Gangsters in Blue

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.

• This show was brilliant.
• Man arrested for videotaping SWAT team drills in New Jersey.
• Jury nullification activist arrested for videotaping another activist’s altercation with federal officials outside a Pennsylvania courthouse.
• This is a terrible story, but do you think the reporter would have made the medium as prominent a part of the narrative if it had been, say, a classified ad in the newspaper?
• Elena Kagan advised President Clinton to continue the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity.
• True/Slant blogger Steve Weinberg is on the civilian review board in Columbia, Missouri. It will be interesting to see his account of what happens in response to the SWAT video.
• This made me happy.
• Iowa man shoots at police serving drug warrant, says he thought they were criminal intruders. At least in this article, there’s no mention of the police having found illegal drugs.

A reader who asks his name not be used writes about the drug raid video from Columbia, Missouri:

I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan.  My first thought on reading this story is this:  Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.

For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions:  have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they’re after is present at the location, and that it’s too dangerous to try less coercive methods.  The general can be pretty tough to convince, too.  (I’m a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call “cordon and knock”:  they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to surrender.  In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn’t happen until after the sun comes up.

Oh, and all of the bad guys we’re going after are closely tied to killing and maiming people.

What might be amazing to American cops is that the vast majority of our targets surrender when called out.

I don’t have a clear picture of the resources available to most police departments, but even so, I don’t see any reason why they can’t use similar methods.

I’ve heard similar accounts from other members of the military. A couple of years ago after I’d given a speech on this issue, a retired military officer and former instructor at West Point specifically asked me to stop using the term “militarization,” because he thought comparing SWAT teams to the military reflected poorly on the military.

Back in 2007 I wrote a bit more on this:

There’s a telling scene related to all of this in Evan Wright’s terrific book Generation Kill. Wright was embedded with an elite U.S. Marine unit in Iraq. Throughout his time with the unit, Wright documents the extraordinary precautions the unit takes to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties, and the real heartbreak the soldiers feel when they do inadvertently kill a civilian. About 3/4 through the book, Wright explains how the full-time Marines were getting increasingly irritated with a reserve unit traveling with them. The reserve unit was mostly made up people who in their civilians lives were law enforcement, “from LAPD cops to DEA agents to air marshalls,” and were acting like idiot renegades. Wright quotes a gunnery sargeant who traveled with the reserve unit:

“Some of the cops in Delta started doing this cowboy stuff. They put cattle horns on their Humvees. They’d roll into these hamlets, doing shows of force—kicking down doors, doing sweeps—just for the fuck of it. There was this little clique of them. Their ringleader was this beat cop…He’s like five feet tall, talks like Joe Friday and everybody calls him ‘Napoleon.’”

The unit ends up firebombing a village of Iraqis who’d been helping the Marines with intelligence about insurgents and Iraqi troops. Yes, it’s just an anecdote. But it’s a telling one. It suggests that to say some of our domestic police units are getting increasing militaristic probably does a disservice to the military.

Regular commenter “CTD” writes:

Last night I attended the monthly meeting of the Columbia Police Civilian Review Board. (The board itself is in its infancy, just having started up in January. The cops fought it’s formation every step of the way, of course.) The meeting had to be moved to the city council chamber because so many people showed up. Even then, it was standing room only. Not a single citizen who spoke attempted to defend the police. Not one. Several told similar stories about being victimized in raids, or having dogs killed. The local Libertarian Party chapter president spoke and quoted from Overkill, FYI. They quality of the citizen comments was surprisingly good, overall. Nobody made any point you haven’t a million times, but it was heartening to see so many agreeing that these paramilitary tactics are far too dangerous to be used for non-violent suspects. Thanks so much for getting the word out on this, we really appreciate it.

This was really my fondest hope for Overkill—that when one of these raids happens, citizens and policymakers would consult the paper. The idea for the SWAT transparency bill in Maryland came from Overkill. Maybe this episode will spur Missouri legislators to pass something similar.

• Ryan Frederick denied by the Virginia Court of Appeals.
• The hills are alive….
• Mistaken drug raid sends elderly woman into cardiac arrest. In Georgia. Same state where Kathryn Johnston was killed. And Jonathan Ayers. They just don’t learn.
• British police state overreactions: Part one. Part two.
• Mountain biker gets injured before race, transfers her non-transferable entry to another mountain biker. Naturally, the local DA charges both with felonies.

If you have the displeasure of reading POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine,^[1] you’ll find that Editor David Griffith’s The Peter Principle is a pointless, empty article which exists for no particular reason other than filling space. (The central thesis is When an officer is promoted it should be based on merit and leadership; he also bravely comes out against promoting cops solely on the basis of political cronyism. Well, O.K.). I mention it here because it is so ordinary, and what people treat as obvious and banal can be interestingly revealing. In this particular article, the one thing that Griffith does get really excited about, along the way, is a long discussion of the comparative merits of Army generals who ordered a lot of men to kill each other during the American Civil War. After discussing this burning issue, the upshot we are offered is that Even good leaders make terrible mistakes and, more importantly, nothing is more dangerous to a warrior — whether he is a 19th century infantryman or she is a 21st century patrol officer — than a bad leader. We are then told that That’s why it’s critical that only the best warriors get promoted up the ranks in law enforcement. … A promotion should only be given when an officer demonstrates effective leadership and is capable of commanding others in a crisis.

Maybe so. Meanwhile, nothing is more dangerous to ordinary people than heavily-armed twitchy police who think of themselves as warriors, and their patrols of the streets as an occupation of hostile territory.

See also:

• GT 2008-05-12: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter…. (#2): On Warrior Mindset
• GT 2009-05-07: Occupying forces, or: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter… (#8)
• GT 2009-05-28: How cops see themselves (#2). National Police Memorial Week and El Monte, California.
• GT 2008-09-25: How cops see themselves
• GT 2008-09-19: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter… (#6)
• GT 2008-08-22: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter… (#5)
• GT 2010-01-23: Siege mentality

1. ^[1] Trust me, don’t bother—I read it so you don’t have to. ↩

Columbia, Missouri Police Chief Ken Burton is apparently frustrated. At another press conference yesterday, a reporter asked the chief what he has learned from the international attention generated by the YouTube video of his department’s SWAT team conducting a drug raid last February.

His reply: “I hate the Internet.”

I’ll bet he does. For two-and-a-half months, Burton and his department were quiet about the raid. That’s likely because, as I wrote yesterday, the raid was really no different from the tens of thousands of similar raids conducted every year, and that are probably conducted by his own department a couple of times per week. Within days of the video hitting the web, Burton was forced to hold several press conferences, and has now laid out several reforms to the way SWAT raids will be conducted in Columbia in the future. I suppose it’s possible those reforms were brewing all along, and the timing of him announcing them after the video went viral was mere coincidence. It seems at least plausible, though, that the dread “Internet” sparked some actual policy changes, here.

Unfortunately the changes—while small steps in the right direction—still miss the point. Burton says his department will no longer conduct SWAT raids at night. They won’t conduct raids in homes where children are present. Suspects will be under constant surveillance until the raid is carried out. And raids will be conducted within a shorter period of time from when police get the initial tip about a suspected drug dealer. But the Columbia Police Department will still conduct volatile, violent, highly aggressive forced-entry raids on people suspected of consensual, nonviolent drug crimes. That is what’s wrong with the YouTube video. Changing the time of day of the raid doesn’t change the wildly disproportionate use of force.

Burton and his department have also criticized web commentary on the video, citing both death threats aimed at members of the SWAT team and an abundance of what Burton calls “misinformation” about the raid.

He’s right. I saw both. In particular, the description that accompanied the YouTube video (which today topped 1 million views) described the pit bull the police killed as crated when it was shot. It wasn’t. (I should disclose that I passed on this bit of incorrect information to several people while discussing the raid before discovering it was incorrect, though I didn’t put it in print). And death threats, even from keyboard commandos posting on Internet discussion boards, are inexcusable.

That said, Burton is deflecting. When the video first went viral, his department’s spokesperson acknowledged that the police didn’t know a seven-year-old boy was in the home, but explained that the department has to carry out drug raids quickly before dealers can move their supply. That was, as Burton would put it, “misinformation.” You might even call it a lie. At the very least, it was another example of a police spokesperson reflexively defending the department before knowing all the facts. Eight days passed between the time the police were tipped off to the alleged marijuana stash and the time they conducted the raid.

As I reported yesterday, according to Brittany Montgomery, the mother and wife in the home at the time of the raid, the police initially gave the family a copy of the video in which the audio and portions of incriminating video had been removed. That sounds like “misinformation,” too. Montgomery also wrote that when her neighbors inquired with the department about the raid, they were initially told it was a drill, and that no shots were fired. That too was “misinformation.” (The department didn’t return my call, so I haven’t been able to get their response to these two allegations.)

“Misinformation” coming from police department officials acting in their official capacity is a hell of a lot more troubling than misinformation disseminated on Internet discussion boards and in blog comment threads.

As for the death threats, yes, they’re an unfortunately ugly part of often-anonymous Internet discourse. But Burton’s men were just captured on video firing off seven rounds into a home just seconds after they’d broken into it. This, despite the fact that there was nothing in the home that posed a lethal threat to them. (Yes, some pit bulls can be dangerous, but not to an armed SWAT team bedecked in full body armor.) One of those rounds missed its intended target (the pit bull) and struck an unintended target (the Corgi). According to Montgomery, there are now bullet holes in the walls of the house. There were other people in that house who weren’t suspects, people the cops weren’t aware of before they started firing their guns, including a child. That seems like a pretty reckless disregard for human life.

But Burton would have us believe that the real outrage here is the faux “if they try to come to my house and do that, I’ll kill them” Internet bravado that came in response to the video, not the very real violence actually depicted in it.

My crime column this week is on the Columbia, Missouri, SWAT raid.

Takeaway:

It’s heartening that nearly a million people have now seen the Columbia video. But it needs some context. The officers in that video aren’t rogue cops. They’re no different than other SWAT teams across the country. The raid itself is no different from the tens of thousands of drug raids carried out each year in the U.S. If the video is going to effect any change, the Internet anger directed at the Columbia Police Department needs to be redirected to America’s drug policy in general. Calling for the heads of the Columbia SWAT team isn’t going to stop these raids. Calling for the heads of the politicians who defend these tactics and promote a “war on drugs” that’s become all too literal—that just might.

• Phoenix Suns protest immigration bill by wearing “Los Suns” jerseys for tonight’s last night’s playoff game. I think I just became a Phoenix Suns fan.
• Prom fail photos.
• Rep. Peter King is another pants-wetting congressman who wants to strip suspected terrorists of criminal protections (King said of the Times Square bomber, ““I know he’s an American citizen, but still…”). Funny, though, that King has sung a different tune when the suspected terrorists have been white.
• Federal judge strikes down Florida law banning criticism of police.
• Another puppycide in Missouri.

In February, I wrote the following about a drug raid in Missouri:

SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.

They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.

So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.

Just so we’re clear.

Now there’s video, which you can watch below. It’s horrifying, but I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.

But Jonathan Whitworth won’t be smoking that pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.

I’ve exchanged emails with the mother of the family, who was in the home at the time of the raid. I’m waiting on her permission to publish her account of what happened.