Police Raids

It seems Philadelphia's drug cops have adopted a nasty habit of raiding corner stores accused of selling paraphernalia, then smashing security cameras and just straight-up stealing cash and merchandise.

The accused officers are denying everything, of course, but the Philadelphia Daily News found multiple former informants who acknowledge being paid with cigarettes. Hmm, I wonder where those came from.

It's truly remarkable how often the soldiers in the war on drugs can be found committing worse crimes than the people they're investigating.

As long as the war on marijuana continues, police will continue shooting harmless people:

GRAND RAPIDS -- The family of a Grand Valley State University student shot by police said he did nothing to provoke gunfire in a drug raid at the student's off-campus apartment.

"All he had time to do was cover his face from a flashlight in his eyes, and they shot him," George Copp said today. [MLive.com]

Police haven’t even announced what, if anything, was found in the raid. Of course, the shooting was reprehensible either way, but it's just another reminder that police use these violent, confrontational tactics without even having good information. Believe me, if there was more than a pinch of dope in that apartment, the police would have told everyone about it by now.

The one thing we do know about Derek Copp is that he's a hippie and he smokes pot. We know this because some intrepid journalist got into his Facebook page and published portions of it in the newspaper. Great job! Now that you're done frolicking on Facebook, can you please go find out why the hell the cops shot this guy?

The Baltimore Sun reports on Cheye Calvo's attempt to bring transparency to the use of paramilitary drug raids in Maryland. Unsurprisingly, the law-enforcement community is not interested in having their activities monitored:

However, the executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association says reporting requirements for SWAT teams should emanate from the law enforcement community, not legislators.

"Our data shows that when SWAT teams are deployed, the violence goes down," said John Gnagey, who was a SWAT team member for 26 years in the Champaign, Ill., police department.

I'd love to know what data he's referring to, because that just strikes me as false on its face. SWAT raids are inherently violent. The violence at Cheye Calvo's house wasn't reduced when the SWAT team showed up and started shooting his dogs repeatedly.

Of course, the SWAT director thinks the legislature should just butt out and let police decide which reporting requirements are appropriate. Did you hear that Maryland legislators? The SWAT team doesn’t want you nosing around in their business.

Police are fond of pointing out that if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about. Perhaps it's about time someone spat that line right back at them.

Justice was finally served in the case of Kathryn Johnston, as three officers were sentenced to prison today for their role in the botched drug raid that took her life.

These officers crossed the often all-too-thin line that separates drug cops from common criminals, and they will pay for what they did, as well they should. We can only hope that today's outcome serves as a reminder to others in uniform who've forgotten what it means to protect and serve. Alas, this comment from the judge suggests that Atlanta's problems with rogue cops are far from solved:

A federal judge who sent three fallen cops to prison for a notorious drug raid that left an elderly woman dead said Tuesday that Atlanta Police Department performance quotas unduly influenced the officers’ behavior.

"It is my fervent hope the Atlanta Police Department will take to heart what has happened here," U.S. District Judge Julie Carnes said. At the close of an emotional two-day hearing, Carnes sentenced former officers Gregg Junnier, Jason R. Smith and Arthur Bruce Tesler to between 5 and 10 years in prison.

At the hearing, Tesler’s lawyer provided examples of other Atlanta police officers breaking the rules or violating the law and said a disturbing culture of misconduct pervades the force. [Atlanta Journal Constitution]

Thus, even in its finest hour, our justice system remains crippled by the enemy within. There is nothing unique about Atlanta's police culture that brought this tragedy to life. Everywhere the drug war is fought, you will find police who have become indifferent to the very laws they've sworn to uphold.

Radley Balko has the details of yet another ridiculously excessive drug raid, this time in Carroll County, MD. From the victim:

After reviewing the search warrant I was horrified to realize these "hut-hut" men came in with M-16s in the middle of the night because my son had been arrested for a misdemeanor marijuana charge. The affidavit filed for the search warrant stated that "it had been the officer’s experience that persons who are arrested with illegal drugs continued to use, abuse and/or distribute illegal drugs". This was the probable cause.

As awful as that sounds, it’s actually worse. The kid a) didn’t even live there anymore, and b) had already been to court for the marijuana charge. What they were they doing raiding his parents? It’s just absurd. Whoever signed that warrant should be fired, if not jailed for reckless endangerment.

And if that’s not enough, it appears that Carrol County’s judges have been signing warrants like this routinely. Sounds like a good reason to pass legislation requiring better documentation of drug raids in Maryland.

Following the botched drug raid death of his two dogs, Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo has gone from drug war victim to hero of justice. His dreadful experience – and dignified response – has inspired two Maryland legislators to introduce a bill that will improve data collection on aggressive police raids:

All the bill does is require each local police department to submit a monthly report of any SWAT activities, with details of time, place, evidence seized, arrests, and any injuries. "This bill is an important first step that doesn’t restrict [SWAT] use," Calvo said. "It merely brings transparency." Transparency should be the least the public demands with regard to the use of potentially deadly force. [Examiner]

Don’t be at all surprised when law enforcement interests in Maryland bitterly oppose any effort to document their activities. They are going to completely freak out about this. You know why? Because police in Maryland conduct unnecessarily violent drug raids all the time, endangering innocent people routinely and without consequence. Naturally, they would prefer that such conduct not be scrutinized.

Ryan Frederick "Odds and Ends," via Radley Balko.

Well, it could have been a lot worse:

A jury convicted Ryan Frederick of voluntary manslaughter this afternoon in the January 2008 death of Chesapeake police Detective Jarrod Shivers.

It also convicted him of simple possession of marijuana.

In the process, the group opted against the two most serious charges filed against the 29-year-old – capital murder and manufacturing marijuana. Voluntary manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. Marijuana possession is a misdemeanor, with a maximum sentence of 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine. [Virginian-Pilot]

I imagine this is one of those cases where both the defense and the prosecution breathed a sigh of relief. It could have turned out much differently and this outcome enables each side to claim that they did their job.

It’s hard to know what to make of this. Frederick was the victim here, no less so than the officer whose life was lost. This young man deserves no punishment and will now serve at least a couple years, I’d bet. He went down hard in what’s rapidly becoming a classic botched drug raid scenario wherein a suspect believes police are burglars and uses a firearm to defend their home with fatal consequences.

The staggering magnitude of police incompetence and corruption at stake here deserves considerable investigation and I hope today’s outcome won’t close the door on that. In the meantime, let’s keep Ryan in our hearts as he heads to the sentencing phase.

Washington Post has a definitive account of the killing of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s dogs that took place during a botched drug raid back in July. It’s an impressive feature that references Radley Balko’s research and really nails down the faulty drug war tactics that brought this tragedy about. As upsetting as the story is, it’s vital that this incident becomes more than a footnote in the long and growing list of brutal drug war excesses that occur everyday in America and beyond.

An accompanying online chat with Calvo included this question:

Washington, D.C.: Mayor Calvo, thank you for courageously speaking up and telling the world about the tragedy perpetrated on your family. I know you have forcefully called for some incremental reforms on the state level, but don't you agree that we will continue to see innocent lives lost in raids gone wrong, billions of dollars wasted on arrests and incarceration, and empowering of violent criminal enterprises as long as drugs are illegal? Isn't the real solution to put drugs into a legal and regulated framework like we did when we legalized alcohol 75 years ago?

Cheye Calvo: Let me say first that I have never done drugs and have a fairly deep personal opposition to them. That said, I also have a serious problem with public policy by metaphor -- and the 'war' allusion is especially dangerous. Clearly, the current policy is a failure, and there needs to be a genuine public discussion here. A federalist at heart, I think that states should have greater leeway to try new approaches. There has to be a middle ground between outright legalization and a military state.

That sounds awfully reasonable and although I’d argue that anything short of a regulated market would continue to produce unnecessary violence, I think Calvo is speaking in a way many people can relate to. I think it’s this type of argument from this type of person that will eventually make a difference in the way the war on drugs is fought in our communities.

We should be seeing a verdict soon in the case of Ryan Frederick, the Virginia man who was charged with murder for killing a police officer who he mistook for a burglar during a questionable drug raid.

The jury failed to return a verdict on Tuesday and will continue deliberating Wednesday. Having followed the case closely, I’m pretty worked up about it and I’ll be glued to the computer until this gets resolved. A guilty verdict would not only send an innocent man to prison, but would provide a symbolic victory for the worst aspects of drug war policing, those that created this tragedy in the first place.

Beyond all that, the trial itself has been a grand injustice, really just a classic railroading that brought out the worst of the worst as far as drug war prosecutorial tactics are concerned. Ryan Frederick is simply not the man the prosecution made him out to be, not on any level whatsoever. In one familiar example, prosecutor Paul Ebert used testimony from a "marijuana expert" to grossly exaggerate the capacity of Frederick’s personal marijuana garden:

Meinhart says 1 plant produces 1 pound of salable marijuana. 1 pound is 16 ounces, and at $400.00 per ounce is $6400.00 times 10 plants is $64000.00. [Tidewater Liberty]

Yet, as Radley Balko points out, Frederick had a not-so-great job getting up at 4 a.m. to deliver sodas. He didn’t have $64,000. Police only found 12 grams of marijuana in the raid. All of this is just pure garbage, the same bogus story recycled over and over again in every marijuana trial. But it’s particularly insidious in this case, since the goal is not only to convict Frederick of a marijuana offense, but to destroy his image before the jury and nail him on a false murder charge.

Please join me in keeping your fingers crossed that Frederick will be set free.