Police Raids

It has now been reported that a mere two months before killing 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston, Atlanta police conducted a very dangerous, similar raid on the home of 80-year-old Frances Thompson. The supposed drug dealer, named "Hollywood," didn't live there. (Read more about it on Radley Balko's The Agitator blog, the most continuous source of information on the problem of SWAT teams/paramilitarization of policing.) You'd think the Atlanta police would learn from one experience and take the steps needed to avoid making the same mistake. Then again, you'd think police nationally would learn when people wind up dying in these raids. But they keep doing it over and over and over...

What do police officers have to say about the indictment of three Atlanta police officers -- two of whom have now pled guilty -- in the murder of Kathryn Johnston? Well, not much.

Officer.com has a thread on this topic, which consists primarily of debate over the facts of the case. There are a few factually incorrect statements, and several corrections, but what you won't find is any substantive discussion of the systemic drug war corruption that made this tragedy inevitable.

The only exception is this comment from the ubiquitous Howard Wooldridge of LEAP:

The 'facts' will probably always remain murky. I blame the Drug War for the entire incident and grandma was simply more collateral damage. This is far f/ the first oops which caused death and won't be the last. Until we become as wise as our grandparents and end this New Prohibition, our profession will continue to suffer, as does the community we protect. Someone tell me one advantage, one good outcome of this policy after we have spent a trillion taxpayer dollars and arrested some 36 million people...Hiway Howie

Sadly, no one even responds to Howard. It is really quite disappointing to find that one of the most shocking revelations of police misconduct in recent years provokes such shallow discussion from law-enforcement officers.

Until police take interest in the numerous lessons to be learned from such tragedies, the list will just continue to grow.

I found two different stories this month about law-enforcement insiders tipping off friends prior to a drug raid. It certainly is revealing to see folks become suddenly concerned when the drug war targets someone they know.

This one involves a dispatcher who warned friends of an upcoming raid on another friend's home. Officers became suspicious after finding nothing during the search.

Another involves a prosecutor who tipped off a relative about an upcoming raid, then turned himself in and resigned after realizing the severity of his actions.

Basically, this guy put people in jail for a living, only to freak out and destroy his own career the moment the drug war touched his family. It's a startling change of heart, but I suspect many drug war participants would do the same. The callousness and brutality of the war on drugs becomes vivid and sickening once you're forced to confront the humanity of its victims.

Oddly, both incidents prompted accusations of endangering police:

Joliet Police Chief Fred Hayes said calling off the operation averted a potential disaster. The prosecutor's relative was "an associate" of the target of the operation, and the target learned of it, Hayes said.

"I think the state's attorney's office handled it very professionally and expeditiously," Hayes added, saying the supervisor's quick action might have prevented officers from being placed in serious jeopardy.

One must scrupulously avoid rational thinking in order to reach this conclusion so effortlessly. Does anyone really think the suspect would wait around and try to fight the police? If anything, the tip makes the raid safer because (1) the suspect will have removed all evidence and has no cause for desperation, and (2) the suspect knows it's a raid rather than an armed robbery.

The average drug dealer ain't Tony Montana jacked on blow ready to take on the world with an M-16. Anyone homicidal/suicidal enough to choose an optional fight with the SWAT team is probably already up in the proverbial bell-tower. Nobody would risk their career to warn someone like that anyway.

Yeah, I know it's the drug war, but can we stop to think for just one minute? I'll count to 60. Let me know what you come up with.

Basile Parasiris is the latest seemingly innocent person to fire on police who he mistook for burglars during a drug raid on his home. He's now charged with 1st degree murder among other things, for the apparent act of attempting to defend his family. From The Montreal Gazette:

Lawyer Frank Pappas said his client was trying to defend himself and his family when he grabbed a loaded gun and shot Laval Constable Daniel Tessier - whom Parasiris mistook for a crazed thief.

"If he would've believed it was the police, do you think he would have taken them on?" Pappas said in an interview. "They have more firepower than him."
…
According to Pappas, police didn't find anything in the Parasiris home.

"There was no body, no drugs, no large quantities of firearms," he said. "They may have found one or two pills of Viagra that he didn't have a prescription for.
…
According to Pappas, the son called 911 after the police barged into the family home and bullets started flying.

"Do you think that if they knew they were police officers, they'd call 911?" Pappas said.

Much remains unknown at this point. But the apparent absence of drugs and the 911 call sound like strong indications that we're looking at another terribly misguided prosecution. Unfortunately, as we've learned from the Cory Maye case, there seems to be a mental block that prevents police, prosecutors, and judges from understanding that normal people are prone to shoot at intruders who burst into their homes.

The otherwise forgivable instinct to defend one's property becomes totally unacceptable when the intruders turn out to be police who mistakenly believe you've got drugs in there. It's mind-boggling that despite all the evidence to the contrary, police continue to insist that they must raid homes suddenly and unexpectedly…because doing otherwise would be dangerous.

How many innocent people must be tricked into shooting police officers before law-enforcement figures out that behaving like burglars is not a safe way to initiate contact with citizens?

As Radley Balko has often pointed out, these deaths occur in the course of a completely unsuccessful effort to stop people from getting high. As the frequency of these raids-gone-wrong increases, it's chilling to think that this ongoing theater of unnecessary death and destruction won't stop until the pile of bodies is too tall to ignore.

I've been brooding about an article in the Gary (Indiana) Post-Tribune about a drug raid where a police SWAT team badly burned a drug suspect when they tossed a flash-bang grenade into his home. I felt the opening sentence was entirely inappropriate and that the reporter was remiss in merely taking the police version of events and not asking the police some serious questions. Here are the opening paragraphs of the article:

Flash-bang burns drug raid suspect January 24, 2007 By LORI CALDWELL Post-Tribune With a little help from the Gary police S.W.A.T. team, Darrell Newburn had a most appropriate name Monday. Newburn, 31, is hospitalized with a new, serious burn on his back caused by a flash-bang that hit his back before officers stormed his Glen Park home Monday afternoon. "How it happened, I'm not certain," Sgt. John Jelks, drug unit commander said a day later. "It's normal practice for them to throw the distraction device in first." Detectives from the Narcotics-Vice Unit obtained a search warrant for Newburn's home at 4433 Delaware St. after making a series of undercover buys from him there. Police surrounded the house and a member of the S.W.A.T. team, led by Cmdr. Anthony Stanley, tossed in the grenade-like device that explodes with a loud bang and bright light. Newburn was hit in the back and suffered a burn about 12 inches in diameter. He is being held under police guard at Methodist Hospitals Northlake Campus.

A few minutes ago I sent a letter to the reporter. I'll let you know if I get any response. Here's the letter:

Dear Ms. Caldwell: I write to protest the flippancy of your lead sentence in the January 24 story, “Flash-Bang Burns Drug Suspect.” Let me get this straight: A man, who is presumed innocent, is severely burned in an unprovoked assault during a drug raid, and you lead with an unfunny pun on his name? Instead of looking for cheap yuks, a good reporter might be asking the police some questions, such as: Why is it standard procedure to use paramilitary SWAT-style teams on small-time drug raids? Why is it standard procedure to throw military-style explosives into the homes of suspects? SWAT teams were originally designed to be used in hostage and other extremely dangerous situations, but there aren’t really that many of those. Give the police a SWAT team, and they will find a way to use it. But is it really appropriate for police to treat a small-time criminal infraction as if they were raiding an insurgent stronghold in Baghdad? I refer you to a recent report about the massive increase in the use of SWAT-style teams, especially in policing the drug war, by Cato Institute analyst Radley Balko. It’s called “Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Policing in America.” Here’s the link: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476 In it, you will find incident after incident of raids gone bad, innocent people killed, and police endangering themselves and others. It’s worth a look. A good reporter might also want to ask the police just what they have accomplished with 40 years of drug raids, and whether there might be another, more reasonable way to deal with drug use. I don’t mean to attack you, only to suggest that there are stories left undiscovered if you rely merely on police and their press releases and don’t ask them the hard questions. I do hope you’ll keep this letter in mind next time you write one of those drug raid stories. Sincerely, Phillip Smith Editor, Drug War Chronicle www.stopthedrugwar.org P.S. If you have any interest in pursuing this, I can put you in touch with a number of current and former police officers (including former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper) who are harshly critical of this gung-ho, paramilitary-style drug war policing and who challenge the whole notion of drug prohibition altogether.

DeKalb County Georgia, which borders Atlanta, endured 12 fatal police shootings last year. Now their new Police Chief Terrell Bolton is promising to do something. From Daily Report:

Bolton, who was hired last month, said his department has nothing to hide, and that the new initiative is meant to encourage transparency and make citizens feel more comfortable.

GBI and DEA agents will respond to police-involved shootings as they happen, working as monitors and reporting inappropriate behavior to DeKalb superior officers.

It's exciting to see police getting serious about not shooting citizens. The initiative includes improved training procedures, but there's a clear emphasis on standardizing the response when a shooting occurs. No doubt, this is a reaction to the Kathryn Johnston fiasco in nearby Atlanta, where officers attempted a cover-up after shooting an innocent suspect.

Radley Balko's research demonstrates the importance of adequately investigating police shootings, which so rarely result in criminal charges even when obvious injustices occur. I'm not sure the DEA are the right people to investigate this, but anything that distracts them from their other duties is a big win for public safety in itself.

Still, there's only so much that training and accountability can do to prevent drug war violence. So long as police conduct no-knock raids on the homes of non-violent suspects, warrants are issued based on the testimony of criminal informants in exchange for compensation, police enter the wrong homes with alarming frequency, and innocent people reach for weapons when their doors are kicked in unexpectedly, the killings will continue.

If these public officials are serious about preventing unnecessary police shootings, it's time to discuss the unnecessary war that demands them.

From The New York Times:

NEWARK, Jan. 8 — Mayor Cory A. Booker and his police director announced the formation of a new narcotics division today to try to defeat a stubbornly high murder rate, firmly linking the trade in illegal drugs to the city's persistent violence.

There's a link, alright. And in time politicians will come to understand that it is prohibition which makes drug-trade violence inevitable. Surely we can't keep addressing community problems with hollow rhetoric like this:

The new 45-person unit, led by a deputy chief, will tackle the city's drug trade as it if were a "ground war," he said.

So basically they're proposing a war on violence. It won't work. It can't work because drug-trade violence stems from an absence of regulation, not a shortage of armed police ready to kick doors in on an informant's tip.

In fact, temporary successes achieved through "ground war" tactics frequently increase violence as new competitors rush to replace those removed from the market by law-enforcement. Nor should anyone disregard the abundant collateral damage that occurs when armed raids are conducted based on tips from shady criminal informants.

The New York Times isn't responsible for making this argument, but they should at least acknowledge it. The discussion of drug-trade violence is incomplete and unproductive when the contributing role of drug prohibition goes unmentioned.

Help us spread the message: The New York Times accepts letters to the editor at [email protected].

Now it seems that one of the officers involved in the deadly "drug raid" in Atlanta last week previously lied about an incident in which he caused a head-on car crash. Yet the Atlanta police kept him on the force, and his "credibility" was good enough to get a no-knock warrant to break down someone's door. Also, the confidential informant is no longer confidential, somehow. But why? Read Radley Balko's analysis in The Agitator.

The killing of an elderly Atlanta woman after she shot and wounded three undercover policemen during a nighttime drug raid just might end up shedding some much needed light on the sordid business that is drug law enforcement in these United States. What we're seeing so far is not exactly a shining endorsement of the Atlanta Police Department's REDDOG (Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia) drug squad or what looks to be the mindless search warrant machinery of the Fulton County courts. Just today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which deserves kudos for being all over this travesty, reported that the snitch on whose word the warrant was based now says he never bought drugs at Johnston's address, and the narcs involved in the raid asked him to lie about it after the fact.

Radley Balko reports that Shaq has been going on SWAT missions. They let him carry a gun, and he’s already had his first wrong address raid and his first misconduct complaint.

Shaq was cleared of any wrong-doing after being accused of excessive force by a drug suspect. Bear in mind of course that getting cleared of misconduct following a SWAT raid is incredibly easy. So one lucky suspect may very well have gotten his ass kicked by Shaq. That’s awesome, but it could also be a sign of terrible things to come.