Police Raids

Police Refuse to Take Responsibility For Botched Drug Raid

We have already grown accustomed to disappointing explanations from law-enforcement after they kick in the doors of innocent people, terrorize families, tear apart their homes, and then insist that such things "almost never happen." It happens all the time, as we know, and the pattern is terribly, depressingly familiar.

Still, the latest botched drug raid, which took place outside Albany, NY on the eve of July 4th, prompted a reaction from police that is so callous and plainly dismissive that it managed to surprise even me. The point isn't that I don't believe some police officers think this way, but that I just wouldn't expect them to reveal it as shamelessly as this.

Here is what Troy Police Sergeant David Dean told Albany's News10 correspondent Anya Tucker after the raid:

Sgt. Dean: "We did not hit the wrong house, we hit the house that the search warrant directed us to hit."

Anya: "But was that information that led up to that right?"

Sgt. Dean: "My bosses are going through this whole investigative process to make sure that we were as thorough as possible."

Anya: "What was the level of threat that you assessed prior to coming into the home?"

Sgt. Dean: "That there were weapons in the house, or that the drugs were stored in that manor."

Anya: "In this house, you found no drugs?"

Sgt. Dean: "We are not publicly speaking on that issue at this point."

Anya: "Do you think this will hurt your credibility?"

Sgt. Dean: "The last thing we want to do is enter an innocent person's home - it doesn't get us anywhere, and it doesn't hamper the drug trade."

Let's just stop there for a second. That is why they donât want to raid the innocent? Because "it doesn't get us anywhere, and it doesn't hamper the drug trade"!? Sgt. Dean either won't acknowledge, or doesnât even believe, that law-abiding citizens have a right not to be treated this way. No duty could be more central to police work than the protection of innocent people and property, yet that fundamental concept takes a back seat, if any at all, to the concern that police weren't able to put anyone in prison that day. And it gets worse:

Anya: "Will you be going back to clean-up the damage to the house?"

Sgt. Dean: "We just have to enter lawfully with our search warrant, that is our only obligation."

Anya: "And you can leave it in any state that you left it?"

Sgt. Dean: "Yes. We had probable cause that led us to believe there was drug activity."

Regardless of what the policy is, does that even sound right when it comes out of your mouth? What sort of public servant goes on TV and says they can trash innocent people's homes with no recourse? If nothing else, I'd be afraid that talking about it this way might lead to these draconian police powers being taken away. Such candor reflects perfectly the paramilitary mentality through which such violent and utterly unnecessary police behavior is born and repeated endlessly.

These remarks should be Exhibit A at a hearing before the state legislature. If police don't feel at all responsible for the damage they cause when they are wrong, what incentive do they have to make sure they're right? This is just another painfully predictable result of raiding homes based on the testimony of some desperate informant with everything to gain and nothing to lose by making up names and addresses at random. That appears to be exactly what happened here, and if it's not, well, donât hold your breath for an alternate explanation.

Maybe I don't say this enough, but I respect cops. I was a criminal justice major. I've studied under them, dined with them, toured D.C. in a squad car and answered calls with them. I've witnessed heroic policing at frighteningly close range and I'll be the first to concede that a good cop is worth anything we can afford to pay.

But the great thing about good cops is that they make you feel safe, and that's the opposite of what happened here. These officers are telling the public that they can destroy your home when you've broken no law, that they donât have to fix it, and that they needn't even explain the circumstances that brought them crashing violently into your peaceful life. Why would anyone anywhere ever want cops like that?

Lunatic Easily Convinces Police He's a Federal Drug Agent

What happens when a crazy person tells local police he's a federal agent and offers to help them fight drugs?

Busts began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, âa meth capital of the United States,â the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood, from television mainly, to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as âSergeant Bill,â boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.
â¦

Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding-performing minister, a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road. [New York Times]

The whole thing provides yet another exhibit in the colossal incompetence that has become so routine and predictable in the war on drugs. If some nutjob showed up at the fire department with a badge and an axe, they'd tell him to hit the road. They wouldn't follow him in and out of burning buildings.

It is precisely because of the massive multi-tiered drug war bureaucracy that his psychotic scheme seemed somehow plausible to everyone. Drug enforcement is the one occupation so lacking in accountability, so consumed by macho tough-guy posturing, that some maniac can just walk through the door and fit right in. It's a match made in hell.

And it wasn't even the cops who figured out he was an imposter. It was a reporter, months into this mindboggling hoax. Even when he recklessly and routinely violated suspects' constitutional rights, the police who followed him around never thought anything of it. That's how easy it is. His flagrantly illegal and incompetent behavior actually made them think he was real.

That this even happened is a potent testament to the fact that drug enforcement in America is thoroughly rotten and diseased to its core. If you see vultures circling around something, you know it is not healthy.

No Charges Filed Against Man Who Mistook A Cop For a Burglar and Shot Him

Anyone who has followed the Cory Maye and Ryan Frederick cases knows how hard it is to convince police and prosecutors that you thought you were being burglarized when you fired on police who charged into your home unexpectedly.

This bizarre story from Alabama puts a new twist on that tragically familiar narrative:

An off-duty Huntsville police officer was shot in the shoulder early Saturday when a friend mistook him for a burglar.

Police Chief Henry Reyes said Tony McElyea, a Strategic Counterdrug Team agent, decided to surprise a good friend and former police academy cadet at his home in the 1300 block of Virginia Boulevard.

McElyea, his girlfriend, and the friend's wife snuck into the home at about 2:30 a.m.

McElyea walked down the hallway and started shouting "Wake up, wake up," at his friend, Reyes said.

The friend, who Reyes said didn't immediately recognize McElyea, grabbed a .38-caliber revolver and shot him.

"It's just one of those things where he got startled and reacted," Reyes said. "It's unfortunate that it happened, but it's fortunate that it's not any worse."
â¦

The incident has been ruled an accident, and no charges will be filed against the shooter, whose name was not immediately released. [Huntsville Times]

So apparently, when you take the botched drug raid out of the equation, suddenly it makes perfect sense that someone would use force to defend their home when intruders come bursting in. Of course, in this case there was no warrant and no vague criminal activity for which the homeowner could be accused of attempting to evade capture. So maybe it's a little unfair to compare this to the Maye and Frederick cases.

Still, it's just impossible to ignore the fact that Cory Maye and Ryan Frederick are no more guilty than this man, who wasn't even charged. They made the same fundamental error he made: thinking that their lives were in danger and using force against the intruder. It shouldnât matter whether or not police had a warrant. The bottom line is that if police behave like burglars, they might be mistaken for burglars. Citizens who make that mistake are not guilty of murdering a cop. They are victims of bad policing brought on by a bad drug policy.

Another Ryan Frederick Update

Radley Balko has much more information from Ryan Frederick's preliminary hearing, which I mentioned yesterday.

Of particular interest is the fact that special prosecutor Paul Ebert has threatened to file felony drug charges against Frederick, despite the fact that only a tiny amount of marijuana was recovered in the raid. The suspected marijuana grow that prompted the raid simply didnât exist, so any new drug charges at this point are almost certainly a trumped-up character assassination designed to smear Frederick in front of the jury.

It's a critical move for Ebert, who clearly realizes that it will be hard to explain why Frederick would have shot a cop over a few flakes of pot. Unless Frederick can be painted as a hardened criminal, his persistent claim that he thought the police were burglars would likely prevail.

It is just amazing the amount of effort being put into prosecuting an innocent man for a murder that wasn't his fault, all so that the real killer (the drug war) can remain on the loose.

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.

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