Gangsters in Blue

I’ve been meaning to post this here, but since it’s up now over at reason, I’ll just copy it verbatim:

In January 2007, a SWAT team in Lima, Ohio, shot and killed Tarika Wilson, a 26-year-old mother, during a drug raid at the home of her boyfriend, Anthony Terry. When the unarmed Wilson was shot, she was kneeling on the ground, complying with police orders. She was holding her 1-year-old son, Sincere, who was also shot, losing his left hand. A subsequent investigation revealed that Officer Joseph Chavalia heard another officer shooting Terry’s two dogs, mistook the noise for hostile gunfire, panicked, and fired blindly into the room where Wilson was kneeling. Chavalia was charged with involuntary manslaughter, but acquitted.

As reckless and violent as the raid was, the police did at least find a substantial supply of illegal drugs inside the house, and Anthony Terry later pleaded guilty to felony drug distribution. A subsequent investigation by the Lima News showed that despite the inherent danger and small margin for error, SWAT raids conducted by the Lima Police Department frequently turned up no drugs or weapons at all. The paper found that in one-third of the 198 raids the SWAT team conducted from 2001 to 2008, no contraband was found.

Similar reviews in other cities have produced similar results: A surprisingly high percentage of raids produce neither drugs nor weapons. And the weapons that are found tend to be small, concealable handguns, with few raids resulting in felony convictions.

A Denver Post investigation found that in 80 percent of no-knock raids conducted in Denver in 1999, police assertions that there would be weapons in the targeted home turned out to be wrong. A separate investigation by the Rocky Mountain News found that of the 146 no-knock warrants served in Denver in 1999, just 49 resulted in criminal charges, and only two resulted in prison time. Media investigations produced similar results after high-profile mistaken raids in New York City in 2003, in Atlanta in 2007, and in Orlando and Palm Beach, Florida, in 1998. When the results of the Denver investigation were revealed, former prosecutor Craig Silverman said, “When you have that violent intrusion on people’s homes with so little results, you have to ask why.”

Lima police apparently aren’t as concerned. When told of the Lima News investigation, police spokesman Kevin Martin said, “That means 68 percent of the time, we’re getting guns or drugs off the street. We’re not looking at it as a win-loss record like a football team does.”

This was originally a short piece from the “Citings” section of reason. But in Overkill, I summarize several other studies that come to the same conclusion.  Though they’re justified on the premise that they’re only used against the biggest, most violent, best-armed drug pushers, most of these raids turn up very little.

It’s hard to tease everything out on this one, because I’m not sure about the sources.  The only newspaper account I can find doesn’t mention the SWAT team.

But it appears that Ohio’s Department of Agriculture (which has a history of enforcing regulatory law with aggressive tactics) raided a Christian food co-op, complete with a SWAT team that held adults, children, and grandparents at gunpoint for a matter of hours.  The family appears to at worst be guilty of regulatory violations, including not obtaining a retail license to sell food (though it’s not even clear they’re guilty of that, given that they’re a co-op).

This appears to be the most detailed account, but it’s from an interested party.  Here’s the co-op’s website.  Other accounts here, here, and here.

Boston police Capt. Christine M. Michalosky has had some health problems of late, problems she had hoped to keep private. Apparently, she shouldn’t have bought lots of Christmas gifts at a local T.J. Maxx for the children who live in the public housing complex in her precinct. This apparently aberrant behavior made her colleagues at the police department worried about her mental health. So they sent a SWAT team to barricade her home.

Because there’s no better pick-me-up than having a SWAT team and flashing police lights outside your home, along with an accompanying army of media speculating about your mental condition all over the TV and newspapers.

We’re seeing this more and more. Mentally unstable people who present an immediate threat to others is one thing. But sending the SWAT teams after someone who’s depressed, or even suicidal, is absurd. Even if Michalosky was contemplating suicide (and it appears she wasn’t), why is that any of the police department’s business? And who thought pointing a bunch of guns at her head would be an appropriate course of treatment?

UPDATE: Link fixed.

Like Mark Draughn, I’ve been somewhat skeptical of Barry Cooper, the former drug cop turned pitchman for how-to-beat-the-cops videos. He comes off as more of a huckster than a principled whistle-blower, which I think does the good ideas he stands for (police reform) more harm than good.

But damn. I have to hand it to him. This might be one of the ballsiest moves I’ve ever seen.

KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.

The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster’s attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster’s secret mobile office nearby.

To clarify just a bit, according to Cooper, there was nothing illegal going on the bait house, just two evergreen trees and some grow lamps. There was no probable cause. So a couple of questions come up. First, how did the cops get turned on to the house in the first place? Cooper suspects they were using thermal imaging equipment to detect the grow lamps, a practice the Supreme Court has said is illegal. The second question is, what probable cause did the police put on the affidavit to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant? If there was nothing illegal going on in the house, it’s difficult to conceive of a scenario where either the police or one of their informants didn’t lie to get a warrant.

Cooper chose to bait the Odessa police department because he believes police there instructed an informant to plant marijuana on a woman named Yolanda Madden. She’s currently serving an eight-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute. According to Cooper, the informant actually admitted in federal court that he planted the marijuana. Madden was convicted anyway.

The story’s worth watching, not only to see if the cops themselves are held accountable for this, but whether the local district attorney tries to come up with a crime with which to charge Cooper and his assistants.  I can’t imagine such a charge would get very far, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone try.

Here’s some local media coverage:

British couple raided after police mistake smelly flower for marijuana.

The Las Vegas Metro police department has a new mobile gang of cops devoted to a saturation strategy in targeted inner city neighborhoods:

[Quote censored for the time being due to an ongoing campaign of legal extortion being conducted against bloggers by Righthaven LLC on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.]

Here are three things that you ought to know about how Metro decides who doesn’t belong, and how they get the bad guys off the street.

First, cops in the saturation team gangs pick and choose whether or not to come down on any given person who is breaking the law. They openly state that they make these decisions based on who they want to hassle and bust and pull off the street, and they openly state that they decide that based on where you’re from, how much money you make, and other proxies for racial and socio-economic status.

[Quote censored for the time being due to an ongoing campaign of legal extortion being conducted against bloggers by Righthaven LLC on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.]

Second, as you may have already guessed, if one of Metro’s sat gangs decides that you’re the sort of person they want to lock in a cage, rather than the sort of person they’ll shake hands with and let go, they will use any chickenshit charge they can make up in order to justify getting in your face, demanding that you explain yourself and justify your existence to them, and, if they aren’t satisfied, grabbing you off the street and throwing you in jail.

[Quote censored for the time being due to an ongoing campaign of legal extortion being conducted against bloggers by Righthaven LLC on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.]

They use whatever laws are at their disposal because, of course, they don’t actually give a damn about the law. This is outcome-driven policing, and the law is just an excuse to bust the people that they’ve already decided don’t belong. That’s because the purpose of these teams is not to stop or respond to crimes; it’s to control people, and in particular to force the the socio-economic cleansing of undesirable people from the cop-occupied neighborhoods. For example:

[Quote censored for the time being due to an ongoing campaign of legal extortion being conducted against bloggers by Righthaven LLC on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.]

This kind of arbitrary rousting of someone, based on absolutely nothing other than a paper-thin pretext and the cop’s conviction that somebody’s probably up to trouble, is dignified by Las Vegas Metro cops and their sycophants at the Review-Journal as old-school policing with professionalism and an innovative, proactive approach to policing.

Third, here is how members of the saturation gangs talk about themselves to a sympathetic press:

[Quote censored for the time being due to an ongoing campaign of legal extortion being conducted against bloggers by Righthaven LLC on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.]

And:

Twenty people were booked this night during the shift. Nine were for felony crimes, including one for a stolen moped.

Honestly, best job in the world, Boehm says. I’m living the dream.

And:

We’re like wolves, officer Justin Gauker says. We travel in a pack.

Well. I feel safer already.

I should say that when I refer to cops as a street gang or Gangsters in Blue or what have you, I’m not indulging in metaphor. I don’t mean that cops act kinda like gangsters (as if this were just a matter of personal vices or institutional failures); I mean that they are gangsters — that is the policing system operating according successfully to its normal function — that they are the organized hired muscle of the State, and that the outfit operates just like any other street gang in terms of their commitments, their attitudes, their practices, and their idea of professional ethics.

—GT 2008-11-26: Professional courtesy, part 2: thugs on patrol

And let’s just say that Metro’s new roving wolfpacks have not done very much to make me reconsider that analysis.

See also:

• GT 2008-06-05: Neighborhood Safety Ghettoes in D.C.
• GT 2008-09-25: How cops see themselves
• GT 2008-08-22: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter (#5)

David Simpson of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports about the gradual trend toward the use of Tasers by metro Atlanta police could dramatically surge soon with a plan to give the controversial stun guns to more than 1,000 DeKalb County police officers.

He reports that three suburban city police departments — Sandy Springs, Marietta and Alpharetta — have issued Tasers to patrol officers in the last year or so, but the area’s largest departments have either not used the devices or limited them to special squads.

Now DeKalb County Police Chief Terrell Bolton has a plan to issue Tasers to every cop on the street. Bolton will ask county commissioners next Tuesday to use $1 million from a fund of confiscated drug assets to give Tasers to 1,011 patrol officers, detectives and sergeants.

With speedy approval and after officer training, DeKalb’s Tasers could be in wide use in six or seven months, Bolton said.

Previously, commissioners have not funded Bolton’s requests for Tasers and other equipment, but their objections focused on how to pay for them. Bolton had resisted using money confiscated from drug dealers because that revenue source won’t necessarily pay for the cartridges that serve as ammunition for Tasers or for replacement weapons.

But with the county budget tightening and recent drug seizures adding to the confiscation fund, Bolton said he changed his mind after he attended a ceremony recently naming a county park for slain DeKalb officers Eric Barker and Ricky Bryant Jr. Each officer left behind four children.

“I don’t want any more children on my watch without a father,” he said.

Bolton was not suggesting that a Taser could have prevented Barker and Bryant’s shooting deaths last January. But he said he fears an officer trying to avoid using a gun could be killed by a knife-wielding suspect who might have been stopped by a Taser.

Bolton and a special county grand jury also have argued Tasers can reduce police shootings — a potent issue in DeKalb, where officers shot to death 12 suspects in 2006.

One of the fatal 2006 cases and an additional fatal shooting in 2007 fit a scenario often described as ideal for using a Taser to save lives: a knife-wielding suspect confronting multiple officers.

Taser critics such as Georgia NAACP president Edward DuBose cite other cases in which suspects who were stunned with a Taser have died — including two Gwinnett County jail inmates and another man who scuffled with Gwinnett deputies.

DuBose said Wednesday his organization “completely” opposes Tasers. READ More HERE

Cross posted on the blogs African American Political Pundit and Electrocuted While Black

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