About a month ago I got a call from a reporter for the Arkansas Times inquiring about my research into paramilitary drug raids. He’d been reporting on a raid in North Little Rock involving a 40-year-old man named Tracy Ingle. When he told me the story over the phone, I was floored, even given all the abuses and mistakes I’ve reported and read about over the last few years. What makes the case especially egregious is not that the police may have gotten the wrong home, that they shot a man, or that they were covering it up or going silent. We’ve seen all that before. What’s mind-blowing about this one is that they’ve continued abusing the poor guy, even after it should have been clear for some time now that they made a mistake.

From the outset, it should be noted that Tracy Ingle has had some trouble with the law in the past, though nothing violent, and nothing drug-related. He has had a couple of DWI’s, and a citation for failing to appear in court. He apparently also agreed to do some repair work on a friend’s car that later turned out to be stolen.

That said, what’s happened to him over the last few months is pretty outrageous.

Here’s the Arkansas Times piece, which I’d encourage you to read in full. And here’s a follow-up interview with North Little Rock Police Chief Danny Bradley about SWAT tactics.

I’ve since spoken again to the reporter and to Tracy Ingle’s sister, Tiffney Forrester, who herself is a former sheriff’s deputy. I’ve also had a chance to review the warrants and return sheets (pdf).

The North Little Rock Police Department wouldn’t discuss the case with me.

Here’s a quick rundown:

• On January 7, 2008 a paramilitary police unit in North Little Rock, Arkansas conducted a drug raid on Tracy Ingle’s home. Ingle says he had fallen asleep for several hours, and was asleep when the raid happened. He awoke when the police took a battering ram to his door. Another team of officers approached form the outside of the house, and shattered the window to his bedroom.

• When he awoke, Ingle says he thought his home was being invaded by armed robbers. He reached for a broken gun, a pretty clear indication that he had no intention of killing anyone, but rather was trying to scare away the intruders. When he grabbed the gun, an officer inside the house fired his weapon. The bullet hit Ingle just above the knee, shattered his thigh bone, and nearly severed his lower leg. When the outside officers heard the shot, they opened up on Ingle, hitting him four more times. According to Ingle’s sister, one bullet still rests just above Ingle’s heart, and can’t be removed.

• Ingle was taken to the hospital, and spent a week-and-a-half in intensive care. He was then removed from intensive care—still in his hospital pajamas—and taken to the North Little Rock police department, where he was questioned for five hours. He was not told he was suspected of a crime, and his family wasn’t allowed to speak with him. After the interrogation, he was arrested and transferred to the county jail.

• Ingle spent the next four days in jail. He says he was never given his pain medication or his antibiotics. Though hospital nurses told him to change his bandages and clean his wounds every 4-6 hours, Ingle told the Arkansas Times that jail officials changed them only twice in four days. Ingle’s wounds became infected during the time he was in jail.

• Police found no illegal drugs in Ingle’s home. They did find a scale, which Ingle’s sister tells me she was an extra she was given when she worked at a medical testing facility for use in her jewelry-making hobby. They also found a bunch of small plastic bags. Again, Ingle’s sister says these were part of her business. "I was leaving the country for a while, and I stored a lot of my stuff at his house," she told me. "The scales and bags were mine, and are both common things to have for anyone who makes jewelry." Police also found the broken gun and a broken police scanner.

• From those items, the police charged Ingle with running a drug enterprise. They also charged him with assault, for pointing his broken gun at the police officers who had just barged into his home. The judge set Ingle’s bail at $250,000, explaining that it had to be set high because Ingle had engaged in a shootout with police—never mind that Ingle didn’t fire a shot. Ingle was able to sell his car to pay a bail bondsman. But with no car, his injuries render him basically immobile.  He had to walk two miles on crutches and an infected leg to his hearing last week.

• The police obtained a no-knock warrant for Ingle’s home about three weeks prior to the raid. The warrant itself (pdf) reads like boilerplate, with no specific references to Ingle (other than his address), or why he specifically posed a risk to police safety, or of disposing of drugs before coming to answer the door. It mentions no controlled buys. It doesn’t even mention an informant. In fact, someone scratched out "crack cocaine" and hand-wrote in "methamphetamine" on the type-written warrant, suggesting a cut, plug, and paste job. The Supreme Court has ruled that police must show case-specific evidence of exigent circumstances in order to be issued a no-knock warrant. The mere fact that it’s a drug case isn’t enough. The warrant for Ingle’s home contains no such specific information.

Many times, information specific to the investigation is contained in the affidavit the investigating officer files for the search warrant, not in the warrant itself. Forrester says she has called the North Little Rock Police Department more than 20 times in an effort to obtain a copy of the affidavits. She says they at first refused to return her phone calls. When she was finally able to speak with a lieutenant, he became angry when she told she had contacted the media. She then says he told her to "dream on" when she asked for copies of the affidavits.

• According to Forrester, Ingle’s neighbor had a direct line of sight into the bedroom, and saw the entire raid. His account initially matched Ingle’s. But that changed. "We have a witness, a next door neighbor that saw the entire incident," Forrester told me. "He came forward on his own to give a statement to the family. Police never questioned him until a month or so after the shooting, at my insistence. They kept this neighbor in his home, and questioned him for at least four hours, refusing to let the man’s wife come home, of for other people to see him. When the police finished intimidating the man, they told him specifically that ‘he did not see what he thought he saw.’ The neighbor is now afraid to talk to the media." I have not yet been able to speak with the neighbor.

• Ingle’s family was able to put up $1,000 to retain an attorney, but can’t afford the extra $6,000 the attorney has asked to represent Ingle. Ingle is therefore still looking for representation. He has no health insurance, and no money to pay for medication, or to continue treatment of his injuries.

• Last week, after the Arkansas Times article appeared, the judge in the case issued a gag order, preventing Ingle and any future attorney he may have from talking to the media about what happened to him. This is puzzling. Before today there had been exactly two articles about this case—not exactly a media circus. It’s hard to understand why a gag order was necessary. It’s only real purpose is to prevent more people from learning about what’s increasingly looking like a railroading. And it’s only effect is to lend more support to the possibility that it is, in fact, a cover-up and railroading.

As noted, the police aren’t talking. And the prosecutor is now bound by the gag order. Perhaps there’s some piece of information damning to Ingle I’m not yet aware of—though it’s hard to imagine what that might be.

Barring that, what’s happening to Tracy Ingle is pretty outrageous.

UPDATE: The Arkansas Times reports that the gag order in Ingle’s case was withdrawn late yesterday. I don’t know that this will make the police or prosecutors any more likely to talk about the case, but if I have time this afternoon, I’ll try again to give them a call.

John McCain is promising more John Roberts and Sam Alitos on the Supreme Court if he’s elected president. Cato’s Ilya Shapiro weirdly thinks this is a reason for libertarians to vote for McCain.

Here’s George Washington University con law Professor Johnathan Turley on Alito:

Despite my agreement with Alito on many issues, I believe that he would be a dangerous addition to the court in already dangerous times for our constitutional system. Alito’s cases reveal an almost reflexive vote in favor of government…

…In my years as an academic and a litigator, I have rarely seen the equal of Alito’s bias in favor of the government. To put it bluntly, when it comes to reviewing government abuse, Samuel Alito is an empty robe.

[...]

As an assistant solicitor general, Alito strongly opposed the ruling of a court of appeals in the seminal case of Garner v. Tennessee. In that case, a police officer shot and killed an unarmed 15-year-old boy when he fled with $10 from a home. Alito supported the right of the officer to kill the boy for failing to stop when ordered, a position ultimately rejected by six members of the Supreme Court and decades of later decisions.

Likewise, Alito authored another memo that argued strongly in favor of giving immunity to officials who violate the rights of citizens — a position long rejected by the federal courts.

As he did as a Reagan administration attorney, Judge Alito often adopts standards so low that any government excuse can overcome any government abuse.

[...]

An independent judiciary means little if our judges are not independently minded. In criminal, immigration and other cases, Alito is one of the government’s most predictable votes on the federal bench. Though his supporters have attempted to portray this as merely a principle of judicial deference, it is a raw form of judicial bias.

The Alito vote might prove to be the single most important decision on the future of our constitutional system for decades to come. While I generally defer to presidents in their choices for the court, Samuel Alito is the wrong nominee at the wrong time for this country.

As for Roberts, in his book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage devotes seven pages to Roberts’ career of defending government power (particularly presidential power).

Roberts, from the beginning of his legal career and straight through to the Hamdan decision, had demonstrated his unwavering commitment to expand presidential power.

These aren’t libertarian judges. They’re judges who defer to police and prosecutors on criminal justice issues, who would put broad restrictions on your ability to sue government agents who have wronged you, and who embrace the Unitary Executive, essentially the belief that when it comes to foreign policy and national security (and a number of other issues), the president’s powers are unlimited, absolute, and unchecked by either Congress or the courts. That isn’t an exaggeration.

Roberts and Alito also both voted the wrong way in Hudson vs. Michigan, the no-knock raid case. Not only that, but Alito’s vote proved to be the tiebreaker. Had Sandra Day O’Connor not retired, it’s likely that Hudson would have gone the other way.

Bush (or more likely Cheney) chose Roberts and Alito for one very specific reason: Both have proven throughout their careers to be reliable defenders of presidential power.

More judges like Alito and Roberts is the last reason a libertarian should vote for John McCain.

The Arkansas bailiff who nearly killed a woman after mistakenly locking her in a holding cell over a four-day weekend will get to keep his job.

I particularly like the commenters to the story who say they have no sympathy for the woman “because she’s an illegal alien.” Guess I’ll just never understand the anger and utter lack of humanity coming from the anti-immigration crowd.

An Albany woman was stopped for no apparent reason, then, with no apparent probable cause, was subjected to a humiliating public search for drugs in which an officer inserted two fingers into her vagina. They also seized her cell phone, and made a random call to one of her contacts, again without a warrant or probable cause. They found no drugs.

The woman filed a complaint, but it was never forwarded to the city’s civilian review board, whose entire purpose is to investigate complaints against the police. The police chief explained that the police aren’t required to forward every complaint to the board, particularly if the complainant requests that it not be, as the chief says happened in this case. This apparently came as a surprise to the city councilman who actually wrote the review board legislation.

As for the woman not wanting her complaint forwarded to the review board, that’s apparently because an internal affairs officer “persuaded” her to let the complaint be handled internally.

A member of the Citizens’ Police Review Board, who spoke on condition of anonymity because only the chairman is authorized to make public statements, said some members of the board have privately suspected that the department may be hiding cases of police misconduct.

In other instances, the internal affairs reports are so poorly organized and investigated the board has had trouble reaching decisions and often sends them back for more investigation. The board is supposed to appoint a monitor for complaints involving civil rights violations or allegations of excessive force.

“Whether the letter of the law says that this should be the process, the intent and spirit of the law mandates that, especially in cases of civil rights violations, they be submitted to us for review,” the board member said. “If not this, what do we review? … The fact they would dissuade someone from reporting an incident and say they would do the investigation better completely defeats the purpose of why we were created.”

Shutter said she grew increasingly unnerved by her experience with internal affairs — which is known as the Office of Professional Standards — because male detectives twice requested she wear clothes from the night of the incident to re-enact the body search.

Tuffey declined to comment on a list of written questions submitted by the Times Union last week, including why internal affairs officials didn’t assign a female detective on Shutter’s case.

“I hold our officers to the highest standards and I expect a complete and thorough investigation, but at this time, since there is an ongoing internal investigation, it would be inappropriate for me to comment.”

Neither officer involved in the incident has been interviewed by internal affairs, according to departmental sources.

Shutter met once with internal affairs detectives. They refused to give her a copy of a signed statement she made recounting the incident, she said.

Civilian review boards are a great idea, so long as they’re given subpoena and investigative powers, their findings and disciplinary recommendations are followed, and they’re taken seriously by prosecutors and police officials. Too often, that’s not the case.

Incidentally, the two officers in Albany have yet to be disciplined–not even the obligatory “suspension with pay.” And now more people are coming forward with similar allegations.

So even as police departments across the country are setting up sex offender registries, drug offender registries, and posting the mugs and names of suspected johns online, they also took a great deal umbrage early this month when Gino Sesto set up a site called RateMyCop.com. The premise is simple: Sesto wrote to police departments across the country, and obtained a list of the names and badge numbers of their officers. He then posted the names online in a format broken down by state and city, and encouraged users to rate their experiences with individual officers. All of the information he posted was already open to the public. He didn’t post the identities of any undercover officers.

Police groups went nuts, making the dubious argument that the site somehow jeopardized the safety of individual officers. Sesto said he had even planned on adding a feature that would allow individual officers to write responses to complaints made against them. But police groups persisted.

Jerry Dyer, president of the California Police Chiefs Association told Wired the site could give citizens the opportunity to "unfairly malign" individual officers, and said he’d be asking the legislature to pass a law making sites like RateMyCop.com illegal.

Last week, it all got weirder. Hosting service GoDaddy mysteriously terminated Sesto’s account, and pulled RateMyCop.com offline. GoDaddy has offered several explanations to Wired’s ThreatLevel blog, but thus far, none of them have made much sense. Sesto gave up on GoDaddy, and next tried to get the site hosted at RackSpace. They turned him down. After initial accepting his down payment for hosting services, a RackSpace lawyer sent a letter to Sesto stating that, "We believe that the website to be found at www.ratemycop.com as described to our sales representative could create a risk to the health and safety of law enforcement officers."

The good news is, the site’s back up, now, though it isn’t clear who’s hosting it.

Me, I think police departments should be required to post all citizen complaints against individual officers online in a searchable database. Individual officers, their union reps, or their departments could post responses or explanations to frivolous claims. Police officers are public servants. Not only that, they’re public servants with the power to arrest, detain, and use lethal force. If certain officers are the subject of repeated complaints and aren’t being properly investigated internally, the public ought to be informed of that. This culture of secrecy—and of intimidating anyone who dares question it—isn’t healthy.

• 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.

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.

• Dear Chief Romero: You’re off your rocker if you think you can bring federal charges against someone for merely coming with an amusing and creative way of criticizing your department. Also, in making a big deal out of this, you only helped the critic’s message reach a wider audience. So congratulations!
• This is absolutely chilling. Story here. The officer was fired, but is now suing to get his job back. The reaction from the police union is almost comical. “What we find to be unreasonable was the behavior of the suspect from the point she came in the room.” Really? Nothing unreasonable about the pool of blood she was lying in? The woman wasn’t being particularly cooperative, but it’s awfully damning that the cop turned off the camera. And sorry, but you don’t get those injuries from “falling.”
• A cop in New Haven will get to keep his taxpayer-funded pension after pleading guilty to stealing seized drug money and from funds earmarked to pay drug informants. The reason? He was able to submit retirement papers before the city got around to firing him.
• This one is priceless.
• Car cam catches Tennessee officer (allegedly) planting marijuana after a traffic stop.
• After a neighbor photographed police engaged in a drug raid, two cops charged the neighbors’ home, forced entry without a warrant, seized the camera and destroyed the film, and arrested the men who took the photographs. Charges were later dropped, and the men are now suing. In court, the prosecutor who tried to bring charges against the men finally agreed they’d done nothing wrong, and that the cops were out of line. But she still wouldn’t call what they did “criminal.” A police captain referred to their actions as, “a mistake in judgment.” Seems like a rather mild characterization of a home invasion, theft, wrongful arrest, and wrongful detainment in response to someone who was exercising his First Amendment rights.

•  Nice editorial in the Desert Dispatch questioning the wisdom of paramilitary police raids.

•  Police in Seattle are looking to add a belt-mounted camera to their uniforms.  Huge fan of this idea.  Hey, why not mount them on SWAT helmets, too?

•  That cop in Baltimore who yelled at the skateboarding kid seems to have a history of problems with his temper.

•  The Florida deputy who dumped a paraplegic man out of his wheelchair has been suspended.  That’s good news, though it’s too bad it took a swarm of national media attention for it to happen.

•  A DARE “Officer of the Year” gets suspended for downloading porn on his police computer.  I can think of quite a few things worse cops have done, and for which they’ve received no discipline at all.

•  Last year, Boston’s mayor admirably assembled a civilian review board to investigate complaints of police misconduct.  Unfortunately, the Boston Herald finds that the board meets in secret and keeps no minutes or records of its meetings.

Justice Scalia’s “new professionalism” comments in Hudson are particularly relevant here.  In fact, I believe he mentioned civilian review boards in that opinion.  The problem is, they tend to be stacked with pro-police panelists, lack transparency and accountability, and even when those first two criticisms don’t apply, they lack teeth.  They’re rarely given subpoena power, or the power to enforce their recommendations.

I’m looking at you, Utah State Sen. Chris Buttars…

SB260, sponsored by Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, would among other things, classify information about charges or disciplinary action taken against police officers as private, unless officers grant written consent to make the data public. The bill was introduced in the Senate Rules Committee meeting on Friday and is already raising eyebrows among those who support liberal open records laws.

Such limitations on police disciplinary records may mean journalists won’t have access to information on police punished for using deadly force, involved in sexual misconduct or other questionable behavior, said Joel Campbell, a Brigham Young University professor and member of the Freedom of Information Committee for the national Society of Professional Journalists.

Hey, let’s make the government even less accountable!

Last fall, my friend Pete Eyre decided to test Virginia’s “open carry” law, which allegedly allows citizens with a permit to carry an unconcealed handgun. If I’m writing about it here, you can guess it didn’t end well.

Pete was stopped by police officers from Arlington, Virginia. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He was merely carrying a handgun, which he was permitted to do in Virginia. Apparently, someone had called 911 to report him, even though he’d broken no laws. He was unlawfully detained, illegally asked to show identification, then threatened when he dared to assert his rights. The police also lied to him about what was said in the 911 call. The caller merely said someone was carrying a gun, and even added that Pete had done nothing threatening. The cops told Pete the caller said someone had brandished a gun.

Thing is, Pete’s not only a hardcore libertarian, he’s also well-educated about his rights. Last time I spoke with him, he also had designs on becoming a police officer. After the confrontation, Pete embarked on a lengthy process aimed at holding accountable the officers who violated his rights. It took a FOIA request and several attempts to get the Arlington police chief to finally answer his complaint. Even then the result was, to say the least, unsatisfactory. Pete isn’t allowed to know how the officers were disciplined. What’s more, the chief dismissed the most serious violations of Pete’s rights–including his detention, the confiscation of his gun and identification, and the threats made against him–as mere “miscommunication.”

Nevertheless, kudos to Pete. He stood up for himself. He did as much as he could, and was polite and articulate through the entire process.

Read up on his whole experience in this series of posts.

The Boston Phoenix investigates the sad case of Stephan Cowans, wrongfully imprisoned for killing a Boston police officer. Cowans was exonerated in 2003, then murdered in 2004 by someone with designs on his $3.2 million settlement. The paper digs into Cowans’ conviction, and finds evidence that police knew Cowans was innocent, yet forged ahead with his prosecution anyway. Regular readers of this site will recognize this language:

What disturbs some political critics, as well as some defense attorneys, is that an unusually high number of botched police cases have not resulted in significant internal reform or any disciplinary action. This despite police conduct that a judge called “a fraud upon the court,” in Christopher Harding’s conviction, and that another judge, presiding over Donnell Johnson’s appeal, said “suggests either serious misconduct or negligence.”

In other cases of wrongful conviction, there was no effort made to answer tough questions about what went wrong. A feeble attempt was made in the wake of Cowans’s exoneration. But its inadequacy only underscores the rottenness of the system. And of all these cases, it is the Cowans conviction that raises the biggest questions about local law-enforcement officials’ ability to police themselves.

[...]

After examining 15 wrongful convictions — all but four in Boston — Reilly and the state’s DAs concluded that they “did not suggest a present systems failure,” and laid most of the blame vaguely on “erroneous eyewitness identifications.”

In the only specific reference to Cowans, the report said that “the Commonwealth’s fingerprint evidence was flawed.”

Such comments fail to acknowledge what the BPD itself concluded more than two years earlier — that the fingerprint evidence was not flawed, but deliberately manipulated and lied about in court.

Defense attorneys who have fought wrongful-conviction cases say that without a more honest and thorough explanation, the public and law-enforcement officials alike cannot know whether a “present systems failure” exists.

It’s a damning article. But if history is any indication, it’s unlikely to bring any real reform.

• 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.”

• 100-year-old tortoise adopts baby hippo.
• You gotta’ read this article to really believe it. The city of L.A. is going to bizarre lengths to prevent vendors from selling . . . grilled bacon-wrapped hot dogs.
• Mitt Romney’s classless exist: Too much porn gives us bastard black babies!
• Ah, federalism and property rights–two fundamental principles of conservative philosophy, right? Looks like the Bush administration DEA’s new tact on medical marijuana is to threaten landlords who rent out space to marijuana dispensaries with forfeiture unless they boot their tenants. I’d say the guiding principle of this administration is moral rectitude.
• Judge in Pennsylvania throws out “outrageous” case in which police paid an informant to have sex with a suspected prostitute . . . four times. Good work if you can get it, I guess.

There’s of course no way of validating her account, but here’s a story about a woman caught up in a federal raid on her home by agents investigating her husband. She says he was eventually cleared of all charges. But because she slammed the door as the men in black were trying to enter her house (she says she didn’t know they were police), she was initially charged with felony obstruction of justice. Interesting angle that she’s writing to a blog that gives career advice. She had to plea to a misdemeanor, but is now worried that her criminal record may hinder her ability to find a job.

Woman calls police for help.  Ends up brutally stripped searched, naked on the floor of a jail cell.

Be sure to watch the video.  There’s a follow-up report, too.