Gangsters in Blue

Oddly enough, on yesterday, the same day this happened, I got several email responses to my Fox column from people outraged at my suggestion that the drug war might have a corrupting influence on law enforcement.

Ten Cook County sheriff’s correctional officers, four Harvey police officers and a Chicago police officer are among 17 people who were charged today in a sweeping federal drug case that accuses the law-enforcement officers of working security in sting cocaine and heroin transactions, the U.S. attorney’s office has announced.

Officers allegedly were paid up to $4,000 each as they served as lookouts and prepared to step in if law enforcement cracked down on the operations, authorities said. The undercover investigation run by the FBI allegedly saw officers protecting poker games and transporting cash.

Fourteen of the defendants were either arrested or surrendered today and are expected to make initial appearances in U.S. District Court this afternoon.

Two of the officers are accused of selling powder cocaine, and all are charged with conspiracy to possess and sell drugs.

Apparently in the asset forfeiture world, video game consoles are the new “large amount of unexplained cash.”

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.

The city of New Orleans has offered an $85,000 settlement with three men wrongly arrested and jailed after a 2002 drug raid.  When the three police detectives who conducted the raid were later implicated in various other crimes, investigators discovered that the detectives had also planted the drugs they say they found in the raid.

Not terribly surprising:

At least seven Oakland Police Department officers and possibly a dozen more may have lied to judges over the past four years in order to win search warrants later used to bust down the doors of suspected small-time drug dealers.

Saying the latest scandal in the department is more than a result of a lack of training, at least one official who has reviewed illegal search warrants said officers knowingly lied to judges to secure warrants.

“There is no good faith here, these are willful,” said assistant public defender Ray Keller. “The thing that is really disturbing is that it is a reckless disregard for the truth; they are lying to judges.”

The department announced earlier this month that it had found a problem with how some of its officers were seeking search warrants for the right to raid the homes of suspected small-time drug dealers, mostly in East Oakland.

Department officials admitted that officers “misstated” on sworn affidavits submitted to judges that substances bought on the street by informants or undercover officers had been tested to verify the substance was illegal drugs.

At the time, the department said officers were acting in good faith but simply had a miscommunication with the crime lab or a lack of training on how to properly seek a search warrant.

Basically, the department said, officers sent drugs to the crime lab, and when they did not hear anything from technicians, assumed the substances had tested positive for drugs.

If I’m not mistaken, in most places it’s illegal to sell a substance you claim is an illicit drug, too. Which would make this a fairly minor offense in and of itself. Still, it makes you wonder what other shortcuts Oakland cops may have taking in obtaining warrants for drug raids.

A few items on the Ryan Frederick case:

• Two weeks ago, I emailed Virginian-Pilot columnist Kerry Dougherty and public editor Joyce Hoffman asking for a correction for the errors and Dougherty’s last column about the Ryan Frederick case (explained in this post). So far, no correction. And it wasn’t a subtle error. Doughtery misstated some substantial facts about the informant scandal related to the case.

• A few people, like commenter FreedomFan, expressed concern about this comment from Frederick’s attorney James Broccoletti about the informants who broke into Frederick’s home:

In reality, the informer did not ‘observe’ marijuana plants, he stole them.

Is Broccoletti admitting Frederick was growing marijuana, here? I called Broccoletti’s office and spoke with another attorney working on the case. He said that comment was taken from the defense brief asking the judge to quash the warrant. The line was in response to the prosecution’s proffer, in the context of assuming that the plants were marijuana. He said the defense at this point is absolutely not conceding that whatever plants Turnbull and Steven may have taken from Frederick’s garage were marijuana. He wouldn’t comment on the Japanese maple theory.

My own feeling at this point is that there’s a good chance Frederick was growing a small amount of marijuana for personal use. Even assuming the worst, though, that doesn’t excuse the police breaking the law to obtain probable cause for a search warrant. The (lack of) investigation and paramilitary tactics were still wholly inappropriate, and of course Frederick shouldn’t punished for defending his home.

• A few people have also asked why we should believe Turnbull about the police misconduct, but not believe the portion of his statements to a Virginian-Pilot reporter where he says Frederick explicitly threatened the police. It’s a fair point–and the prosecution wants you to believe the latter, but not the former.

I guess the reason I’m inclined to believe one but not the other is because the police misconduct and intimidation of Turnbull fit the facts we already know about the case. Turnbull’s story about he and Steven working as informants, breaking into Frederick’s garage, and their ensuing arrests is backed by court records and the search warrant and affidavits. His story about Frederick calling his cell phone and threatening the cops, on the other hand, doesn’t fit what I’ve been told about Frederick by his friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers.

It also doesn’t make much sense. The prosecution’s theory is that after the burglary, Frederick got Turnbull’s number off his caller ID (Turnbull and Steven stupidly called Frederick before breaking in to his home to see if he was around). He then called Turnbull, said he knew the police were coming, and said he had “a plan for them, too.” Prosecutors say Frederick then got rid of the remaining marijuana plants, and waited for the police to come, so he could kill one of them.

Nothing about that passes the smell test. I don’t doubt that Frederick called Turnbull. He probably even threatened Turnbull, thinking it was Steven of an acquaintance of Steven’s (remember, Frederick and Steven knew one another–Steven once dated the sister of Frederick’s fiance). If Frederick planned to kill the cops, why would he go to the trouble of disposing of his marijuana plants? Why would he dispose of the plants, but leave the incriminating magazines, grow equipment, and keep around some marijuana for personal use? Why would he knowingly take on a team of raiding cops with a cheap handgun? Why would he give up seconds after killing just one of them? Why would he wait until his door had been busted in to start shooting?

As I wrote in my last reason piece on this case, it’s time for a federal investigation. We aren’t going to know what actually happened in this case until Turnbull and Steven are given immunity, and can speak freely without fear of Chesapeake authorities coming down on them for what they say.