Gangsters in Blue

For its cover story this week, the Washington Post Sunday Magazine ran a terrific feature on the case of Cheye Calvo, the Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor who’s home was raided and two black labs were slaughtered by Prince George’s County police during a botched drug raid last summer. Calvo and his wife unknowingly received a package of marijuana as part of a drug smuggling scheme. The SWAT team pounced shortly after Calvo’s mother-in-law brought the package in the house.

Calvo and his family have since been cleared of any wrongdoing, and Prince George’s County officials have at least apologized for wrongly raided their home, but the county and the police still adamantly insist they did nothing wrong, have refused to apologize for killing Calvo’s dogs, and have said they’d do nothing differently if they had the whole thing to do again.

The Post piece tugs at the heartstrings—more than a few people who sent it to me said it had them in tears. It also reads as strong critique of the drug war, or at least of this particular highly-militarized method of fighting it. The piece devotes quite a bit of copy to Overkill, the 2006 paper I wrote for the Cato Institute on the rise in the use of SWAT teams and paramilitary police tactics, and even inspired a stirring editorial in defense of the Fourth Amendment by the magazine’s editor, Tom Shroder.

The piece also uncovered some previously unreported information about the case.

This passage, for example, picks up shortly after the police had “secured” the house, and Calvo’s peering out his window.

At one point, Cheye recalled, he noticed a familiar uniform in the growing crowd on lawn. Berwyn Heights police officer Pvt. Amir Johnson had been patrolling the neighborhood when he passed the mayor’s house and saw officers dressed in tactical uniforms coming out the front door. He stopped. (Berwyn Heights and Prince George’s police have overlapping jurisdictions within town limits.)

“The guy in there is crazy,” Johnson remembered a Prince George’s County officer telling him when he arrived. “He says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights.”

“That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights,” Johnson replied.

The detective looked very surprised, Johnson later recalled: “He had that ‘Oh, crap’ look on his face.”

In this passage, when the Berwyn Heights police chief (who wasn’t notified of the raid) calls the cops at the scene to find out what happened, Prince George’s narcotics detective David Martini flat-out lies to him:

At home in St. Mary’s, Murphy dialed the cellphone of his second-in-command, now standing on the mayor’s front lawn. Murphy’s officer handed the phone to a Prince George’s narcotics investigator, Det. Sgt. David Martini.

This is how Murphy later recalled their conversation:

“Martini tells me that when the SWAT team came to the door, the mayor met them at the door, opened it partially, saw who it was, and then tried to slam the door on them,” Murphy recalled. “And that at that point, Martini claimed, they had to force entry, the dogs took aggressive stances, and they were shot.”

“I later learned,” Murphy said in an interview, “that none of that is true.”

Finally, this passage is so infuriating it’s almost comical:

It was about 7:45 p.m. when Trinity turned her 1997 Suburu Outback with the kayak rack on top onto Edmonston. The road was so jammed with police vehicles that she couldn’t reach her driveway. Assuming that the house had been robbed, Trinity abandoned her car and searched frantically for any sign of an ambulance.

“Is my husband okay?” she asked when Ken Antolik met her near her front gate. “Is my mom okay?

“Yes,” he told her. “They are in the house.

Then it struck her. It was too quiet. She didn’t hear dogs barking. She knew, even before she asked: “Payton and Chase?”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Trinity collapsed against his chest. A female officer eventually came and led her gently around to the back door. Trinity started in to find her husband and mother, then saw blood. There was so much blood. There was blood pooled near the door. Officers were tracking her dead dogs’ blood all over the house. She backed outside.

“I remember sitting on the steps thinking, ‘I’m never going to be able to live here again,’ ” Trinity recalled.

“I found something,” Georgia heard a detective yell excitedly. The woman held a white envelope filled with cash. Inside, was $68. Across the front of the envelope were written two words: “yard sale.”

The detective seemed crestfallen, Georgia said. Georgia, who had been moved, still bound, into the downstairs bedroom, says she overheard the woman saying something like: “It’s my first raid, and we got the mayor’s house.”

Calvo and the article’s author, April Witt, just completed a live chat at the Washington Post’s website.

You download a free copy of Overkill here. My work on police militarization for reason here, and on cops killing dogs here. Prior post on the Calvo raid here.

Shouldn’t a prosecutor required to do even a bare bones investigation into the reliability of his witnesses?

More from Chesapeake this afternoon:

Jailhouse informant Jamal Skeeter’s credibility took more hits at the Ryan Frederick murder trial this morning, as a defense attorney introduced about 30 letters Skeeter wrote to various authorities offering his assistance in homicides, police shootings and even the Michael Vick dogfighting investigation.

Called back to the witness stand, Skeeter didn’t deny that he’s a “professional witness.” But he denied writing some of the letters, even though acknowledging they were in his handwriting with his name on the envelope…

When Skeeter entered the courtroom, he initially refused to answer any questions, saying his safety was in jeopardy. He also tried to order the removal of the media. The judge refused and ordered him to testify.

Over the weekend, I’ll put up a more thorough review of the last few days in the trial of Ryan Frederick, the Chesapeake, Virginia man charged with capital murder for shooting a police officer during a botched drug raid.

But here’s one item of note: Earlier this week, we heard the unlikely testimony of Steven Wright, the police informant in the case. Wright gave damning statements about buying marijuana from Frederick dozens of times over about a six month period, and state that Frederick threatened to kill both him in his family. Wright also admitted to both illegally breaking into Frederick’s home three days before the raid (to collect probable cause for the search warrant), and to lying to the police about said break-in for months. His testimony was not only harmful to Frederick, it helped assuage allegations that Chesapeake police officers were sending informants to break into private homes in order to look for evidence for search warrants.

Wright has been in jail since last October on several charges stemming from his theft and use of credit cards, including a charge of grand larceny. He was supposed to appear in court last December on those charges, but that appearance was delayed, rather conveniently, until two days after his testimony in Frederick’s trial.

Yesterday, Wright was released on bond. He still hasn’t been charged for breaking in to Frederick’s home, nor has he been charged for obstructing the investigation of Frederick and the raid by allegedly lying to police about the break-in for months.

Gwinnett County, Georgia:

[Georgia Bureau of Investigation] spokesman John Bankhead said state agents along with Gwinnett and Hall County police narcotics officers had been keeping watch over a drug suspect’s home at 4237 DeJohns Way for about three weeks. Officers thought they saw the suspect enter the duplex around 2 p.m. Tuesday and moved to arrest him, Bankhead said.

A no-knock search warrant had already been obtained from a judge — allowing law enforcement to enter the suspect’s home without knocking or announcing their presence — because the duplex was in a known gang area, Bankhead said. However, the agents and officers mistakenly forced entry into a duplex adjacent to the suspect’s home.

No one was home at that unit, Bankhead said. The agents also banged on the door of the other unit in the same duplex, startling residents inside. Within minutes, Bankhead said the officers figured out that they were at the wrong building.

[...]

Jainet Rios, 25, a Home Depot supervisor, said she was at work when the officers came to her parents’ home. She said her parents, her two sisters ages 18 and 19, and the 19-year-old’s infant baby were terrified when drug investigators began yelling at them with their guns drawn. She said the incident especially shook up her mother, who suffers from bipolar disorder and was recently released from a psychiatric treatment facility.

It’s the second wrong-door raid in Gwinnett County in two months.

Big development in the Ryan Frederick trial today.

This morning, Frederick’s attorney, James Broccoletti, requested and was granted a recess after three attorneys contacted him last night with concerns about state’s witness Jamal Skeeter, a jailhouse snitch who testified on Tuesday.

According to local TV station WVEC, one of the attorneys was actually another prosecutor, Portsmouth Commonwealth’s Attorney Earle Mobley.

Broccoletti said Mobley told him Skeeter is well-known to prosecutors for giving false testimony and is considered a “professional witness.”

Ebert apparently told the court, “he did not realize Skeeter had questionable credibility.”

His long felony record and wholly implausible testimony didn’t give it away?

MORE: From the Virginian-Pilot:

A spokesman for Mobley said this morning that Portsmouth prosecutors had used Skeeter as a witness but stopped. The spokesman, Bill Prince, could not immediately identify what cases Skeeter testified in.

“We didn’t find him to be trustworthy. We felt an obligation to turn that over to the Chesapeake people,” Prince said this morning. “We got to the point where we wouldn’t use him anymore.”

To sit on such information, he said, would be “offensive.”

Mobley’s office also sent a letter last year to the Norfolk commonwealth’s attorney upon learning that Skeeter was scheduled to testify against a homicide suspect.

Norfolk did not use Skeeter as a witness.

You don’t often hear about one state’s attorney undermining another’s case in the midst of a trial. Mobley deserves a ton of credit, here.

Informant and jailhouse snitch testimony dominated yesterday’s proceedings at the Ryan Frederick trial. Frederick is the 28-year-old Chesapeake, Virginia man facing murder charges for killing a police officer during a drug raid (see this wiki for more on Frederick’s case). My prior coverage of his trial here.  Virginian-Pilot coverage of yesterday’s events here.  Coverage from the local libertarian blog Tidewater Liberty here.

The star for most of yesterday was Steven Wright, the informant who tipped police off to Frederick, and who illegally broke into Frederick’s home three nights before before the raid to obtain probable cause.

A few observations, before I excerpt from the Virginian-Pilot’s coverage of his testimony:

• The Virginian-Pilot article doesn’t mention it, but Wright was arrested a few days prior to the raid on charges of credit card theft and fraud. Those charges were dropped shortly after the raid, then reinstated months later, when Wright was arrested again. He was due to stand trial last month. Conveniently, his trial date was moved to tomorrow, two days after his testimony against Frederick.

• Wright’s portrayal of Frederick as a vengeful killer with a gangsta’ vibe runs contrary to everything I’ve heard about Frederick from neighbors, coworkers, and friends and family.

• According to Wright and the police detectives the state has put on the stand, Wright not only illegally broke into Frederick’s home, he lied to police about it for months, possibly compromising not only a drug investigation, but an investigation into the killing of a police officer. Yet he’s never been charged—not for the break-in, nor for lying about it for months.

Here’s the Virginian-Pilot’s account of Wrights testimony:

Ryan Frederick threatened to kill police informant Steven Rene Wright after learning that Wright broke into his garage and stole five marijuana plants, Wright testified at Frederick’s murder trial Tuesday.

“I had a week to turn myself in to him or he was going to go after my family,” Wright said from the witness stand. “He said he was going to… kill me if I didn’t come.”

[...]

Wright said he and a friend, Renaldo Turnbull Jr., broke into Frederick’s garage on Jan. 14, 2008, and stole five of about 10 plants growing in a sophisticated hydroponic tent. They then went to another friend’s house where they made a cell phone video of the plants.

The plants were never turned over to police, he said, but Frederick learned Wright took them and called with the threats.

Wright said he met Frederick earlier in 2007 while dating the sister of Frederick’s fiancee.

In the six to eight months prior to the raid, Wright said, he’d been to Frederick’s house at 932 Redstart Ave. 30 to 50 times; he saw the marijuana growing operation at almost every visit; and he smoked the drug with Frederick and others. He said Frederick even explained to him how the hydroponic system produced superior cannabis.

Wright said he became a police informant after seeking help from a drug dealer in an unrelated case who threatened him. He said police paid him $60 for information that led to the arrest of that dealer.

Despite being limited by the judge to testifying about one or two marijuana sales between November 2007 and the night of the raid, Wright blurted out that he bought marijuana from Frederick some 20 to 30 times throughout 2007.

Wright insists he was never asked by Chesapeake police to break into Frederick’s home. Rather, he said he did so voluntarily as part of a scheme he planned with several friends. They’d steal half the plants, then leave the other half for the police to find after Wright tipped them off. The problem for the prosecution, here, is that in order to believe Wright’s testimony, they’ll also have to accept his own testimony that he’s a habitual liar who routinely spins out falsehoods when it’s in his interest.

The state then called Jamal Skeeter, a jailhouse snitch with a long felony record.  From the Tidewater Liberty blog:

Mr. Skeeter said that he had been in the Chesapeake jail for a period of about 10 days in June of 2008. He had been brought here from the Correctional facility at Lawrenceville, where he was serving a 14 year sentence. He was here to testify as a witness in another case.

He wore red coveralls, indicating that he is in solitary confinement. (Mr. Frederick has been in solitary confinement throughout his entire stay at the jail). He said that in June he was in the gym (on his one hour daily “break”) when “someone” pointed Mr. Frederick out (thru a glass door) as “the guy who shot a policeman.” Mr. Skeeter somehow arranged to speak to Mr. Frederick (through a glass door) and that Mr. Frederick immediately “broke out in a story” saying that he knew he was shooting a cop, but that he was trying to get off on self-defense.

[...]

He said Mr. Frederick told him that he was high when the police got to his house, and that he had hollow points in his gun. When asked about Mr. Frederick’s demeanor, Mr. Skeeter said he “was trying to be a gangsta” and didn’t seem sorry for what he had done.

[...]

Mr. Skeeter claimed that he has made no deal with anyone, and that he’s doing this (testifying against Mr. Frederick) for Det Shivers family because “it ain’t right.”

To sum, the career felon Mr. Skeeter took interest in Frederick after “someone” told him Frederick shot a cop. In their first conversation, through a glass door, during an hour-long break in the jail’s gym, Frederick apparently confessed everything to Mr. Skeeter.  Skeeter, the felon, then contacted prosecutors, not to get time off his own sentence, but because of the overwhelming sense of empathy he felt for the dead cop’s family, and because Frederick’s confession violated his own personal sense of right and wrong.

Sure.  Sounds plausible.

The state then called jailhouse informant Lamont Malone, who is serving time for seven different felonies.  Malone has already testified once against someone else, resulting in a reduction in his sentence from life to about 19 years.

Again from Tidewater Liberty:

He said he is currently in the Chesapeake jail (he has also been in Suffolk and Portsmouth), and has “gotten to know” Mr. Frederick. He said Mr. Frederick’s jailhouse nickname is “Calvin.” He said that Mr. Frederick calls his gun “Roscoe” and that Mr. Frederick shot the police after they kicked in his door because he “panicked” and “had to get rid of his product.” He said that Mr. Frederick told him that he grew “Hydro” and that he had to get rid of his plants. He didn’t say how he did this.

He said that Mr. Frederick told him that he wanted to keep his case in Chesapeake because of the support, and that he expects that his lawyer is going to get him off.. He said that Mr. Frederick has expressed no remorse.

[...]

He said that Mr. Frederick makes unkind comments about Mrs. Shivers, and that he doesn’t seem sorry for what he did. He said that Mr. Frederick has been “laughing it up” with another prisoner, who is facing similar charges.

Laying it on thick, aren’t they?

When weighing yesterday’s testimony against Frederick’s story, it’s probably useful to remember that Frederick had no prior criminal record, and had a full-time job that required him to get up early in the morning (with kind words from his employers). Friends and neighbors described him to me last year as a shy, introverted guy who smoked pot recreationally.

It’ll be interesting to see if Renaldo Turnbull gets called to testify, and what his testimony might look like if he does.

Today is the third day in the trial of Ryan Frederick, the 28-year-old Chesapeake, Virginia man facing murder charges for killing a police officer during a drug raid (see this wiki for more on Frederick’s case). Tuesday primarily consisted of jury selection. Yesterday featured the opening statements.

I’m really in awe of the prosecution’s brazen strategy. According to the Virginian-Pilot, prosecutor James Willett argued in his opening that Frederick was “stoned out of his mind,” and “in a blind rage” at the time of the raid. Willett is apparently confident that no one on the jury has ever smoked marijuana. Frederic attorney James Broccoletti then asked the judge to admit into evidence a video in which a police detective flat-out says that Frederick didn’t appear high at the time of the raid. Moreover, in a recorded conversation taken shortly after the raid, Frederic says he didn’t know the men breaking into his home were the police. And he’s weeping.

As I suspected, the prosecution’s case is going to rely not just on the word of criminal informants, but of jailhouse snitches, too. Again from the Virginian-Pilot:

[Frederick] later told a jail inmate that if he had more ammunition, “he would have taken them all down,” a prosecutor told jurors Wednesday.

“He’s over there” in jail “bragging about it. He thinks he’s going to beat this charge,” James Willett, one of three prosecutors, told the jury during opening statements.

This is just absurd. Frederick was on suicide watch shortly after the raid. He surrendered after discovering the men breaking into his home were the police. Everyone I’ve spoken to who knows Frederick describes him as meek, shy, and introverted. It isn’t surprising that the prosecution could find a felon willing to say Frederick confessed to him in exchange for help with his own sentence. What will be surprising is if the jury is made aware of the deal he cut with prosecutors.

One other huge inconsistency in the state’s case came out in opening arguments. From the Tidewater Liberty blog:

[Willett] went on to describe how the police carefully planned how to serve the warrant and of the necessity of serving it with overwhelming force because they knew Frederick’s home had been burglarized and he would be wary.

Let’s set aside for a moment the incredibly dumb calculation that it would be a good idea to launch an aggressive, forced-entry, after-dark raid on a man the police knew would be “wary” because his home had just been burglarized. (A man who had no prior record and no history of violent behavior, by the way.)

We now know that the police informants were the ones who broke into Frederick’s home, and that this is how they obtained probable cause for the raid. Yet the police didn’t explain on their affidavit for the warrant that their probable cause had been obtained illegally, as is required by law. The state says this is because the police weren’t aware of that fact until months later. Yet they’re now arguing that the police knew on the night of the raid that Frederick’s house had been broken into three nights earlier, even though Frederick never reported the break-in.

So the state is arguing the following:

• The police knew on the night of the raid that Frederick’s home had been burglarized three nights before the raid.

• The police learned of the break-in through their informant, Steven Wright. Frederick never reported the break-in.

• The police mention on the warrant that Wright was in Frederick’s home “72 hours” prior to the raid.

• Despite all of this, the police never made the connection that, despite his criminal record, and that he was desperate to get help on the felony charges he was facing at the time, their informant could possibly have been the one who committed the break in.

The Chesapeake police involved in this raid were either corrupt or stupid. They either lied on the warrant, or they were incredibly ignorant of what their informants were doing. The prosecution has apparently calculated that their case against Frederick is better served by “stupid.”

Frederick’s defense is moving for a mistrial given these inconsistencies in police and prosecution statements regarding the informants.

In Lawrenceville, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta:

Gwinnett County police drug investigators on Wednesday served a “no-knock” search warrant and forced entry into a Lawrenceville house, but soon discovered they were at the wrong address.

In a news release, a Gwinnett police official said it was “a case of human error and not deliberate malfeasance on the part of the investigator.”

[...]

The front door was patched with a piece of wood Wednesday night, but splinters still littered the front hallway of the home of John Louis, 38, and his girlfriend Heather James, 37.

Louis said he was upstairs working from a home office when police used a battering ram to break through the door. James and their 3-month-old daughter were asleep in separate bedrooms.

“They came in here and put guns to us. The house was full of police,” Louis said. “I’ve never had a gun in my face before. I’ve never even held a gun.”

He said that he and James, who was in a nightgown, were ordered at gunpoint to lie on the floor. When he tried to ask what they wanted, Louis said, he was told to “shut up.”

After the officers roamed through the house for a few minutes, they spotted the baby and realized their mistake, Louis said. He said they apologized and told him they confused his home with that of a neighbor two doors down, a suspected methamphetamine distributor.

Louis said he still has questions for police about how such a mistake happened.

“If you had the house under surveillance for three months, why did you come here?” Louis said. “You broke in here and put all our lives in danger, and all you can say is you’re sorry?”

Seems like we’ve reached a troubling new comfortableness with wrong-door raids when the police department’s defense is, “well, at least it wasn’t deliberate.”  I’d hope that raiding the wrong house would never be deliberate.

Video of a local news report here.

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.