Gangsters in Blue

Except this time, the intruders were criminals:

When armed intruders burst into her Southeast Portland home and ordered her husband and her roommate to the floor at gunpoint, Emily Morden knew it had to be a terrible mistake.

One of the men yelled: “Where’s Tim?” and barked orders. The intruders began to bind their hands with duct tape. They accused Morden’s 23-year-old roommate of being a drug dealer. The roommate, an old friend, lay on the floor in pajamas and fuzzy duck slippers.

Morden started to protest.

“Tim is not a drug dealer! He works at Fred Meyer!” she said, kneeling before the gunman but refusing to lie down out of fear of what would happen next.

“Are you sure you have the right house?”

Turns out, they didn’t.

The “Tim” they were looking for was the medical marijuana grower who lived next door.

There’s the usual argument here about how this kind of thing puts people in an even more precarious position when trying to determine if the people breaking into their homes are cops or criminals posing as cops.

But reader Brian Courts, who sent me the article, had another observation I hadn’t considered: The people who got raided by these criminals were actually treated better than most of the people wrongly raided by the police.

Consider:

1) No one was shot or killed. And no dead dogs.

2) The intruders actually apologized when they realized they had the wrong house.

3) Now that they’ve been caught, the intruders will actually be punished for terrorizing a home full of innocent people.

I have an article up at Slate today explaining why Obama and Biden’s criminal justice proposals are misguided.

In particular, Obama is proposing to resurrect the COPS and Byrne grant programs, which shows an unfortunate, uncritical throw-federal-money-at-the-problem approach to crime.

Regular readers of this site know that Byrne and COPS have created all sorts of problems, including the further militarization of local police departments, statistics-driven drug policing, multi-jurisdictional task forces that lack accountability, and the disproportionate targeting of minorities, particularly blacks.

Obama has expressed some encourage sentiments on many of these issues. It’s too bad that he’s embracing policies that are going to make them worse.

Over the weekend, Washington Post Metro columnist Marc Fisher wrote a terrific column on the botched drug raid on Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo.  Snippet:

Critics of no-knock raids say they not only result in too many errors, sometimes with tragic results, but undermine efforts at community policing, the building of trust and relationships that is critical to effective crime-fighting, such as Berwyn Heights’ requirement that its officers go to every local youth ballgame, get out of the car and walk around chatting with people.

"Telling the people that these officers followed procedure and did nothing wrong sends a chilling message," Calvo says. "And then we wonder why people who live in high-crime areas don’t trust the police. They treated us like animals. They were not there to protect and serve, they were there to search and destroy."

Calvo intends to seek stronger county oversight of SWAT deployments, and that would certainly help. But as long as we continue to glamorize the police when they take on the trappings of the military, more people will be shocked out of bed in the middle of the night, more dogs will be shot on sight, and we’ll have ever more reason to wonder why the police are treated like enemy occupiers.

Fisher attended a Cato panel on no-knock raids that I spoke at last week.  After the event, i recorded a podcast for Cato, available here.  You can also now watch an archived video of the forum here.

If you’ve been following this story then you know just how frightening this passage is:

A jury verdict that cleared a police officer in the drug-raid shooting death of an unarmed woman will allow other officers to do their job without hesitation, police union officials said.

Because, clearly, unloading a hailstorm of bullets into a closed bedroom door in a house you know ahead of time has a family with children present is not something about which you should have the slightest hesitation whatsoever. And hesitation (in other words taking a moment to think about what you’re doing) is something that cops have been told for years gets them killed; therefore, end of story, no possible competing interests worthy of consideration from a public policy perspective at all, period. Don’t worry about that, officer; it’s just a flesh wound, and you’re just doing your job.

If only we understood the unique, existential dilemma of police officers, doing a difficult, dangerous job day in and day out with so little appreciation! Why can’t the pussified public suck it up and understand that officers are professionals who are trained to do, well, whatever they feel like doing at any particular moment, which is by definition “professional” and “heroic” and goddamnit who are you to question them, anyway? And we can’t have any breaks in the thin blue line, so any officers who might disagree with Lima’s professional law enforcement standards will dutifully shut up and let the press frame the entire profession’s reaction to the verdict as “cheering”.

I’ll say it again: if the only way you can do your job safely is by endangering others, don’t act like you’re doing the rest of us any favors. If you’re going to frame this issue in a way that pits cops against citizens, don’t be surprised when you lose public support.

This one’s second-hand, so take it for what it’s worth.

But it is another data point for my theory that this stuff happens way more frequently than what’s reported in the newspaper.

“The Ballad of Kathryn Johnston,” by Shawn Mullins.

Get the album <a href="here.

As it turns out, they were just plain ol’ chocolate chip cookies.

The initial story about the guy’s arrest was circulated all over the world.

Police officers in Blue Mound didn’t think much of the cookies dropped off at their station Monday night – until they got a whiff of them.

Overpowering the chocolate chips was the pungent smell of marijuana.

“It reeked of it,” said Lt. Thomas Cain, a Blue Mound police spokesman. “It wasn’t hard to tell. Anyone that’s been around marijuana before would have known.”

Makes you wonder what to think the next time this guy writes in a police report that his probable cause to conduct a search was the scent of marijuana coming from a car or apartment, doesn’t it?

Also, why is it that these field tests police use turn up so many false positives? If you’ll remember back a bit, Dallas police had similar problems when the informant they were using was planting ground up pool chalk on targets. Cops doing field tests in those cases claim the tests showed the chalk (also known as sheet rock) to be cocaine. Several times.

Last year in California, a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap came back positive for GHB.

Last Thursday, narcotics cops in Troy, New York shot the locks off a door, tossed a flash grenade through a window, and stormed a house as part of an early-morning drug raid.  They found only a single mother inside, not the drugs or weapons described in the warrant.  The raid seems to have stemmed from a bad tip from a confidential informant.  But Troy authorities don’t seem particularly repentant.  Here’s District Attorney Richard McNally:

"The checks and balances were in place. We checked and double-checked the information in this case. All the checks and double-checks were done. Unfortunately, it didn’t work as planned."

Obviously the checks and balances weren’t in place, or the police wouldn’t have terrorized an innocent woman (fortunately, her five-year-old daughter wasn’t home at the time).

One local TV reporter spoke with a police sergeant related to the case, who said the police have no intention of repairing the damage they did to the woman’s home.

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."

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."

Which apparently means they feel no obligation to clean up the mess they made.