Gangsters in Blue

Reason contributor Trey Garrison looks at the stimulus wish lists of cities in Texas, and finds lots of toys for cops:

• Frisco wants $125,000 for an armored vehicle and $200,000 for a mobile command vehicle. You know, for all that gang tank warfare going on up in Frisco.

• McKinney wants $5 million for SWAT toys and stuff.

• North Richland Hills wants $51,000 for volunteer patrol volunteers. Let’s throw in $10 for a dictionary so they can look up the word “volunteer.”

• Irving wants $5 million for biometric scanners, digital cameras, RFID scanners — nothing Big Brother there.

• Grand Prairie wants $1.25 million for nicer landscaping around the public safety building.

• And finally, Arlington is really gearing up for urban warfare. Arlington wants $1.6 million for SWAT toys like military grade carbines, $625,000 for unmanned aerial surveillance drones, and $130,000 for “covert ops”…more equipment for those deadly but camera-friendly no-knock raids…

It isn’t just in Texas. For example, I’m thinking the last thing Frank “Worst Mayor in America” Melton of Jackson, Mississippi needs is a Bearcat armored tactical vehicle.

Other examples:

• Sparks, Nevada wants $600,000 to purchase a “live fire” house its SWAT team can shoot up, and another $420,000 for a SWAT armored vehicle.

• Pleasanton, California wants $250,000 to buy a vehicle for its SWAT team.

• Gary, Indiana wants $750,000 for a host of “modernization” upgrades to its police department, including “sub-automatic machine guns” and an “armored vehicl” [sic].

• Hampton, Virginia wants a whopping $3.5 million for “Air Tactical Unit Support and Equipment,” which I’m pretty sure means they want a sweet helicopter for the SWAT team.

• Ottawa, Illinois (population: 18,307) wants $60,000 to purchase, among other things, five “tactical entry rifles.”

• Glendale Heights, Illinois wants $96,000 to purchase red light cameras, and another $67,000 to hire someone to monitor them.

• Toward a more Orwellian America!  The following cities requested stimulus funds to supplement, initiate, or upgrade public surveillance camera systems: Brockton, Massachusetts; Buffalo, New York; Burnsville, Minnesota; Caguas, Puerto Rico; Cerritos, California; Columbia, South Carolina; Compton, California; Homestead, Florida; Hormigueros, Puerto Rico; Indianapolis, Indiana; Inglewood, California; Lewiston, Maine; Lorain, Ohio; Lynn, Massachusetts; Marion, Ohio; Merced, California; New Rochelle, New York; North Richland Hills, Texas; Oakland, California; Orange, New Jersey; Orem, Utah; Orlando, Florida; Pembroke Pines, Florida; Ponce, Puerto Rico; Riverdale, Illinois; Shreveport, Louisiana; Silver City, New Mexico; Sumter, South Carolina; Tallahassee, Florida; Warren, Ohio; and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Winston-Salem, North Carolina requested just under $85 million in security-related stimulation. But top prize goes to Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is asking the rest of the country to stimulte its economy with a whopping $135 million in public safety-related requests.

All in all, America’s mayors asking for a little over $5.5 billion in public safety “stimulus.”

The Reason.tv video Mississippi Drug War Blues: The Case of Cory Maye took top prize in the Best Documentary Short category at the Oxford Film Fest. Congratulations to Paul Feine, Roger Richards, and Dan Hayes for their hard work. And of course, props to Drew Carey for making the video possible. You can watch it below.

Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo, who last summer was subjected to a particularly violent mistaken drug raid in which police shot and killed his two black labs, is helping push a new bill in the Maryland legislature that would require every SWAT team in the state to provide to the public “a monthly public report on its activities, including where and when it was deployed and whether an operation resulted in arrests, evidence seizures or injuries.”

This is a terrific first step, and the Maryland legislature needs to pass it. Part of the problem I’ve encountered reporting on this issue is that police departments tend to to be stingy with this sort of information. Even when it’s available, it’s often collected in ways that aren’t usable. Over the last few years, I’ve tried to file open records request for copies search warrants, evidence return sheets, and any other documentation of SWAT-related drug raids in several major cities. In addition to being quoted prohibitive copying and labor fees, I’ve also learned that search warrants and evidence return sheets are usually kept in separate places, making it arduous to match them up once a case has been resolved. In cases where a raid resulted in no charges, the warrants are actually often thrown out. Of course, those are the very cases we want to know about.

The bill Calvo’s pushing would begin to make data about SWAT teams available, so we can assess how often they’re used, in what situations they’re used, and, when they’re used in drug raids, how often they actually find not only illicit drugs, but the high-power weapons proponents say make these sorts of tactics necessary. In the few places this sort of analysis has been done, the results have been less than convincing.

Calvo’s bill would also show how many often Maryland’s SWAT teams hit the wrong home.

It’ll be interesting to see how the state’s police organizations react. Commenters to the Washington Post article who appear to be police officers seem to be miffed at even this small bit of transparency.

When I first read that Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff Leon Lott was planning to pursue charges against Michael Phelps, I thought the sheriff’s name looked familiar.

Then I remembered, I wrote about him in the Citings section of our December issue.

In March the sheriff and SWAT team of Richland County, South Carolina, posedfor a photo with an impressive new piece of equipment: an M113A1 armored personnel carrier. The vehicle, which moves on tank-like tracks, features a belt-fed, turreted machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds.

The sheriff, Leon Lott, obtained the $300,000 vehicle through the 1033 program, named for a 1997 federal law streamlining the Defense Department’s transfer of surplus military equipment to local police departments…

Charles Earl Barnett, a U.S. Marines veteran and retired police major who has served on several United Nations and NATO military and peacekeeping missions, says a .50-caliber machine gun is “completely inappropriate” for domestic police work. It “causes mass death and destruction,” Barnett says. “It’s indiscriminate. I can’t think of a possible scenario where it would be appropriate.”

Sheriff Lott has named his new acquisition The Peacemaker, explaining in a press release that the name is fitting because “the bible refers to law enforcement in Matthew 5:9 ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.’ ”

Let’s just hope God helps the next kid who lights up at a University of South Carolina frat party.

Police in Howard County, Maryland conducted a nighttime, no-knock raid on the home of Mike Hasenei, whom they apparently suspected of stealing items from two police cars burglarized last month. They found nothing, but they did shoot and kill Hasenei’s Australian cattle dog. The police say the no-knock raid and tactical entry were necessary because Hasenei is a (legal) gun-owner.

Police spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn confirmed the raid on Hasenei’s house, noting that police had a search warrant signed by a judge…

Llewellyn confirmed the dog shooting, but said the dog charged police, forcing them to shoot it…

Llewellyn said police had reason to believe a gun was in the residence, which was why they did not knock…

Llewellyn added that when police have reason to believe there might be firearms in a residence, they take precautions to ensure the safety of the officers and anyone inside the house.

“This often includes the use of the tactical team, which is specially trained to deal with potentially dangerous situations,” she said.

Sounds like they need more training.

Hasenei, 39, of the 6600 block of Deep Run Parkway, Elkridge, said he was sleeping shortly after 9 p.m. Jan. 15 when a police tactical team kicked in the door to his house.

He woke up and walked into his living room to find it swarming with officers, he said. When he asked what was going on, he was ordered to get on the ground, and when he asked again, he said, he was knocked to the ground and told he was under arrest.

He wasn’t arrested.

So the police say they used a no-knock and a tactical team to secure the place quickly because they knew Hasenei was a gun owner. Yet Hasenei was able to get up from bed, walk out from his bedroom, and enter his living room before making his first contact with the tactical team. Which shows that all they really succeeded in doing was to provoke a potentially violent confrontation with a guy who at the moment looks to be innocent of any crime.

It’s a good thing he didn’t grab one of his guns on his way out of the bedroom.

My colleague Jacob Sullum notes that while there have been five DEA raids in California since Obama took office, the administration announced yesterday that it does intend to keep Obama’s promise to call them off, but only after he his drug enforcement team is in place.

That’s somewhat encouraging, I guess.  But it still doesn’t make much sense. He could end the raids today with an executive order.

Ten years.