You’d never know violent crime stats actually ticked up over the last year.

In the last couple of months, police have broken up games in Charleston, South Carolina (netting a poker playing cop and prosecutor in the process) and, no surprise here, in Dallas and Houston.

In the Houston case, prosecutors planned to file felony organized crime charges against the operators of a $300 buy-in tournament.

In the Charleston case, investigators went back more than a year to find names of players who may not have been playing on the night of the raid. They then went out and arrested them, too. They were eventually charged with misdemeanors.

Here’s a first-hand account of similar Charleston raid from a couple of years ago:

At the game in 2006, Chimento said there was a knock on the door and then “…all of a sudden it was like a commandos SWAT team raiding a bunch of crack dealers. It’s was like the SWAT team that you see on TV, busting into your home, guns drawn, ski masks on, full protective gear, and demanding we put out hands on top of our heads,” Chimento said. “At first we thought we were getting robbed, then we realized they had police written all over them, and we were like ‘Oh my God, check this out.’ Someone could have easily been killed that night.”

A 78-year-old grandmother was one of the players swept up that night. Police issued citations on the spot and seized about $6,000 in total from all of the players.

Fish tank, meth lab—whatever.

Brooklyn Park police were looking for a meth lab, but they found a fish tank and the chemicals needed to maintain it.

And a few hours later, when the city sent a contractor to fix the door the police had smashed open Monday afternoon, it was obvious the city was trying to fix a mistake.

It happened while Kathy Adams was sleeping.

"And the next thing I know, a police officer is trying to get me out bed," she said.

And what thorough investigative work precipitated this raid?

Roehl said the drug task force was acting on a tip from a subcontractor for CenterPoint Energy, who had been in the home Friday to install a hot water heater.

"He got hit with a chemical smell that he said made him light headed, feel kind of nauseous," Roehl said.

The smell was vinegar, and maybe pickling lime, which were clearly marked in a bathroom Mr. Adams uses to mix chemicals for his salt water fish tank.

"I said, ‘I call it his laboratory for his fish tanks,’ " Mrs. Adams said, recalling her conversation with the CenterPoint technician. "I’m looking at the fish tank talking to this guy."

Police say there was no extended investigation, just an interview with the subcontractor.

Still, no one did anything wrong.

"From a cursory view, it doesn’t look like our officers did anything wrong," said Capt. Greg Roehl.

[...]

"Everything this person told us turned out to be true, with the exception of what the purpose of the lab was," Roehl said.

[...]

Police say the detective who asked for the search warrant is an 8 ½-year veteran, but he just started working in the drug task force.

CenterPoint energy maintains the home was "unsafe" and it would have "irresponsible" for the subcontractor not to report it.

Several people have asked me what I think about the acquittal of the four New York City police officers who shot and killed unarmed groom-to-be Sean Bell. I guess I don’t have much to add that hasn’t already been said elsewhere. We’ll never know exactly what happened, but I’d wager to guess that if four men not wearing badges were to unload 50 rounds into another, unarmed group of men, killing one and sending stray bullets all over the neighborhood, they wouldn’t have escaped without being convicted of a single crime.

On the other hand, I’m having a hard time seeing how…uh…capitalism is to blame. This is what happens to people who read too much Naomi Klein.

So much for “community policing.”

Springfield’s men in black are returning.

The city’s new police commissioner, William Fitchet, says members of the department’s Street Crime Unit will again don black, military-style uniforms as part of his strategy to deal with youth violence.

Fitchet’s predecessor, Edward Flynn, had ditched the black attire as part of an effort to soften the image of the unit. Flynn left Springfield in January to become the police chief in Milwaukee.

Sgt. John Delaney told a city council hearing Wednesday that the stark uniforms send a message to criminals that officers are serious about making arrests.

Delaney said a sense of “fear” has been missing for the past few years.

Worth keeping in mind when you hear complaints about how the public always assumes the worst about the police. I can’t tell you how many older and retired cops have expressed their concerns to me about this kind of thing. That is, the psychology effected by military-style uniforms happens on both sides of the badge. It’s bad enough that Sgt. Delaney thinks it’s the role of the police to instill fear in the people they work for. But the flip side is even worse: When you dress cops like soldiers, some of them are going to start acting like soldiers.

Sean Mullins’ ode to the 92-year-old woman killed in a botched drug raid came out a few weeks ago. And it’s good! Well, the music is good. The lyrics wander around a bit, and don’t really tell what actually happened. But hey, it’s a good pop song about a botched drug raid. I’m not going to complain. I can’t find it online anywhere, but you can download it from Amazon for a buck.

Here’s a short interview Mullins gave to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I’d beg to differ with him on one point. Mullins says this kind of thing only happens in “certain neighborhoods.” It’s probably true that low-income people get the brunt of it. But there are plenty of examples of botched raids on college students, middle-class homes, and, occasionally, even millionaires.

The reader who sent me this link has a connection to the man who tased, and says he’s expected to die today.

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.