarrod Shivers’ life.

Supporters of Ryan Frederick play to rally on Feb. 23 outside the Chesapeake Correctional Center where he’s being held.

There’s also now a fund for his legal defense, though you have to wade through some MySpace crap to get to it. Looks like they have about $1,000 so far.

Also, something raised on a local libertarian blog that I hadn’t noticed:

Most damningly, the inventory reports that 3 shell casing were recovered, 2 .380 ACP casings and one .223 casing. Frederick had a .380 pistol, but no AR-15 or other rifle to account for the .223. Police often carry such rifles in SWAT type actions.

The police have made no statement admitting that one of their officers fired a shot, nor has any explanation for that rifle casing been offered. It would be no surprise, and no indication of additional wrongdoing, if one of the officers fired his weapon in the course of the incident, so why let these weeks go by with that casing unexplained? The result is that something that might well be entirely reasonable takes a on sinister appearance. Further, posts on the Virginian Pilot blogs pointing out that irregularity have been quickly removed, adding to the appearance of a cover-up and eroding our trust in the Pilot as well.

If there is nothing wrong about that .223 round, then doggedly refusing to address its existence creates the impression that there is. Who fired that shot, and where did it go?

Odd that the Pilot would remove those posts. I think the paper’s coverage thus far has been pretty good.

This morning, the Virginian-Pilot has a long profile of suspect Ryan Frederick. He certainly doesn’t seem like a dangerous cop killer. Friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family describe him as a friendly, decent, hard-working guy who’d had some rough times. By 28 he had already lost both parents, and most recently, his grandmother. He’d also recently gotten engaged. They reiterated that Frederick was an avid gardener. None say they had any knowledge of him selling drugs. Neighbors say there was little in the way of traffic at Frederick’s home. Seems this raid took square aim at an occasional, recreational pot smoker.

In fact, the only negative passage in the entire profile comes from a guy who knows nothing at all about Frederick:

Officers are still in shock three weeks later, said Jack Bider, president of the Chesapeake Fraternal Order of Police and a friend of Shivers.

"Here we have a citizen, not only a citizen of Chesapeake, but a police officer trying to make a living, and this guy shoots through a door," Bider said. "Let’s remove the police factor out of it. What if it was a Girl Scout knocking at his door on this cold and rainy night and she slips on his porch and falls onto the door? Is he going to shoot through the door then?"

Shivers was trying to "make a living" by breaking into the home—after dark, with a weapon—of a man guilty of nothing more than a misdemeanor. Also, Frederick may have shot through the door, but according to press reports thus far, he shot as Shivers was attempting to crawl through one of the lower panels, which suggests it had been kicked in. Let’s be clear, here. This was a home invasion. It would take an awfully large girl scout to mimic what Frederick must have heard that night by simply tripping and falling.

Over the weekend, I noted that the local news station whose anchor organized a fundraiser for Det. Shivers’ family failed to note in the story that the police failed to find the marijuana operation they were looking for when they raided Frederick’s home. They seem to have corrected that, now, though there’s no mention of the earlier omission.

Thanks to reason commenter Rimfax for setting up a Wiki with an archive of posts on the Frederick case. Catch up here.

• When peaceful protesters gathered in Lima, Ohio last month to denounce the SWAT raid in which police shot and killed 26-year-old Tarika Wilson, and wounded her one-year-old son, the local police department apparently stationed snipers from the same SWAT team on the roofs of the buildings overlooking the protest. It’s been six weeks, now. And we still don’t know what happened in that house, or why the unarmed woman and her child were shot.

• A man is suing the city of Hartford, Connecticut for a wrong-door SWAT raid. Curiously, the police department says it has no record of the raid.
• A judge in Canada gets it right:
  

  A British Columbia Supreme Court judge has thrown out marijuana trafficking charges against a man after the Surrey RCMP drug squad rammed down the door of his garage and entered guns drawn.

  [...]

  “While the police knocked and announced at the front door, there was no announcement at the garage door before the garage door was battered down and entry secured,” Bruce wrote in her ruling.

  “The actions of the police created a real risk of harm to an occupant by accidental shooting and to the police in terms of an aggressive response to the violent entry,” she said.

  “In my view, a shocking entry without a prior knock and announce, with guns drawn and ready to be discharged, and pointed at the accused’s head, could have produced disastrous consequences.”

  Bruce also said police had other alternatives that did not involve a breach of Cao’s charter rights.

• Both of these articles say that in barricade situations, the local SWAT team only enters homes “as a last resort.” But we of course know that isn’t the case with warrant service, where breaking into a home is a pretty regular occurrence. The obvious question: Why do SWAT teams avoid confrontation when the suspect is a known threat, but force confrontation against nonviolent offenders, the overwhelming majority of whom aren’t?
• Another case of criminals posing as raiding narcotics cops to rob a home. If forced-entry drug raids weren’t so common, this tactic wouldn’t be so successful. Also puts the Ryan Fredericks and Corey Mayes of the world in a better light, doesn’t it? While researching Overkill, I found dozens of examples of crooks pretending to be cops to get into their victims’ homes. It’s actually a common tactic for drug dealers who want to rob other dealers. But it happens to people with no involvement in the drug trade, too.
• A couple of weeks ago, I praised Fresno’s police department for its restraint in pursuing a car theft suspect who fled into an apartment building. Here’s a good example in how not to hunt down someone suspected of a violent crime:

• And here’s another.
  

  Inside his house on Third Street, burn holes and char marks now stain his mattress. His pillow is burnt. His body looks much the same. Second- and third-degree burns cover much of his stomach and groin area. Burns took the skin off of his left forearm. The hairs on the left side of his goatee are shorter, also burned. He can hardly walk. Friends have to help him stand.

  Sherman, 42, claims he was attacked in his sleep — but not by robbers or thugs. In the early morning hours of Jan. 16, a SWAT team of deputies from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department broke a window right above Sherman’s bed and hurled a flash bang diversion device into his house. The SWAT team hoped to find evidence relating to recent attempted murder on Pallesi Street under investigation by the Barstow Police Department.

  Now suffering from burns, Sherman said he intends file formal complaints and sue over the injuries. He has not done so, he said, because the burns have limited his ability to walk and move around.

  [...]

  After the device went off, Sherman said he was dragged out onto his front porch, kicked and beaten by the SWAT team while still burning. He said they performed a rectal search for drugs, stepped on his neck and called him a “n—–” repeatedly. Neighbors Jeff and Melissa Nearen, who have known Sherman for about six months, heard the commotion and came out of their house. Jeff Nearen said he thought it was unnecessary to search the house of man who is on disability and blind in one eye.

  “They weren’t acting like professional policemen,” Jeff Nearen said. “They were acting like thugs.”