Police Raids

Ryan Frederick Formally Charged With First Degree Murder

Radley Balko reports:

He was formally charged with first degree murder and with the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. So yeah. They really are going to go through with this.

The misdemeanor marijuana possession charge was nolle prossed. Which means the reason the police tried to ram their way into Frederickâs house in the first place is now pretty much moot. They didnât even find enough marijuana to merit a charge. Now theyâre trying to make him pay for the consequences of their mistake.

So to recap, police charged into Ryan Frederick's home looking for a marijuana grow that didnât exist. Mistaking the intruders for thieves, Ryan opened fire, killing a police officer. He's now charged with knowingly and deliberately killing a cop, even though that's the least plausible explanation for his actions.

Informant Identified in Fatal Maple Tree/Marijuana Mix-up

Radley Balko reports that we might now know the identity of the confidential informant who mistook Japanese maple trees for marijuana, leading to the death of a police officer and murder charges against an innocent man.

The informant had a conflict with Ryan Frederick, so he broke into his house, misidentified his plants, and told police Frederick was growing marijuana. When police raided the home, Frederick mistook them for burglars and opened fire, killing a police officer. He's now sitting jail, awaiting trial for killing a cop.

This utterly tragic and absurd situation is the natural and predictable byproduct of our mindless war on drugs, which allows incompetent idiots with ulterior motives to provide probable cause for violent police raids.

Radley has some background on the case here.

Update: From comments, "If a police officer ran into traffic and got killed, would the driver who hit the officer be charged with murder?" I think that analogy comes pretty close to being fair. Frederick wasn't growing marijuana. He had no reason to think the people bursting into his home were anything other than common criminals, so he defended himself in good faith. The officer was killed because he went somewhere he didn't belong. It's a tragedy, to be sure, but it's certainly not Frederick's fault. Not in the slightest.

Drug Cops Raid Innocent Man, Shoot Him 5 Times, Then File Bogus Charges

His name is Tracy Ingle and he's alive, but he needs help.

1. They raided his house from multiple entrances, bashing down his front door with a battering ram and crashing through his bedroom window.

2. He grabbed a broken gun to scare what he thought were burglars and was subsequently shot 5 times. One bullet remains lodged above his heart.

3. In jail, they withheld his pain medication and antibiotics. They ignored his doctor's instructions to change his bandages and clean his wounds. He became infected.

4. They found no drugs but charged him with drug dealing. His sister claims ownership of the scale and baggies which form the basis for the drug charge. She uses those things for making jewelry.

5. He pawned his car to make bail so he had to walk 2 miles on crutches to his first court appearance. His leg was still infected.

6. On the warrant, the words "crack cocaine" are scratched out and replaced with "methamphetamine," suggesting the document may have been illegally altered after the judge approved it.

7. A neighbor who saw the whole raid now refuses to talk after a visit from the police. They assured him that "he did not see what he thought he saw."

If you can handle it, Radley Balko has much more.

[Ed: Sign our petition to Congress, state legislators, governors and the president to stop these dangerous raids from happening, and click here to learn more about the issue and campaign.]

Mississippi Drug War Blues: The Case of Cory Maye

Drew Carey's latest reason.tv video features the horrific story of Cory Maye, an innocent man who sits in prison after killing an intruder in his home who turned out to be a police officer executing a drug warrant meant for someone else.

This video is required viewing for anyone who thinks they have an opinion about the drug war. If you don't know Cory's story, and the countless others like it, you don't understand what the drug war really is, what it does to innocent people, and how it has corrupted the administration of justice in America.

[Ed: Sign our petition to Congress, state legislators, governors and the president to stop these dangerous raids from happening, and click here to learn more about the issue and campaign.]

Nobody is Safe from Drug Prohibitionâs SWAT Teams

Yet another SWAT team raid has gone horribly bad. A group of police officers stormed a house looking for suspected drug dealers. But this otherwise normal situation is somewhat out of the ordinary because there was actually a relatively wealthy, affluent person who was unwittingly targeted:

The [police officers] were together Wednesday night, battering down the door of a suspected drug house, when two men on the other side nearly ended their lives, police said. Gillis and Garrison remained in Grant Medical Center last night, recovering from serious gunshot wounds, as investigators worked to build the case against the two men accused of shooting them during a raid gone awry on the Near East Side. One of the accused is Derrick Foster, a 38-year-old former defensive end for Ohio State University who police said has no criminal record.

The article also states that a work review called Foster "an asset to the Near East Side" of the neighborhood where he was employed as a Columbus code-enforcement supervisor. He was a pillar of society. When he heard the police bust in the door of his friends house, he mistook them for a team of robbers and fired his legally-owned weapon. He was not under any investigation, others in the house were. Here is the official police story on what took place:

Officers with the narcotics bureau's Investigative and Tactical Unit had received a warrant to search the house at 1781 E. Rich St., just north of Main Street. They approached about 9:45 p.m. IN/TAC officers are trained for such raids and make eight to 12 a week across the city, police said. They follow a specific procedure that includes announcing their presence immediately. "The whole time they're pounding on the door, they're yelling, 'Police!'," division spokeswoman Amanda Ford said.

But according to a witness, the only alert given was for the windows to be broken. The police spokeswoman, who wasn't there, apparently knows something that the witness doesn't. In addition, even if the police did yell, I can think of several completely plausible explanations why people in a home may not hear such an announcement â theyâre listening to loud music, theyâre in the basement working with loud machinery, theyâre asleep and using earplugs, etc. Also, the article stated "police didn't know who might be in the house when they raided it." I question the intelligence and responsibility of the decision to raid a house when they had no idea who might be there. In this case, an innocent man (or men) was exposed to a traumatic experience that ended in a horrible way. What if his daughter had been there too? What this shows is that anybody could be the target of one of these raids. This is not just a problem for the underprivileged. Foster is a college-educated middle-class father. He owned a legal firearm, a right granted in part for the purposes of self-protection. Attempting to protect himself, he now faces two counts of felonious assault and attempted murder. It is extremely fortunate that this didnât turn out even worse. Both of the policemen that were wounded are thankfully expected to recover. But the sad truth is that Fosterâs five-year-old daughter is probably going to have to grow up with her father in prison because of this futile drug prohibition-related insanity. Yet another American family destroyed by the increasingly indiscriminate drug war.

News Release: Will SDSU Drug Bust Coverage Raise the Critical Questions?

Will SDSU's Drug Bust Reduce Drug Availability on Campus in the Future? Advocates Urge Media to Look Beyond the Surface, Ask Critical Questions About Raid's Long-Term Implications for Drug Trade (or Lack Thereof) In the wake of a major drug bust at San Diego State University, in which 96 people including 75 students were arrested on drug charges as part of "Operation Sudden Fall," advocates are asking media outlets to go beyond the surface to probe whether drug laws and enforcement actually reduce the availability of drugs. "Cocaine was banned in 1914, and marijuana in 1937," said David Borden, executive director of StoptheDrugWar.org, "and yet these drugs are so widely available almost a century later that college students can be hauled away 75 at a time for them. That is the very definition of policy failure." Borden, who is also executive editor of Drug War Chronicle, a major weekly online publication, continued: "Since 1980, when the drug war really started escalating under the Reagan administration, the average street price of cocaine has dropped by a factor of five, when adjusted for purity and inflation. (1) Given that the strategy was to increase drug prices, in order to then reduce the demand, that failure has to be called spectacular." Drug arrests in the US number close to 1.5 million per year, but to little evident effect as such data suggests. Ironically, San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis painted a compelling picture of the drug war's failure in her own quote given to the Los Angeles Times: "This operation shows how accessible and pervasive illegal drugs continue to be on our college campuses and how common it is for students to be selling to other students." "While SDSU's future drug sellers will probably avoid sending such explicit text messages as the accused in this case did, it's doubtful that they will avoid the campus for very long," Borden said. "In fact the replacements are undoubtedly already preparing to take up the slack. By September if not sooner, the only remaining evidence that 'Operation Sudden Fall' ever happened will be the court cases and the absence of certain people from the campus." "Instead of throwing away money and law enforcement time on a policy that doesn't work, ruining lives in the process, Congress should repeal drug prohibition and allow states to create sensible regulations to govern drugs' lawful distribution and use. At a minimum, the focus should be taken off enforcement," said Borden. â END â 1. Data from DEA STRIDE drug price collection program, adjusted for inflation using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index figures. Further information is available upon request.

Defenders of Paramilitary Policing Don't Know What They're Talking About

A recent post in which I criticized no-knock drug raids provoked this response in comments:

Guess what??? Drug warrants are served to arrest the bad guy and find the drugs. If you knock and wait what do you think happens to the drugs?? You guessed it, they disappear! I know that you want the drugs to be legal, but theyâre not. So for now, we honest citizens are glad that the police are taking the drugs off the streets and we know that isnât possible if they knock on the drug dealerâs door and ask them to pretty please come out.

This is absurd on a couple levels and it deserves to be highlighted since this type of thinking is precisely what we're up against. First, as Dave Borden pointed out, you can't flush a grow room down the toilet. Or a meth lab. Or any substantial quantity of anything. Having relied solely on the "drug flush" justification in defense of aggressive police raids, would the commenter then concede that a more patient approach is ok whenever there's no clear officer safety threat and the items listed in the warrant arenât flushable?

Regardless, as weak as the "drug flush" excuse is, it's almost entirely beside the point. We're concerned primarily about the alarming number of completely innocent people that are being shot dead during misunderstandings that are caused by these tactics. Wrong-door raids are so common that the city of Los Angeles has a team specifically for the purpose of cleaning up after wrong address drug raids. Fatal altercations with innocent people who think they're being robbed have become commonplace.

It is just amazing that someone could speak out in defense of these raids without addressing this obvious and dramatic problem. I linked to a list of dead innocent people, so the commenter had an opportunity to learn about this. Arguing against us without responding to our primary concern is just a waste of everyone's time.

Criticisms of our ideas are welcome here, but in the interest of having a productive debate, I hope that it will be possible to address the central themes when discussing a topic such as this. We're talking about innocent people getting killed, not just guilty people flushing toilets. Any questions?

SWAT Officers Brought Children Along on a Drug Raid

Over and over again we're told that dynamic entry no-knock drug raid tactics are necessary because drug suspects are armed and dangerous. Anyone who suggests otherwise is accused of hostility to law-enforcement, and yet the very officers conducting these raids routinely demonstrate nonchalance about the supposed risks. Via The Agitator:

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. -- Two SWAT officers are being counseled after bringing their young children along with them on a drug raid.

The Orange County SWAT team searched a house on Napoleon Street Friday, arresting three people and recovering guns and drugs.

The two officers who brought their children on the raid will not be disciplined. [local6.com]

Remember when police brought Shaquille O'Neal along on a drug raid? His body itself is worth millions and his massive size makes him an easy target, but they brought him along anyway.

The point here isn't that police shouldn't bring children or NBA stars along on drug raids, although one certainly wonders why they would do that. The point is that if police think these raids are safe enough for children, then the "officer safety" arguments they use to justify aggressive entry tactics appear disingenuous. If these raids are safe enough for civilians, can't we find a way to make them safe for the innocent people that keep getting killed?

A Cop is Dead Because An Informant Mistook Japanese Maple Trees For Marijuana

This is one of those stories that is simultaneously so unbelievable and yet nauseatingly familiar that you just know our deeply flawed drug laws are behind it.

Ryan Frederick is an amateur gardener who grows tomatoes and Japanese maple trees, which look like marijuana. An informant told police there was pot growing at the residence and a warrant was issued. Frederick, who had been burglarized earlier in the week, mistook the police for thieves and sought to defend his home by firing on the unexpected intruders. Police officer Jarrod Shivers was killed.

Now, as we learned in the strikingly similar case of Cory Maye, law-enforcement does not take kindly to people defending their homes during mistaken drug raids. Ryan Frederick has been charged with first-degree murder on the theory that he knew the intruders were police and fired on them anyway.

Frederick had no criminal record and no marijuana plants. The informant was just wrong. Although a few joints were found in the home, it just doesnât make much sense to contend that Frederick would provoke a shoot-out with police over a misdemeanor. Nonetheless, he's being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and can only hope the jury understands the horrible situation he's been placed in.

This is still a developing story, but at this point it seems pretty clear that the only reason this raid ever happened is that some idiot mistook Japanese Maple trees for marijuana. That's all it took. There are no safeguards built into the drug war to prevent this type of thing. If you call in a suspected marijuana grow, you are assumed to be a botanist capable of accurately identifying plants. Police will even risk their lives to investigate your idiotic claims.

Prosecuting Ryan Frederick for murder will do nothing to curb the inevitable result of continuing to raid homes based on informant testimony. This is all just one more injustice stacked atop a precarious edifice. Like Cory Maye, Ryan Frederick is lucky to even be alive, which begs the question of how many dead innocent people would have been unfairly charged with attempted cop-murder if they'd been fortunate enough to even survive the raid.

Much more at The Agitator and DrugWarRant.

Alert: A SWAT Team Shot a Mother and Child Last Week -- Take Action Now to Stop the Madness!

CLICK HERE TO TAKE ACTION TO STOP THE DEADLY SWAT RAIDS

In November 2006, 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston was killed by police during a raid conducted at the wrong house. Ms. Johnston fired at the police officers as they were breaking in through her living room window. Three officers were injured, but Ms. Johnston was struck 39 times and died at the scene. In July 2007, Mike Lefort, 61, and his mother, Thelma, 83, were surprised and thrown to the ground when Thibodeau, Louisiana police burst into the wrong house with a "no knock" warrant. Thelma suffered from a spike in her blood pressure and had a difficult time overcoming the shock. In March 2007, masked police officers in Jacksonville, Florida, mistakenly burst into the home of Willie Davis, grandfather of murdered DreShawna Davis, and his mentally disabed son. The pair were forced to the ground, where they watched helplessly as police tore apart the memorabilia from DreShawn's funeral. The drug sale that never happened was said to involve all of two crack rocks worth $60.

One would think after Atlanta police killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston, that they would get the idea, but they haven't. Last Friday, 1/4/08, a SWAT team, serving an ordinary drug search warrant, invaded the Ohio home of Tarika Wilson -- an innocent woman -- shot and killed her, and shot her one-year-old son. "They went in that home shooting," her mother said at a vigil that night. The boy lost at least one of his fingers. Two dogs were shot too. SWAT teams were created to deal with extreme situations, not routine ones. Yet police now conduct tens of thousands of SWAT raids every year, mostly in low-level drug enforcement. The result is that people like Wilson and Johnston continue to die in terror, with many thousands more having to go on living with trauma. But it's all for a drug war that has failed and can't be made to work. It's time to rein in the SWAT teams. Please sign our online petition: ">Enough is Enough: Petition to Limit Paramilitary Police Raids in America." A copy will be sent in your name to your US Representative and Senators, your state legislators, your governor, and the president. When you're done, please tell your friends and please spread the word wherever you can. This is a first step. Take it with us today, and there can be more. Enough is enough -- no more needless deaths from reckless SWAT raids! Visit http://stopthedrugwar.org/policeraids for more information about this issue, including our October Zogby poll showing that 66% of Americans, when informed about the issue, don't think police should use aggressive entry tactics when doing routine drug enforcement.

CLICK HERE TO TAKE ACTION TO STOP THE DEADLY SWAT RAIDS

StoptheDrugWar.org (still known to many of our readers as DRCNet, the Drug Reform Coordination Network), is an international organization working for an end to drug prohibition worldwide and for reform of drug policy and the criminal justice system in the US. Visit http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle for the latest issue of our acclaimed weekly newsletter, Drug War Chronicle.

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