Gangsters in Blue

• You know, I’m kind of digging Vietnam’s pillars of foreign policy.
• Raytheon invents a device that makes torturing prisoners easy as playing a video game.
• Weird as this sounds, the theory behind it actually makes a lot of sense.
• A restaurant critic tries Nutraloaf.
• Sizing up the number one quadrillion.
• After police shoot and kill unarmed man, Las Vegas plans to make drug raids safer by . . . using more SWAT teams.
• This is one of the oddest lawsuits I’ve seen in a while. If the accusations in the complaint are true, I hope the guy ends up owning the hospital. And I don’t mean in the Interwebs sense of the word. I mean I hope the hospital has a big sign out front with his name on it.

• The Maryland dog park shooter has been charged with two misdemeanors.
• “What We Own.”
• RIAA, NAB may ask the government to mandate FM receivers in portable electronics.
• Obama sticking with his DEA nominee Michele Leonhardt, even though she’s a proponent of federal raids on medical marijuana clinics.
• Good interview with Innocence Project co-founder Peter Neufeld.
• Hilarious Facebook controversy over photo illusion featuring Kylie Minogue, a microphone, and a giant stuffed bear.
• Smells Like a Rockin’ Robin.
• Feds say no charges against school officials in Pennsylvania laptop spying case.
• Kathryn Johnston’s family will get $4.9 million from the city of Atlanta.

• Gene Healy on Britain’s encouraging new government.
• Another isolated incident. SWAT team raids home (with 5-year-old inside), finds no drugs. Charges occupants with “Disorderly House” (?).
• A Calvin & Hobbes search engine.
• Retired NYPD cops investigated for faking mental illness to collect more benefits.
• Jupiter swallows a “super-Earth.”
• Johnny Carson is coming to the Interwebs.
• Carlos Miller organizes a photo-protest at the Miami-Date Metrorail.

Yet another cop-kills-the-family-dog story today, this one from Willits, California:

Mendocino Major Crimes Task Force agents, aided by a uniformed Willits police officer, serving a search warrant at 64 Franklin Avenue on July 27, shot and killed a family pet, an 8-year-old half-pit bull mix named Tonka.

When agents searched the home, they found nothing directly linking the residents to the arrest of Craig Anthony Gelber, the target of the search, according to MMCTF Commander Bob Nishiyama.

Apparently the raid came after police spotted their suspect at or near the residence with marijuana starts.

“I know the officer felt terrible,” says [police chief] Nishiyama about the shooting. “You may have the nicest dog in the world, but we don’t know it. Officers are authorized to defend themselves. We offered to take the dog and take care of it, but the family preferred to handle the arrangements themselves.”

According to resident Anna White, Tonka’s owner, the police shot her pet while it was in a fenced area on her front porch. “We found the shell casing outside by the fence area. Tonka then ran into our house, got onto my bed and died.”

White described her bedroom following the search, claiming Tonka’s body had been dumped from the bed onto the floor and items from her room dropped onto the body and into the dog’s blood. “They destroyed our house and found nothing,” says White. “Tonka lived long enough to die on my bed, which we shared each night.”

Tonka was one of three dogs at the home. White’s father was the only family member at home during the first part of the search. Her father got to the door after the shot had been fired, says White. The three dogs then ran into the home. Her father did not know at first Tonka had been shot since he was handcuffed and lying on the floor during the search.

Just collateral drug war damage. Nothing to see here.

The Arizona Republic:

In a stretch of barren desert alongside Interstate 8 near Gila Bend that has become a corridor for human and drug smuggling, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and about 100 men staged a crime-suppression operation Thursday.

Arpaio brought with him a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun that can shoot accurately up to a mile as a display of the kind of force he would use if anyone hurts a deputy.

“I am trying to send a message to Mexico,” he said. “We will not take anyone hurting our deputies. We will fight back.”

No word if Arpaio also brought his armored personnel carrier, which has been known to careen out of control and smash into lowly citizen automobiles.

Arpaio isn’t the only sheriff sporting a .50-caliber machine gun. As i wrote in 2008, Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff Leon Lott has one too, mounted to Lott’s own APC. He calls it “The Peacemaker.” I consulted an expert on the appropriateness of the weapon:

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.”

I didn’t specifically ask him at the time, but I’m guessing Barnett would not be inclined to make an exception for “shooting at Mexicans.”

(Hat tip: Say Uncle)

I’ve been fairly hard on Columbia, Missouri Police Chief Ken Burton since video emerged of his department’s SWAT raid on a marijuana offender. But to be fair, though the reforms he proposed missed the most important point—the misapplication of force in using SWAT raids on people suspected of nonviolent crimes—he has at least shown more concern than other police officials in similar situations. And I suspect even the reforms he did propose weren’t popular within his department.

The video below, courtesy of the Marijuana Policy Project blog, shows Burton may be coming around on the foolishness of marijuana prohibition in general.

Money quote:

“I applaud your efforts,” he told a reporter who asked about campaigns to change marijuana laws. “If we could get out of the business [of going after marijuana offenders], I think there would be a lot of police officers that would be happy to do that.”

Last week, Burton announced that all of his officers involved in the now-infamously YouTubed marijuana raid have been cleared of any wrongdoing. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, that’s to be expected. The raid was routine, and consistent with the law, not just in Columbia but in much of the country. It’s the law that’s the problem.

The MPP blog also points to an interesting quote by D.C. Metro PD Assistant Chief Peter Newsham that’s not quite as explicit, but seems to acknowledge that the only dangerous elements to marijuana are due to it being illegal.

That’s the subject of my crime column this week.

• Time lapse video of fruit/vegetable decay.
• Another isolated incident.
• 16 items they only sell at Chinese Walmarts.
• Puppycide. And another one here.
• Inspiring!
• Further adventures in qualified immunity.
• Whoops!

(Via Tennessee Guerrilla Women 2010-05-17 and @InjusticeNews.)

By now you’ve probably seen the video of the SWAT stormtrooper raid in Columbia, Missouri, during which a gang of heavily-armed cops violently stormed a house in order to serve a search warrant on a suspected possible nonviolent marijuana user. Turned out that his partner and 7 year old child were also there at the time; so were their two dogs, which the cops went ahead to shoot and kill. After murdering pets, they repeatedly lied about their actions to neighbors and the press, and the story has only come out because the video has been released on the Internet. In any case, if you haven’t read it, Radley Balko’s commentary on the story is mostly right on.

In Tulsa County, Oklahoma, a government police SWAT team on another hyperviolent warrant-serving drug-search shot an nearly deaf biker named Russell Doza at least seven times in the back while he awoke from sleeping in a bed in the clubhouse. They were supposedly storming the clubhouse early in the morning in order to serve a warrant for the victimless crime of selling marijuana and methamphetamines. They didn’t actually find any drugs in the clubhouse, and they didn’t find any of the suspects named in the warrant, but they did find Russell Doza, so three cops — Deputy Lance Ramsey, Corporal Tom Helm, and Sergeant Shane Rhames — shot him in the back, in one arm, and at least twice, point blank, in the back of his head. The cops claim he reached for a gun and just somehow got shot in the back of the head at close range. Even if he did reach for a gun, the cops created the violent confrontation in the first place by storming a private club for no just reason at all, in a failed attempt to discover evidence of a crime that never had any victims to begin with. I have no particular reason to believe that the Deppities are telling the truth, but even if they are, they murdered Russell Doza.

Aiyana Jones

In Detroit, a government police SWAT team on another hyperviolent warrant-serving raid killed a 7 year old girl named Aiyana Jones by shooting her in the neck while she slept on the sofa, in her family’s living room, in their hosue on Lillibridge St. on the east side of Detroit. The SWAT team tstormed the house in the middle of the night in order to serve a warrant for a murder suspect. Who, in press releases after the storming of the house and the killing of Aiyana Jones, was indeed found in the location, within the scope of our search warrant. Except the problem is that the house is a duplex and they got a warrant for the home of a completely innocent family, without bothering to figure out where the fugitive was, and even though they had every reason to be aware that there were children living in the house that they planned to mount a high-risk hyperviolent raid on. They neglected to mention that the house they killed Aiyana Jones in was not the house where they arrested their Suspect Individual; when they got there, the door wasn’t even locked. But the cops were on film, being followed around by a camera crew for A&E’s murder-cop reality action show, The First 48. So what better opportunity to show their stuff? They swarmed the front porch, hurled a flash-bang grenade through the plate-glass window into the living room, and then Officer Joe Weekley, a frequent guest star on several A&E cop shows, shot off his gun and put a bullet into Aiyana Jones’s neck.^[1] According to the initial excuses from the police, there was a tussle — no, strike that, there was some sort of contact [sic] between Officer Joe Weekley, and Aiyana’s grandmother, Mertilla Jones. According to the current police story, while the heavily-armed, professional police Officer Joe Weekley was courageously contacting a 46 year old woman who was confused and upset by a bunch of heavily armed strangers blowing up a grenade in her living room in the middle of the night right next to her sleeping granddaughter and storming into her house, somehow, in a Terrible Tragedy, the gun just discharged, somehow or another, in the midst of all the contact. After shooting her granddaughter to death, police wouldn’t say whether or not Mertilla Jones would be charged with assaulting a police officer.

According to the family, the cops are lying. Geoffrey Fieger, a well-known civil rights lawyer in Detroit, has taken on the family’s case, and says that he has a tape which clearly shows the cops shooting blindly into the house from out on the porch, moments after the grenade blew up. I don’t know which is telling the truth, although I will say that the cops have obfuscated, revised, evaded and lied from the start in this case, in a consistent attempt to deny responsibility and create a false appearance of urgency. I have no particular reason to believe that they are telling the truth about this, either, whereas I do have some reason to believe that Fieger probably has the video he says that he has. All that said, it really doesn’t matter what the video shows, or doesn’t. If the cops burned a little girl to hell with an incendiary grenade and then shot her in the neck, accidentally, while storming into a house they had no reason and no right to be in, in order to serve a warrant for a man who wasn’t there, because they couldn’t be bothered to exercise the caution necessary to pick the right unit of the duplex, or to work out some way of catching a suspect whose location they already knew other than a hyperviolent middle-of-the-night paramilitary raid, then they still fucking murdered that little girl. They introduced violence into the situation; they chose a hyperviolent confrontational method which they knew would be endangering the lives of a house full of completely innocent people; if you or I stormed two different apartments on the theory that a dangerous man might be in one of them, hurled explosives, ran around with guns drawn, and we accidentally killed a child in the process, then you or I would be locked up immediately, indicted shortly thereafter, and thrown in prison for years. Because the unhinged maniac who shot a little girl happens to have a badge and a uniform, the shooter has been given a paid vacation from their job. Boss Cop Detroit Police Assistant Chief Ralph Godbee gave a press conference in which he solemnly announced how Very Sorry he was that police just had to gun down a 7-year-old girl in her own home, because of the risk to their sacred hides when Entering a Potentially Dangerous Situation. He wants you to know that this is a tragedy of unspeakable magnitude, and that This is every parent’s worst nightmare. It’s also every police officer’s nightmare. I can’t tell you what I think of that, because there aren’t any words that are dirty enough.

In a follow-up post on the Columbia, Missouri raid, Radley Balko posted a letter from a government soldier who took umbrade at his watch-word of police militarization, because the rules of engagement SWAT teams operate under are, in some ways, even looser than those used by counterinsurgency soldiers trying to kill enemy guerrillas in Afghanistan. Balko seriously wonders whether SWAT teams are now more militarized than the military. I’m not convinced, unless the in some ways is doing so much work as to make the statement meaningless. ^[2] But the mere fact that the comparison might seem plausible is telling. And outrageous. But not at all surprising. How could it be, when every week brings Yet Another Isolated Incident, and when Terrible Tragedy after Terrible Tragedy shows SWAT teams once again storming houses and clubs for no reason other than to protect the investigation of the most utterly trivial and nonviolent offenses, when they consistently use maximal force and freely open fire, even when they know that they may well be in completely the wrong house, even when they have every reason to know that they’re putting children’s lives in danger, and when they brutalize, beat and murder innocent people, over and over again, all with more or less explicit legal guarantees of complete impunity, and the lockstep backing of their departments and their colleagues throughout the government’s criminal system?

Do you feel safer now?

1. ^[1] When he’s not shooting 7 year old girls and showing off SWAT tactics on live victims for television audiences, Officer Joe Weekley also drives a tank (Armored Personnel Carrier, sorry) for the Detroit SWAT team. ↩
2. ^[2] The process of storming a house in a war zone may offer more opportunities to surrender before escalating the situation to violence; but SWAT teams aren’t firing missiles into apartment complexes from robot aircraft… yet. ↩

Lots of you have sent me this story.

I think it’s too early to draw any conclusions. It appears the police were looking for a homicide suspect. If they had intelligence that he posed a direct and immediate threat to others, the tactics may have been justified. On the other hand, there may have been other, less confrontational ways to apprehend him. It appears the little girl was shot by accident, and the suspect was not the cause of the gunfire. That’s a reminder of just how volatile and dangerous these raids are. Which is another argument in favor of reserving them for only those times when you have a suspect who presents a violent, imminent threat.

It’s also possible that these were perfectly appropriate tactics for the situation at hand but the SWAT team did a poor job of implementing them. That wouldn’t be something on which I’d be qualified to have an opinion.

We’ll see in coming days whether SWAT and flashbangs were an appropriate way to apprehend this particular suspect.

Sympathies to the family of Aiyana Jones. Heartbreaking.

MORE: Via “Ken” in the comments, according to this article the police were raiding both portions of a duplex. The little girl’s family says the suspect was found in the other apartment. The police are only saying that the warrant covered the entire building. According to the article, neighbors say they told police there were children in the home, and there were toys in the yard.

If that all sounds at least a little familiar, it should. Bit of a chill just went down my spine.