Gangsters in Blue

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

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If you’ll remember, shortly after the Kathryn Johnston raid, Assistant Atlanta Police Chief Alan Dreher sprang into action to defend the actions of the police officers. Less than 24 hours after the raid, Dreher assured us that there was nothing to see, here. The police had made a controlled buy at Johnston’s home. They arrived at her house in a marked car, and came in in marked uniforms. Johnston shot at the officers, Dreher said. He later added that Johnston “should have recognized” the men breaking into her home as police officers. The cops returned fire only in self-defense, he said. Dreher even suggested that it was a police officer, not an informant, who bought the drugs from Johnston (as it turns out, no one did, the controlled buy was a lie).

Police defenders and critics of mine were quick to jump on Dreher’s statements to show that I and others were “jumping the gun” in questioning the raid. After all, if the police said they did a buy, they did a buy. If the police say they announced, then they announced. If the police infer that this 92-year-old woman was a dope dealing criminal who got what she deserved, well, then she sure as hell got what she deserved.

Well, we all now know that just about everything Dreher said was wrong. Dreher was presiding over a corrupt narcotics unit that routinely lied on search warrant affidavits, harassed and intimidated informants, covered up mistakes, and was subject to damaging arrest and raid quotas that encouraged shortcuts and circumventing the checks in place to ensure the protection of civil rights. It was Dreher who spoke too soon, propagating the lie told to him by his officers that Johnston was some sort of dope-slinging, gun-toting granny.

Dreher was acting as spokesman just after the raid because Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington was out of town. When Pennington returned, he quickly dispensed with Dreher’s clannish, old-school, blue-wall-of-silence approach. Pennington was more forthcoming, and quickly announced he’d be conducting a thorough internal investigation. Within days, Pennington turned the investigation over to federal authorities. We now know that Johnston was innocent, that there was no drug buy, and that Johnston didn’t even get off a shot. The cops were wounded by fragments from their own bullets. When they found out they had made a mistake, the narcotics team handcuffed Johnston and left her to bleed to death in her own home while they planted marijuana in her basement.

I bring all of this up because in a police environment driven by all the professional standards and accountability Justice Scalia assured us in Hudson v. Michigan dominate police departments across the country, you’d think that Dreher would have been fired. At minimum, as APD’s chief of operations, Dreher presided over an astonishingly rogue and unaccountable narcotics department that put who knows how many innocent people in jail, and subjected who knows how many people to mistaken and botched drug raids. He was either oblivious to all of the corruption, or he was complicit in it. Neither speaks well of him as a police manager or a leader. Dreher then helped disseminate an ass-covering version of the Kathryn Johnston raid that proved to be wrong in just about every way possible. Dreher’s early press statements were not only rash and wrong-headed defenses of his officers, in the process he also sullied the name of the innocent woman his officers had just killed.

But as you might have guessed by now, Dreher didn’t lose his job. It’s even worse than that. Dreher is now one of four finalists for the police chief position in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. That’s right. He’s up for a promotion. And this isn’t even the first time. He was also a finalist for police chief in Charlotte, North Carolina.

All hail the new professionalism.

UPDATE: Dreher didn’t get the job. That’s good news.

Arthur Tesler was the only officer to take part in the Kathryn Johnston raid who didn’t take a plea bargain. Despite admitting that he lied, helped cover up Johnston’s murder, and stood watch outside while other officers handcuffed the bleeding 92-year-woman—allowing her to die while they planted marijuana in her basement—he was convicted today only on the charge of lying to investigators. He’ll face a maximum of five years in prison.

The one good thing to come out of the case is we got to see just how vast, deep, and pernicious the culture of corruption and disregard for civil rights ran in Atlanta’s police department. Tesler testified that narcotics officers were required to serve nine warrants and make two arrest per month, or they’d risk losing their jobs. This led to routine lying on warrants and bullying and intimidation of informants. What we don’t know is how many people were wrongly raided, arrested, and jailed because of all of this.

Arthur Tesler is the only officer involved in the Atlanta drug raid that killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston to fight the charges against him. The testimony to so far come out of his trial really only confirms what we knew about the narcotics division at Atlanta PD from the federal investigation into Johnston’s death, but it’s still pretty striking stuff:

A former Atlanta police officer testified Thursday that narcotics officers routinely lied under oath when seeking search warrants, a practice that led to police killing a 92-year-old woman.

Former Detective Gregg Junnier told a Fulton County jury that detectives would tell judges that they had verified their informants had bought cocaine from dealers by searching them for drugs before the buy took place.

"I have never seen anyone searched before they go into the house, I’ve never seen that done, even though officers always swear to it," Junnier said. "It’s done that way in 90 percent of the warrants that are written."

But it wasn’t just lies to get the warrant to search Kathryn Johnston’s home that made Junnier uneasy, he said. He had an inkling something was wrong when he and Officer Jason R. Smith were leading the narcotics team to the front door. He said the northwest Atlanta house differed from the informant’s description.

"I said, ‘Man, this doesn’t look right,’ and he said, ‘I know,’ " Junnier testified. " ‘I said what do you want to do.’ He said, ‘Hit it.’"

A minute later, Johnston was lying on her floor, dying.

[...]

He said the chance to seize a kilo (2.2 pounds) of cocaine also drove the officers, who normally made arrests for much smaller amounts.

In the raid, police fired 39 shots. Junnier was shot in the face, chest and leg. Two other officers were also wounded. Investigators determined Johnston had fired one round from a revolver; the officers were shot in their own crossfire.

Junnier described entering Johnston’s house: "She was still alive. She was gasping for air. I heard … the order to cuff her."

Later that day, he said, the cover-up began.

It would be pretty näive to think these kinds of shortcuts only happen in Atlanta.