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.

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.