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SWAT/Paramilitarization

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.]

Please Burn the Byrne Grants

Since Scott opined yesterday about the injustice of paramilitarized policing, I thought I would follow up by referring back to a related topic I've addressed from time to time -- coordinated drug busts as taxpayer-funded lobbying by law enforcement agencies, large numbers of raids conducted together as part of statewide operations, intended to garner publicity for a funding program known as the Byrne Grants and thereby avoid Congressional budget cuts. California and Kentucky were among the guilty parties last year, though I suspect they were not the only ones. Kentucky is at again, according to libertarian SWAT-critic Radley Balko of Reason magazine, writing last week for FoxNews.com:
Last month, police in Kentucy went on a 24-hour drug raid blitz. According to local media accounts, the raids uncovered 23 methamphetamine labs, seized more than 2,400 pounds of marijuana, identified 16 drug-endangered children and arrested 565 people for illegal drug use. ... "During 'Operation Byrne Blitz,'" a local television station reported, "state police and highway patrol agencies, local police and sheriff's departments, and drug task forces throughout the country conducted undercover investigations, marijuana eradication efforts and drug interdiction activities. The collaborative effort, named for the federal grant program which funds many of the anti-drug efforts, underscored the impact that cuts to this funding could have on local and statewide drug enforcement."
Perhaps because they often are tied to drug arrest statistics, it was task funded by the Byrne grants that perpetrated the racist scandals in Tulia and Hearne, in which large numbers of minorities were rounded up and prosecuted, only for it all to turn out to be fabrication. In the Overkill report, Balko has identified the grants as one of the reasons for the overwhelming increase in the use of SWAT teams for minor drug enforcement. The Bush administration, surprisingly, has taken the lead in trying to slash Byrne funding, while Democrats have led efforts to restore it, such as NY Sen. Chuck Schumer at a press conference late last month. A letter signed by 51 senators asked the chairman and ranking member of the Committee on Appropriations to restore cut Byrne funding, among them presidential contenders Clinton and Obama. To be fair to the candidates, some of our favorite senators unfortunately are on there too, such as Chris Dodd (D=CT), sponsor of the first Senate bill taking on the Higher Education Act drug penalty; Dick Durbin (D-IL); the justice-reform-minded Jim Webb (D-VA), others who've done some good things from time to time. Democrats clearly relish the support of national law enforcement unions, and it must be hard for any politician to resist getting to stand up next to law enforcement leaders at a press conference and call for more money for them. The Byrne grants fund other things besides arrests too, and the reasons for opposing the program may seem like harder sells from the point of view of a member of the "establishment" than it does for us out here. Also to be fair to the Democrats, those 51 signatories included 15 Republicans. A conservative commentator from the Heritage Foundation, Cully Stimson, also commented on FoxNews.com, but making the case for the grants, in Don't Burn the Byrne Grants, back in February. Still, if George Bush can get it right, I think it's lame for Democrats not to, especially when one of the results of this program is what happened in Tulia and Hearne, about as close to overt race-based persecution by government as can be found. I say, do burn the Byrne Grants, in fact please burn them. The fact that law enforcement groups quite transparently lobby for them by conducting massive numbers of drug busts to get attention ought to set off warning bells. Any good things the grants might also support can be funded through other channels. This program is badly structured and misdirected, and it should go.

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 they’re not. So for now, we honest citizens are glad that the police are taking the drugs off the streets and we know that isn’t possible if they knock on the drug dealer’s 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 aren’t 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?

Protest Against Police Violence is Monitored From Above by Police Snipers

Concerned citizens in Lima, Ohio continue to search for answers six weeks after their local SWAT team killed an innocent woman and shot her baby during a drug raid. Though the police department has yet to explain the shooting, their behavior certainly speaks volumes about the Us vs. Everyone mentality that made this tragic event possible.

Via The Agitator, snipers from the Lima SWAT team were perched on the rooftop as citizens gathered to discuss the violent excesses of the Lima SWAT team. Apparently, they think you pose a threat if you protest the threat that they pose:
As residents arrived in the parking lot at the school, several noticed movement on the roof of the buildings. The Lima SWAT team was in position looking down on the gathering speakers. “Here we come in good faith, and they have snipers on the roofs of our school! We came in peace, and they are ready to gun us down like dogs!” Willie Manley vowed to ask them face to face. “How can we trust you, when you can’t trust us?”

The mood seemed to changed as people continued to walk into the school many taking a final glance at the rooftops in disbelief, shaking their heads and commenting to friends. [The Sojourner's Truth]
By what sort of twisted logic was it decided that these peaceful protesters might have to be put down? The whole thing just smacks of intimidation.

This is the same SWAT team that had to remove an image from its website shortly after the shooting, which depicted a SWAT officer firing a machine gun straight at you when you opened the site. The graphic made anyone visiting the site feel like a potential target, which was exactly the wrong message to send after killing an innocent mother of six and shooting her baby.

Yet, the decision to post SWAT snipers atop the local high school during a town hall meeting discussing SWAT violence is even more hideous. An act so ironic and inappropriate is an unambiguous statement of contempt towards a confused and grieving community. If the Lima Police Department were even remotely concerned about the widespread public animosity they'd already caused, they would not behave this way. And if they had a plausible explanation for killing an innocent woman and shooting her baby, we'd have heard it by now.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the War on Drugs. You might have heard of it before, but you really don't understand what it is until you've witnessed the spectacle of hundreds of African Americans marching hand in hand against indiscriminate police violence. If you've formed an opinion about drug prohibition without realizing that innocent mothers and babies are getting shot, then please take this opportunity to reassess the situation.

animated graphic from Lima Swat Team web site -- they took it down after killing Tarika Wilson

Residents Rallying Around SWAT Raid Target Ryan Frederick

residents of Chesapeake rallying behind Ryan Frederick
Recently we reported on a tragic case in Chesapeake, Virginia, in which a forced-entry (e.g. "SWAT") raid on an extremely low-level drug suspect (he had just a few joints as it turned) ended with the resident, Ryan Frederick, fatally shooting police officer Jarrod Shivers out of fear for his life. It later came out -- at least as claimed by Frederick -- that the anonymous informant police relied upon before battering open Frederick's door had probably mistaken the Japanese maple trees he grew as a hobby for marijuana. Yet Frederick is in jail facing first-degree murder charges The Agitator reports that residents are rallying around Frederick, and that friends of his have created a Myspace page for him that links to a form to donate to his legal defense. Good for them. It's tragic that officer Shivers lost his life -- Frederick's supporters have said so themselves -- but at the end of the day there was no rational basis for police to enter his home in the terrifying manner that they did. To be clear, it is a pretty common way of doing things at this point in time -- roughly 40,000 SWAT raids are conducted every year, according to some estimates, and the vast majority are not for emergency or otherwise high-intensity situations -- but that doesn't make it a good idea and it doesn't make it right. Every time a raid is done, the people inside are subjected to a pretty significant psychological trauma, whether or not anyone gets hurt physically. And one only needs to watch the news to know that needless injury and death is bound to be the result sometimes, again and again. Police need to start taking responsibility for their actions. That means not blaming the victims of botched raids, like Ryan Frederick, for the predictable consequences reckless police tactics. And it means not using such reckless tactics to begin with. Since the nation's police are not about to do so willingly, the rest of us need to organize to force them to. If you haven't already, please sign our petition to limit the use of SWAT teams, and send it to your friends. And visit Ryan Frederick's Myspace page (linked above) to show your support. (Important: Please don't tear down Officer Shivers or say anything suggesting that he deserved what he got. Shivers was misled into what he did by a bigger problem existing in police culture, or at least that is what happened so far as I can tell. And negative comments about him won't help our cause, but could alienate people who might otherwise listen to what we have to say.)

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 doesn’t 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.

No Wonder They "Went in Shooting" -- SWAT Team Had Violent Animated Gif on Web Site Before Killing Tarika Wilson

Radley Balko pointed out on The Agitator that the Lima, Ohio, SWAT team's web site had an animated gif on it which seemed to fire into the faces of web site visitors: Check out Google's cached copy of the page here to see it in context. Since they killed 26-year-old Tarika Wilson, an innocent mother of six, and maimed her youngest son, a one-year-old, they've taken the violent image off of the site, though. It's not hard to see why they "went in shooting" to her home, as Wilson's sister described it. A policing, SWAT team culture that would allow such an image to go on their own official home page, is a culture that is simply prone to reckless, "cowboy" behavior. Frankly, it seems like they were having a little too much fun being a SWAT team. As the saying goes, "it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye." This time it was a life that was lost, and a child's finger. But it was never fun for the people on the other end. According to the web page, the Lima SWAT team conducts about 50 raids a year, about once a week. I looked up the city's population to try and get a sense of how much that is, and it's a mere 38,219 (estimate July '06). That's bigger than Mayberry, but it's not a metropolis by any means. So I think that one SWAT raid a week there is a huge number. One would think one was living in Baghdad, for such extreme measures to be used once a week in a jurisdiction that size. The page says that most of the raids were on crack houses. There's the explanation -- they are using the SWAT team not for the extreme or emergency situations that SWAT is meant for, but on routine drug enforcement. The federal government is probably funding them on a per-arrest basis. I can't imagine it's pleasant to live near a crack house. But the overwhelming majority of crack houses don't have drug kingpins or terrorists hiding in them. The appropriate approach is to knock and announce, wait an appropriate amount of time, and then if the door hasn't been opened, to force it open but to do so cautiously. (Actually the appropriate approach is to put the crack houses out of business through legalization, but that's another issue.) Drug dealers are not in the business to kill cops and become the most hunted fugitives on the planet. Drug dealers are trying to make money. Police don't need to enter in dramatic and sudden force to protect their lives. The dealers aren't going to shoot them, they're going to try to disappear or hide or dispose of the evidence. Last year we looked into police officer fatalities doing drug enforcement, and out of two million drug arrests per year we could only find four of them in all of 2006, with only two of those directly related to drug arrests. In the rare situations when you need a SWAT team, it's important that it be there for you. Lima's almost two hours from the nearest big city, Columbus, so maybe they should have their own. But I can only say maybe, partly because there would be at least one more living person in Lima now if they didn't. They certainly shouldn't be using it 50 times a year. PLEASE SIGN OUR PETITION TO STOP THE DEADLY SWAT RAIDS.
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