Gangsters in Blue

A jury in Colorado has acquitted a man who organized poker tournaments at a local bar on charges of illegal gambling, apparently agreeing with his defense that poker is primarily a game of skill, not chance.  Last month, a judge in Pennsylvania came to the same conclusion, exonerating a man of gambling charges for running $1-$2 Texas Hold ‘Em games out of his garage.

I’d rather see states do away with gambling prohibitions altogether (or, more accurately, to lift the states’ monopoly on gambling), but the outcomes in these cases are exactly right. The fact that professional poker players even exist (as opposed to, say, professional slots or roulette players) is proof that the game is driven more by strategy and skill than by luck.

This month, another state judge in South Carolina will rule on the same question. In that case, Police sent a wired informant with marked bills to break up the $20 buy-in game run by Mount Pleasant resident Bob Chimento and his college buddies. Generally speaking, such games are legal so long as the host doesn’t take a cut of the prize money. Police and prosecutors determined that Chimento’s collection for pizza and beer qualified as a "rake," making the game illegal.

"The typical police raid of these games … is to literally burst into a home in SWAT gear with guns drawn and treat poker players like a bunch of high-level drug dealers," says Jeff Phillips, a Greenville attorney representing Chimento’s group. "Using the taxpayers’ resources for such useless Gestapo-like tactics is more of a crime than is playing of the game."

Chimento and his friends aren’t alone. The Washington-based Poker Players Alliance says it has received so many calls about poker-related arrests that it’s created a national network of attorneys - many of them poker players themselves - to serve as a legal brain trust for its membership.

Reason.tv and Drew Carey highlighted one of those cases last year, in which a paramilitary vice squad in Dallas raided a Texas Hold ‘Em tournament held at local VFW post.

This is just ridiculous:

The Richland County (S.C.) Sheriff’s Department has acquired an armored personnel carrier complete with a turret-mounted .50-caliber belt-fed machine gun for its Special Response Team.

Sheriff Leon Lott told the Columbia State newspaper that he hoped the vehicle, named “The Peacemaker,” would let the bad guys know that his officers are serious.

“We don’t look at this as a killing machine,” Lott told the paper. “It’s going to keep the peace. We hope the fact that we have this is going to save lives. When something like this rolls up, it’s time to give up.”

Who wants to set an over under on the first time they use this thing to bust a pot dealer?

UPDATE: Pete Guither found a photo of the thing, and the weird origin of the name the sheriff gave it.

The violent drug raid on Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo is now making national headlines.  Calvo was also on CNN yesterday.

In the raid, police in Prince George’s County, Maryland intercepted a package addressed to Calvo’s wife that contained about 30 pounds or marijuana.  Undercover officers completed the delivery to Calvo’s home, then stormed the place in SWAT gear when Calvo brought the package inside.  During the raid, the police shot and killed Calvo’s two black labs, including one Calvo says was running away to hide.  Calvo and his mother-in-law were then handcuffed and questioned at gunpoint while his dead dogs lay nearby in pools of their own blood.

Since the raid last week, we’ve learned that police have arrested two men in conjunction with a scheme using delivery services to ship marijuana across the country.  The plan was for operatives within the companies to intercept the packages before they reached their targets. The destination addresses may have been random, or simply chosen because of their location along routes convenient to the scheme.  In fact, the Washington Post reports in the story linked above that some packages were accidentally delivered, at which point operatives went to the houses of the innocent people who’d received them to ask for their return.

Despite all of this, Prince George’s County police refuse to apologize for the no-knock raid, for the tactics they used in the raid, or for killing Calvo’s dogs.

Prince George’s County Police Chief Melvin High said Wednesday that Calvo and his family were "most likely … innocent victims," but he would not rule out their involvement, and he defended the way the raid was conducted. He and other officials did not apologize for killing the dogs, saying the officers felt threatened. 

High told the Washington Post that the raid "was conducted responsibly, given what deputies and officers knew at the time."  That’s absurd.  High doesn’t even seem to consider the possibility that perhaps the officers didn’t know enough to conduct the raid when they did, and that maybe they should have done a bit more investigating before going all commando on the Calvo family.

Interestingly, the state of Maryland does not issue warrants no-knock raids.  However, police may determine at the scene that a no-knock entry is necessary if one of two conditions are present.  The first if the police have reasonable suspicion that the suspect may pose a threat to the officers’ safety.  The second is if police have reasonable suspicion that the suspect may destroy the evidence.

Though these two "exigent circumstances" exceptions carve gaping holes in the knock-and-announce requirement, it’s difficult to see how this situation fit either exception.  Prince George’s police say they heard Calvo’s mother-in-law scream as they approached, which they say made them fear someone inside may  grab a gun or dispose of the marijuana.

Both prospects are dubious.  If the police had done any surveillance or investigation at all, they’d have realized that this was the home of the local mayor, an unlikely candidate to engage in a suicide shootout with raiding cops.  And unless the Calvos own an industrial strength toilet, it’s unlikely that he’d have been able to flush 30 pounds of marijuana in the time it takes police to knock and announce themselves. 

Moreover, even if seeing the cops approaching did tip off Calvo and his mother-in-law, that’s the whole purpose of the knock-and-announce requirement—to give suspects notice that the police are coming, and to allow them the opportunity to consent to a peaceful search and avoid the violence of a forceful police entry.

Still, courts have in the past been loathe to question police officers who find exigent circumstances at the scene of the search.  Perhaps the high profile of this raid will lead to more scrutiny.

Finally, I guess I’d just add that the national media coverage of the Berwyn Heights raid seems to be predicated on the assumption that the most troubling aspects of the raid—the killing of the dogs, the violent tactics, the lax investigation, the likely innocent victims, and the police obstinacy after the fact—are unusual.  They aren’t.  The only thing unusual about this raid is that its victim happened to be an elected politician.

We still don’t know what quantity or what type of drugs were found in the house. But it is looking increasingly like Derrick Foster isn’t the kind of guy who’d knowingly kill a police officer:

One of the accused is Derrick Foster, a 38-year-old former defensive end for Ohio State University who police said has no criminal record.

Foster has a sociology degree, a $60,000-a-year job as a Columbus code-enforcement supervisor, a $146,000 home on the South Side, a 5-year-old daughter and a valid permit to carry a concealed weapon.

In one annual review, Foster’s supervisor called him “an asset to the Near East Side” neighborhood where he works.

Police now say they suspect some gambling may have gone on in the house. Which makes some sense. Foster doesn’t have the resume of a cop killer, or a guy who’d have reason to be slinging dope (I don’t know many drug dealers who’d bother to apply for a gun permit). It does seem plausible, however, that he might have been at the house to gamble, and mistook the raiding cops for invaders out to rob a gambling house.

You’d never know violent crime stats actually ticked up over the last year.

In the last couple of months, police have broken up games in Charleston, South Carolina (netting a poker playing cop and prosecutor in the process) and, no surprise here, in Dallas and Houston.

In the Houston case, prosecutors planned to file felony organized crime charges against the operators of a $300 buy-in tournament.

In the Charleston case, investigators went back more than a year to find names of players who may not have been playing on the night of the raid. They then went out and arrested them, too. They were eventually charged with misdemeanors.

Here’s a first-hand account of similar Charleston raid from a couple of years ago:

At the game in 2006, Chimento said there was a knock on the door and then “…all of a sudden it was like a commandos SWAT team raiding a bunch of crack dealers. It’s was like the SWAT team that you see on TV, busting into your home, guns drawn, ski masks on, full protective gear, and demanding we put out hands on top of our heads,” Chimento said. “At first we thought we were getting robbed, then we realized they had police written all over them, and we were like ‘Oh my God, check this out.’ Someone could have easily been killed that night.”

A 78-year-old grandmother was one of the players swept up that night. Police issued citations on the spot and seized about $6,000 in total from all of the players.

County officials are defending the poker raid from last week.

Look like the reason for the raid really was the extra $5 organizers were charging players, which they were using to buy refreshments. That was the difference between a legal poker gathering and a guns-drawn police raid.

Pretty absurd.

• The ACLU is suing on behalf of a paraplegic man who had his licensed, legal, therapeutic marijuana seized during a drug raid.
• Man shot in a Wilmington, North Carolina gambling raid. Police aren’t saying if he was armed, or what happened that led to the shooting.
• Mark Draughn notes that some overly sensitive DEA agents are suing over the movie American Gangster, because of some text at the end of the movie referring to a state drug enforcement agency the agents say could be mistakenly construed as the federal agency. Draughn points out that the damages the agents are seeking (”turn over all of its profits to a fund for federal DEA agents”) sounds like the product of some guys who’ve spent their careers doing asset forfeiture cases.
• More fun with maps: The top religions in America, broken down by county.
• Looks like there will be no indictments in the Hoboken SWAT-Hooters scandal.
• John McCain, after 27 years of making and voting on federal legislation:
  

  “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.” 

  That would explain campaign finance reform.