Gangsters in Blue

I actually spent much of the last week very near where this one happened:

Two Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Office narcotics agents burst into the wrong house during a raid in Galliano earlier this week and now face possible disciplinary action.

Sheriff Craig Webre classified the mistake as "very rare" and said the agents, Lt. Chet Caillouet and Deputy Robert Mason, likely used the wrong two-story house as a reference point.

No drugs. Just an 83-year-old woman and her son.

Via my reason colleague Katherine Mangu-Ward, the alterna-weekly in Salt Lake City visits the annual meeting of the National Sheriff’s Association, and finds the convention hall populated with–surprise!–an abundance of military gear, and booth displays from military outfitters.

There’s so much wrong with this story:

It’s a recruiting video created by high school students to attract their peers to the Garner Police Department.

The 30-second video spot features a pounding electric guitar spliced over footage of officers in SWAT gear, a revving police chase and lots of guns. The Garner Police Department hopes to use the video to attract high school and college graduates.

Dawson Harris, a senior at Enloe High School and 1 of 5 students who created the video, says young people like to see SWAT-team action. The high schoolers worked for seven months in a video production class to produce a commercial that appeals to people in their early 20s.

Not that Garner is struggling with a crime problem. The suburb of Raleigh is enjoying its lowest violent crime rate since 2000 and hasn’t had a homicide since 2005.

You can watch the video here.

In researching Overkill, I interviewed one former police chief who’s quite wary of the whole SWAT phenomenon. He told me the following:

“The best way to staff your SWAT team is to get your department together and ask for volunteers. Then you write down the name of every guy who raises his hand, then you make sure those guys are never on the SWAT team. Not only that, but you keep an eye on them. Guys who are attracted to that kind of thing shouldn’t even be cops, much less SWAT guys.

Now watch that video again. A few things come to mind.

(1) You’d think that the Garner police chief would be disturbed that local high school kids think the best part about being a cop is kicking down doors, toting big guns, and loosing dogs on suspects. Instead, he’s flattered.

(2) Not only that, he’s using the video as a damned recruiting tool. Think for a sec about the mindset of the guy who watches that video, then gets so revved up, he decides he wants to be a cop, and heads down to the police station to sign up. That’s the guy to whom you want to hand over a gun and a badge?

(3) I’ll make my usual point here about why a town that hasn’t had a murder in three years and has virtually no violent crime needs a SWAT team in the first place, much less needs to make the SWAT team the focal point of its recruiting video.

Over at reason, you can now read the testimony I gave on police militarization a few weeks ago before the House Crime Subcommittee.

The event wasn’t nearly as entertaining as the Internet gambling hearing (and by “entertaining,” I mean, there weren’t any laughably stupid questions from dim politicians).

One thing that did come up in the Q&A: A woman in the gallery asked for renewed funding for Bill Clinton’s COPs program, which provided federal grants for community policing. I’m a big fan of community policing, which aims to put cops on walking beats, ingrain them in the neighborhoods they’re patrolling, and generally foster a less confrontational, more civil relationship between the police and the people.

The problem is that community policing is really only effectively implemented at the local level. Like lots of other attempts at good policy that come from the federal government, COPs grants often ended up funding endeavors that were a far cry from what advocates intended.

The Madison Times, for example, found in 2000 that COPS grants in many Wisconsin jurisdictions ended up funding–you guessed it–SWAT teams. Which are sort of the opposite of community policing. In fact, when criminologist Peter Kraska interviewed several police chiefs in the Midwest for his large study of paramilitary police units, they told him that a SWAT team was a vital component of any good community policing program.

So the question at the hearing gave me the opportunity to point all of this out. Rep. Bobby Scott, the committee chair, seemed taken aback. He asked me, “Are you telling me that the COPs grants we handed out in the 90s were actually used to start SWAT teams?”

I confirmed that while I didn’t know of any large-scale studies, Kraska’s work and the Madison newspaper’s investigation seemed to confirm that this was indeed the case in at least several communities.

He replied, “Well that’s certainly not what we had in mind.” And the room filled with laughter.

It was kinda’ cool to be be in a position to give an influential congressmen a lesson in unintended consequences.

The photo above shows Rock Island, Illinois SWAT team member Dytanya Robinson, who's teaching a youngster the basics of tearing down a private citizen's door. Her appearance at the local elementary school came courtesy of funding from the DARE program. The article's lede:

The kids sat in Frances Willard Elementary School's library Thursday morning, waiting for their teacher.

She arrived about 9:10 a.m., dressed in all black, including a black face mask. "Sorry I'm late," Rock Island Police Officer Dytanya Robinson told the Junior Police Academy class. "I've already been working two raids … I've been sweating in this hot suit since 6 a.m."

Two SWAT raids before 9am, on one day, in a city of 40,000, that had all of two murders in 2005.

Another three narcotics officers have been suspended from APD. But it isn’t clear that any of them were involved in the Kathryn Johnston shooting.

The good news is that this means the investigation is looking at broader problems within the city’s narcotics policing. The bad (but not surprising) news is, it appears the corruption goes pretty deep.

Near Durnago, Colorado:

Law-enforcement officers raided the wrong house and forced a 77-year-old La Plata County woman on oxygen to the ground last week in search of methamphetamine.

The raid occurred about 11 a.m. June 8, as Virginia Herrick was settling in to watch "The Price is Right." She heard a rustling outside her mobile home in Durango West I and looked out to see several men with gas masks and bulletproof vests, she said.

Herrick went to the back door to have a look.

"I thought there was a gas leak or something," she said.

But before reaching the door, La Plata County Sheriff's deputies shouted "search warrant, search warrant" and barged in with guns drawn, she said. They ordered Herrick to the ground and began searching the home.

"They didn't give me a chance to ask for a search warrant or see a search warrant or anything," she said in a phone interview Thursday. "I'm not about to argue with those big old guys, especially when they've got guns and those big old sledgehammers."

They'd been investigating the trailer next door for a month, but still managed to hit the wrong home.

Herrick's son, David Herrick, said investigators surveilled the neighbor's house before the raid, and it was extremely unprofessional to enter the wrong house.

"There is a big difference between 74 and 82," he said, referring to the house numbers.

What's more, Herrick doesn't understand why his 77-year-old mother was handcuffed.

"Why they thought it was necessary to handcuff her and put her on the floor I don't know," he said. "And then they had to ask her what the address was."

Remember Steven Blackman? He’s the man whose home Ft. Worth police raided last summer. His house was destroyed. They broke down his door, and fired four rounds of tear gas into the house. They also weirdly slashed the tires on his truck. Fortunately, he wasn’t home at the time, or he could well be dead. The cops had the wrong address, of course. They commenced the raid due to a mistaken, uncorroborated tip from an informant (but don’t worry, this almost never happens).

Well, the reviews and reports have been written. So what about all that professionalism, all those checks and balances, all that new police accountability Justice Scalia assured us was taking place all over the country in his opinion in the Hudson case?

One officer was suspended for five days. And last week, that suspension was reduced to one day.

Note also that the man police were actually looking for was wanted for possession of an illicit drug. Not distribution. They used tear gas bombs, a SWAT team, broke down the back door, and slashed the wrong guy’s tires trying to arrest someone for possession.

Keep that in mind too next time defenders of these tactics say they’re only used to go after the big-time dealers.

New York City:

Cops in New York City are accused of wrongly breaking into a local man's home this month, holding him at gunpoint, then stealing $2,000 from a jacket.

The May 9 incident was a result of a raid in which the police officers were given faulty information, the New York Daily News reported Sunday.

"They didn't tell me what they were looking for or why they were here," said Alisaleh Moshad Ali, 50, the Yemeni immigrant whose house was broken into. "They just told me to get on the floor."

The police later apologized, after finding that they were at the wrong address. However, Ali and his wife, Leslie, 30, have not received any explanation for the $2,000 Ali says went missing from his jacket, which was in a closet.

Police argue Ali left the house for 30 minutes after the incident, leaving someone else the opportunity to steal the money since the door was reportedly broken.

The Daily News reported the police department has been receiving an increased number of complaints involving raids on the wrong homes.

As this Metafilter post points out, that's six botched raids in the last five weeks. That we know of.

Last September, civil rights attorney Joel Berger and I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal about how New York City officials have reneged on their promises to reform the way drug raids are executed after the 2003 wrong-door raid that resulted in the death of 57-year-old Alberta Spruill. Looks like they've not only not learned much, but the problem is getting worse. There are some pretty striking similarities between Spruill's death and that of Kathryn Johnston. I hope Atlanta learns better than New York. I have my doubts.

Meanwhile, the family of Sal Culosi tells me that the Justice Department has found no criminal civil rights violations in the SWAT shooting of the 37-year old Virginia optometrist, who was under investigation for gambling on football with friends. While I understand the finding, it's still frustrating when combined with the fact that no state criminal charges will be filed, either. If a non-police citizen of Virginia pointed a loaded weapon at a fellow citizen which resulted in an accidental discharge and death, he'd almost certainly face charges, at least of some sort of criminal negligence. This police officer got a short suspension, and will keep his job.

The Culosi family is moving forward with a civil suit.

Another botched, wrong-door drug raid. This one's got it all. Terrified immigrants who don't speak English, a roughed-up pregnant woman, a man kicked in the groin, another woman with a heart condition, flashbang grenades, and assurances from the cops that this kind of thing happens "not very often." Fortunately no one was killed. Only terrified.

The police never contacted the landlord of the residence to verify. And when they raided the "right" address, the place was empty.