"How did America's police become a military
force on the streets?"
By Radley Balko, ABAJournal, 1 July 2013
<https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/how_did_americas_police_become_a_military_force_on_the_streets>
"At the time the Third Amendment was ratified, the
images and memories of British troops in Boston and other cities were still
fresh, and the clashes with colonists that drew the country into war still
evoked strong emotions. What we might call the 'symbolic Third Amendment'
wasn’t just a prohibition on peacetime quartering, but a more robust expression
of the threat that standing armies pose to free societies. It represented a
long-standing, deeply ingrained resistance to armies patrolling American
streets and policing American communities.
And, in that sense, the spirit of the Third Amendment is
anything but anachronistic."
=======================================
QUOTATIONS AND SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
Although some of the aims of professionalism may have been noble,
the story of early American policing is one of overcorrection. While the
professionalism reformers were able to end the patronage system, in some cities
they managed to insulate police departments from politics altogether, making it
difficult for mayors and city councils to hold police officials accountable. At
the level of individual cops, the use of squad cars and radios clearly brought
a lot of benefits, but could also isolate police officers from the residents of
the communities they patrolled. […] Police and citizens interacted only when
police were ticketing or questioning someone, or when a citizen was reporting a
crime. In poorer communities that could bring about an increasingly antagonistic
relationship […]. (p. 34; "Quick History," ch. 3)
Calls attention to William Parker of LA for
professionalization. Dragnet Style
(as the ideal) and for bringing up Daryl Gates, who "did more to bring
about today's militarized American police force than any other single
person." Note also importance of LA's Watts riots, that "went a long
way toward scaring middle America about crime, to the point where they were
willing to embrace an all-out 'war' on crime and drugs to clean up the
cities" (p. 35; ch. 3).
There are two forms of police militarization: direct and
indirect. Direct militarization is the use of the standing military for
domestic policing. Indirect militarization happens when police agencies and
police officers take on more and more characteristics of an army. Most of this
book will focus on the latter form of police militarization, which began in the
United States in the late 1960s, then accelerated in the 1980s. But the two
forms of militarization are related, and they have become increasingly
intertwined over the [35] last thirty years. (pp. 35-26; ch. 3).
Discusses Depression Era Bonus March, beginning 28 July
1932, and what I (RDE) will call the after-action report of Major (at the time)
George S. Patton "recounting the lessons he had learned from the Bonus
March," including when Patton disobeyed a direct order of the President
"to stand down […] and went after the protesters […]" (p. 37; ch. 3).
Titled "Federal Troops in Domestic Disturbances,"
it revealed a startling contempt [37] for free expression — and for civilians
in general. The paper first assesses periods of unrest throughout history.
Patton ridicules nations and empires that hesitated to use violence against
citizen upraises and praises those who did [cites officers of Louis XVI of
France vs. Napoleon's "whiff of grapeshot" saving the directorate. …]
Patton attributes the success of the Bolshevik Revolution to "the
hesitating and weak character of the Russian officers," which prevented
them from properly slaughtering the Communists while they were merely
protestors.
Most alarming
are Patton's own suggestions and recommendations on how the military should
handle domestic riots and uprisings. He calls the writ of habeas corpus
"an item that rises to plague us" and recommends shooting captured
rioters instead of turning them over to police to bring before "some
misguided judge." (p. 38; ch. 3)
1968: King Assassination, Civil Rights, DNC-Chicago/Nixon,
Drugs
[Martin Luther
King's assassination on 4 April 1968 and the subsequent riots] In fact […] came
at a time when much of […] white, middle-class America began to sense that its
values and traditions were under attack from all sides. In his drug war history
Smoke and Mirrors [subtitle: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure,
1996] , journalist Dan Baum points out that black homicide arrests doubled
between 1960 and 1967. At the same time, heroin deaths and overdoses were also
on the rise. The hippie, antiwar, and counterculture movements were in full
swing. All of this coincided with the rise [67] of the civil rights movement.
Nixon's Silent Majority began to see a link between drugs, crime, the
counterculture, and race. * * *
Months later,
at the 1968 Democratic National Convention (DNC), police in Chicago would
instigate a riot and then indiscriminately beat liberal [etc.!] protesters.
Some of the beatings were aired live by the networks [….] [Notes Sen. Abraham
Ribicoff going off-script in McGovern nomination speech] to proclaim,
"With George McGovern we wouldn't have Gestapo tactics in the streets of
Chicago! With George McGovern we wouldn't have a National Guard!" <https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/abrahamribicoff1968dnc.htm>
Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who had called up more than twenty thousand police
and National Guard troops for the convention, didn't do much to distance
himself from the Nazi smear. Lip readers later alleged he shouted up from the
convention floor, [68] "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy
motherfucker! Go home!"
Nixon's
"ignored American" weren't the least bit troubled by what they saw
from Daley and the police. According to a Gallup poll taken a few weeks later,
56 percent of the country supported the crackdown, and just 31 percent were
opposed. Polls would also show Nixon surging into a comfortable lead over the
eventual Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey. (pp. 67-68; ch. 4)
Nixon triumphant
The law-and-order campaign worked. Nixon won the 1968
election by a comfortable margin in the electoral college. (And when you factor
in the votes for George Wallace, Humphrey lost the popular vote by a wide
margin.) The Republicans also picked up five seats in the Senate and five in
the House. In four years, crime had become the most important issue in the
country. [70] * * * [Nixon, John Mitchell et al. …] decided that the
high-profile target of the new administration's promised anticrime effort would
be drug control. Drug use, they thought, was the common denominator among the
groups — low-income blacks, the counter culture, and the antiwar movement —
against whom Nixon had unified "ignored America." (pp. 70-71; ch. 4)
The Nixonites
mulled a number of other constitutionally dubious drug war proposals in
addition to the preventive detention and no-knock proposals. They wanted to
authorize the use of "loose search warrants." These would have
allowed police to apply for a warrant for contraband, then search multiple
properties to find it. The idea came precipitously close to a writ of
assistance, but without the restrictions on nighttime service and
knock-and-announce. Combined with the no-knock provision, it would have
essentially authorized police to kick down the doors of entire neighborhoods
with a single warrant. Loose warrants didn't make the final crime bill, but the
idea was really only about ten years ahead of its time. Starting in the 1980s,
police would conduct raids of entire city blocks, housing complexes, and
neighborhoods. The Nixon administration also wanted to strip away
attorney-client privilege, as well as the privilege afforded to conversations
with priests and doctors, and to expand wiretapping authority. They even came
up with an early precursor to California's eventual "three strikes and
you're out" law.
No one had any
idea if these policies would work, but in a way it didn't matter. The strategy
was about symbolism and making the right enemies as it was about effectiveness.
[***]
On July 14,
1969, Nixon gave his first major address to Congress to outline his antidrug
program. He declared drugs a "national [72] threat." He set the tone
for a much more aggressive, confrontational federal drug fight. He described
the "inhumanity" of drug pushers, laying groundwork for the sort of
dehumanizing rhetoric that would be used for years to come to reduce drug users
and drug dealers to an enemy to be destroyed. [***]
In a few
areas, Nixon could move immediately, without waiting for money or authorization
from Congress. On such area was border enforcement." (pp. 72-73; ch. 4)
But the same
broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause that allowed the federal government
to integrate private business in the south gave [Attorney General John]
Mitchell and [President Richard] Nixon the authority to wage their war on crime
and drugs — a war that over the next forty years had some devastating
consequences for large swaths of black America. In the omnibus law [the
"omnibus narcotics bill," bringing together "the great crime
bill orgy of 1970" (86)], Mitchell would claim for his department all
authority to oversee the manufacture, distribution, export, import, and sale of
[87] addictive drugs. The bill created a classification system for illicit
drugs and vested the classification authority with the Justice Department. That
met with fierce resistance from researchers and medical organizations, who
believed that authority to determine which psychoactive drugs have medical
benefits and which cause harm should belong to the Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare or to an agency like the FDA instead of an agency whose primary
mission was law enforcement. Their pleas were in vain. A version of the [Thomas
J.] Dodd bill would later become the Controlled Substances Act, the law that
has authorized the war on drugs ever since. (pp. 87-88; ch. 5)
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
Jerry Wilson as Head of DC Metro Police
"During
the often heated [sic: no hyphen] antiwar protests of the early 1970s, Wilson
believed that an intimidating police presence didn't prevent confrontation, it invited
it."
On no-knock
raids: "'I never really bought into the idea that police were getting
gunned down while serving warrants,' Wilson says [sic]. 'Drug pushers sold
drugs to make money. They might run. But there weren't many drug dealers who
were in the business to get into shootouts with narcotics officers.' Wilson
didn't find the destruction of evidence exception convincing either. 'We called
that the 'no-flush rule.' Again I just didn't think that warranted breaking
down a door. There were better ways to do it,' he says, referring to serving
drug warrants. You couldn't flush much pot down a toilet anyway. Cocaine or
heroin, you could flush a good amount. But then it was gone — off the [99]
street. They [no-knock proponents] wanted to make sure the evidence was
preserved to get a conviction. But a drug conviction wasn't worth the risk of a
no-knock raid.'" (ch. 5, pp. 99-100)
Nixon Admin. in Early 1970s
So the White
House crime team came up with a plan. They would launch an all-out PR offensive
to scare the hell out of the public about crime, and to tie crime to heroin.
Once voters were good and terrified, they would push for reorganization to
consolidate drug policy and enforcement power within the White House. [Egil]
Krogh put together a quick-hitting but multifaceted strategy that included
planting media scare stories about heroin, publicly recalling ambassadors to
embarrass heroin-producing countries like Thailand and Turkey, and holding
high-level (but entirely staged) [103] strategy sessions that they'd invite the
media to attend. The plan culminated with a planned speech from Nixon that
would forge new frontiers in fearmongering.
The scare
strategy was executed as planned. Nixon's June 17, 1971, speech more than met
expectations. He declared drug abuse "public enemy number one" and
ask for emergency powers and new findings to "wage a new, all-out
offensive." Years later, both this speech and a similar one he gave the
following year would alternately be considered the start of the modern
"war on drugs." In a poll taken the following month, Americans named
drug abuse as the most urgent domestic problem facing the country. (ch. 5, pp.
103-104).
Death (early 1972) of Dirk Dickenson Mostly by Lloyd
Clifton (Berkeley PD to Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs [BNDD]) 4 April
1972
Clifton had
a record of beating on civilians, including a young Black man arrested by
mistake and turned out to be the son of a California Superior Court judge (so
Clifton got a reprimand, pretty much the only punishment in his career).
"If this new federal initiative against street-level pushers was all about
projecting aggression and instilling fear, Clifton was a perfect fit" (ch.
5, pp. 108-16, quote here, p. 109).
"In
the end, a twenty-four-year-old man was chased from his own home by armed men
who had just emerged from an Army helicopter. They then shot him dead, from the
back, while he was unarmed and on his own property. The heavy-handed raid was
based on false pretenses and didn't turn up the criminal enterprise it was
supposed to find. No one would be held accountable for any of it. Dirk
Dickenson was collateral damage" (ch. 5, pp. 108-16, quote here, p. 116).
<https://humboldtherald.wordpress.com/2006/12/18/humboldt-trials-and-tribulations/>
Three dogs and a cat thrown outside by raiding officers:
"(Given the frequency of dog-shooting during raids in the coming years,
the […] pets got off easy" (ch. 5, p. 117).
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
Raids with Warrants and Warrantless, Early 1970s
There months
after those raids, in 1972, the New York Times published the results of
its own investigations in the use of aggressive drug raids. The paper found
that "dozens" of botched raids had occurred across the country since
the 1970 federal crime bills and similar bills in the states became law. Agents,
"often acting on uncorroborated tips from informants," were "bashing
down the doors to a home or apartment and holding the residents at gunpoint
while they ransack the house." The paper found that the botched raids were usually on lower-class families and
were "tied intimately to the veritable explosion of government drug
enforcement activities in recent years," thanks to Nixon's "total war" on drugs.
Some victims told the paper that they hadn't come forward because narcotics
officers had threatened them. Others had remained silent because "in their
hatred for drugs they condoned the tactics but not the specific
incidents." Two weeks earlier, the Associated Press had published its own
investigation, which came to similar conclusions. […]
Between April
1972 and May 1973, ODALE [The Office of
Drug Abuse Law Enforcement] strike forces conducted 1,439 raids. It's
unclear how many were knock-and-announce and how many were no-knock, but even
by 1973 the difference between the two kinds of raids had already begun to
blur. "You might whisper 'Police! Open up!'" one agent told the Times.
"Or you could yell it the instant before you hit the door."
Nixon's dehumanization and demonization of
drug offenders had been a (literally) smashing success. Tactics like these
had rarely been used in the United States, even against hardened criminals. Now
they were being used against people suspected of non-violent crimes, and with
such wanton disregard for civil rights and procedure that the occasional wrong
door or terrorized family could be dismissed as "an insignificant
detail" or as cops "just trying to do their job." […] These men
were rounding up "the very vermin of humanity," after all. Surely the
country understood that some collateral damage would be inflicted in the
process. (ch. 5, pp. 121-22)
Cops vs. Public
Don Santarelli
— father of the federal no-knock raid […]. When asked to reflect on the legacy
of Nixon's drug war in an interview for this book […] says it set in motion an
animosity between police officers and the public that may now be beyond repair.
"When you speak to a police officer today, you're terrified that you're
going to offend him, and that he's going to arrest you and take you off to
jail. Sure, a judge will let you out and drop the charges in a few days. But
you've spent those days in jail. And now you have and arrest record. There's
just no accountability for excessive force." He adds that his old boss's
war rhetoric, later taken up by President Ronald Reagan and his successors, is
to blame. "There has always been confrontation between the rational,
educated way to look at policy and the escalation of language to make a
political point. If politicians can get away with calling it a 'war on crime' or a 'war on drugs,' then they will. And yes,
that's going to make law enforcement more willing to push the envelope when it
comes to use of force.
After Nixon
left office in the fall of 1984, the federal drug war went into a brief period
of détente. But the SWAT concept
would continue to gain momentum, independent of the break in the drug war. The
two institutions would finally merge in the 1980s with Reagan's revival of the
Nixonian drug war, applied more literally [125] than even Nixon could have
imagined. No-knock raids would
return in full force, this time with no room for shame or remorse. (ch. 5, pp.
125-26)
S.W.A.T.
ABC-TV, Starting 24 Feb. 1975
The first
season did well, and ABC ordered a second. Milton Bradley soon put out a
S.W.A.T. board game. Kids could take their sandwiches to school in S.W.A.T.
lunch boxes. There were S.W.A.T. action figures […], and die-cast miniatures of
the S.W.A.T. mobile. […].
SWAT had hit
popular culture.
At the same
time, real SWAT teams were spreading throughout the country. [132 * * *]
Some police
officials feared that the SWAT trend, particularly in smaller cities and towns,
would succumb to what the philosopher Abraham Kaplan called "the Law of
the Instrument": when you're carrying a hammer, everything looks like a
nail. "There are some cops who want to solve all society's problems with
an M-16," one police chief told the paper. "[…] And if you set
yourself up to use heavy firepower the danger exists that you will use it at
the first opportunity, and over-reaction — the opposite of what the [SWAT]
concept is about — becomes a real danger."
Big-city SWAT
teams were getting training in paramilitary tactics and weapons, but that
training was balanced by an emphasis on negotiation and deescalation [sic] and
the use of violence only as the last possible option. In the smaller agencies
around the country, not only did the SWAT team not get that sort of training,
but the teams were staffed by part-timers […]. The risk was that the entire
police department could succumb to a culture of militarism. In some quarters,
it was already happening. Within a decade, the SWAT proliferation would
accelerate. The emphasis on deescalation [sic] would all but disappear. Soon,
just about every decent-sized city police department was armed with a hammer.
And the drug war would ensure there were plenty of nails around for pounding.
(ch. 5, pp. 132-33)
Carter to Reagan Transition: Sam Ervin in the Senate
The lull in
the fighting [for the Castle Doctrine] didn't last long. Before Carter left the
White House, he'd face allegations that pot-smoking was common among his staff
and that two senior-level aides were cocaine users — and that one of them was
his drug czar. The Reagan administration would soon come in to staff the drug
policy positions with hardened culture warriors.
Ervin's
wins were important but ultimately ephemeral. The drug war and police militarization
trends were about to merge. By the time Sam Ervin died in April 1985, the
California National Guard was sending helicopters to drop camouflaged-clad
troops into the backyards of suspected pot growers in Humboldt County; the
justice Department was wiretapping defense attorneys; and Daryl Gates was using
a battering ram affixed to a military-issue armored personnel carrier to smash
his way into the living rooms of suspected drug offenders. (ch. 5, p. 136)
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
Ch. 6: The 1980s —
Us and Them
William French
Smith set the tone for the Reagan administration early on. In one of the first
cabinet meetings, the new attorney general declared, "The Justice
Department is not a domestic agency. It is the internal arm of the national
defense."
This would be
a rough decade for the Symbolic Third Amendment. Reagan's drug warriors were
about to take aim at posse comitatus, utterly dehumanize drug users,
cast the drug fight as a biblical struggle between good and evil, and in the
process turn the country's cops into holy soldiers.
Smith
surrounded himself with a crew of prosecutors who called themselves the
"hard chargers." One was Rudy Giuliani […]. (ch. 6, p. 139)
The very first change in public policy that Reagan
pushed through the Congress with the 1981 Military Cooperation with Law
Enforcement Act, a proposed amendment to the Posse Comitatus Act that would
carve out a much larger rule for the military in the drug war. […] The amended
law encouraged the Pentagon to go further [than indirect assistance, as Navy
tipping off Coast Guard] and give local, state, and federal police access to
military intelligence and research. It also encouraged the opening up of access
to military bases and equipment, and explicitly authorized the military to
train civilian police in the use of military equipment. The law essentially
permitted the military to work with drug cops on all aspects of drug
interdiction short of making arrests and conducting searches.
The next year
Reagan pushed for more. He wanted the Posse Comitatus Act amended yet again,
this time to allow solders to both arrest and conduct searches of US citizens.
He also made official his desire to repeal the Exclusionary Rule, which would
essentially free police to violate the Fourth Amendment at will. (ch. 6, p.
145)
Reagan also pressed for — and got — expanded asset
forfeiture: "The Democrats were eager to eliminate the perception that
they were softer on crime than the Republicans. Senators Joe Biden and Hubert
Humphrey preempted the White House-sponsored bill with a bill of their own. The Biden-Humphrey bill gave Reagan
everything he wanted. ¶ On September 30, 1982, the crime bill loaded up with
most of the provisions Reagan wanted passed the Senate 95-1" (ch. 6, p.146).
"The government [of the United States] sent U-2 spy planes to the state of
California to search for marijuana. Then they sent the helicopters. In all,
thirteen California counties were invaded by choppers, some of them blaring
Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' as they dropped Guardsmen and law enforcement
officers armed with automatic weapons, sandviks, and machetes in the fields of
California" (ch. 6, p. 148).
Campaign Against Marijuana Production (CAMP, 1983 f.[in
California])
The officials running the operation [in California] made no
bones about the paramilitary tactics they were using. The considered the areas
they were raiding to be war zones. In the interest of "officer
safety," they gave themselves permission to search any structures
relatively close to a marijuana supply, without a warrant. Anyone coming
anywhere near a raid operation was subject to detainment, usually at gunpoint. [148]
Describing the
1984 [sic!] operation, the journalist Dan Baum writes, "For a solid month,
the clatter of helicopters was never absent from Humboldt County. CAMP
roadblocks started hauling whole families out of cars and holding them as
gunpoint while searching their vehicles without warrants. CAMP troops
. . . went house to house kicking in doors and ransacking homes,
again without warrants.
In his book The
Great Drug War, Arnold Trebach writes that in 1983 and 1984 [William]
Ruzzamenti claimed that the entire town of Denny, California, was so hostile to
the drug warriors that he'd need "to virtually occupy the area with a
small army. […] When CAMP left, a military convoy drove out of the small
village, guns trained on the townspeople. The couple ["Denny residents
Eric Massett and his wife Rebecca"] told Trebach that one of them was
waving a .45 as the others chanted, "War on drugs! War on drugs!"
But CAMP was
just the marijuana eradication program in California. The Reagan administration
had begun similar federal-state programs all over the country. In 1984 the
federal-state marijuana eradication efforts conducted twenty thousand raids
nationally, resulting in the destruction of 13 million plants (many of them
wild) and around five thousand arrests. (ch. 6, pp. 148-49)
Asset Forfeiture: 1984 f.
Because 1984
was an election year, it would need to have an omnibus crime bill of its own.
Polls showed that crime was the most pressing domestic issue with the public
[…]. [151]
At this point, there wasn't any real debate about crime
policy. It was really only about which party could come up with the most
creative ways to empower cops and prosecutors, strip suspects of their rights,
and who they were more committed to the battle than their opponents were. The
most significant provision in the newest crime bill again dealt with asset forfeiture. […] Under the new
law, the Justice Department would set up a fund with the cash and auction
proceeds from its investigations. After the lead federal agency took its cut,
any state or local police agencies that had helped out would also get a share.
The measure
was considered uncontroversial at the time, but it is difficult to overstate
the effect it would have on drug policing over the next thirty years.
[…] After it
passed for example, the CAMP raids and those like them in other parts of the
country were no longer just about putting on a good show and terrorizing the
counterculture. Now the raids could generate revenue for all the police
agencies involved. The DEA's Ruzzamenti was rather frank [identifying land
seizure as central …]. "[…] Basically, people have to prove that they
weren't involved and didn't know about [marijuana cultivation on their land].
Just the act of having marijuana grown on your land is enough to tie it up;
then you have to turn around and prove you're innocent. It reverses the burden
of proof." (ch. 6, p. 152)
Because it was
much easier to win land through civil forfeiture than to win a conviction in
criminal court, federal prosecutors often offered to drop the criminal charges
if the landowners agreed to hand their property over to the federal government.
Those sorts of
offers exposed just how fraudulent the government's justification for its
terror tactics really were. Allegedly, these pot growers were the dregs of
humanity, greedily poisoning America's children with their sinister harvest.
They were dangerous enough that the government had to send virtual armies to
occupy entire towns, buzz homes and chase children with helicopters, set up
roadblocks to search cars and gunpoint, and strip suspects and innocents alike
of their Fourth Amendment rights. These growers were that dangerous.
However, if they were willing to hand over their land, the government was more
than happy to let them go free.
Because of the
new forfeiture law, police agencies now had a strong incentive to
"find" a connection between valuable property and drug activi ty,
even if there was none. They now had an incentive to conduct drug busts inside
homes when the suspects could just as easily – and more safely – have been
apprehended outside the house. They now had a strong financial incentive to
make drug policing a higher priority […] than to investigating other crimes.
(ch. 6, p. 153).
"These
forfeiture policies would soon help fund the explosion of SWAT teams across the
country — forging yet another tie between the escalating drug war and
hypermilitarized policing" (ch. 6, p. 154).
Gates, LAPD, and Forcible Entry
In a suit
by the ACLU against the LAPD, "The court found the ram [on an APC] to be
so excessive as to violate the Fourth Amendment requirement that searches be
reasonable, and it ruled that prior to each raid the LAPD would need to get
special permission from a judge before using a battering ram. (In the same
case, the court also ruled that city police did not need a judge's permission to use flash-bang grenades)"
(ch. 6, p. 156).
Drugs and Nat'l Security
Under Reagan, "At the national level, the once-separate
trends of militarization and the war on drugs continued to converge. On April
8, 1986, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 221,
which designated illicit drugs a threat to US national security. […] The
declaration put pot, cocaine, and heroin at nearly the same class of enemy as
any nation against whom the United States had fought a conventional war"
(ch. 6, p. 157).
"Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. William Crowe went
further, stating that with new antidrug offensive, 'you're probably going to
have to infringe on some human rights.' In testimony before Congress, Darryl
Gates proclaimed that casual drug use was 'treason,' then recommended that
users be 'taken out and shot.' It was especially odd comment given that Gates's
own son had a history of problems with drug abuse" (ch. 6, p. 166).
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
Final Reagan Years, 1988 Crime Bill
[H.R. 5210 (100th): Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988
/ The Edward Byrne Memorial
State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Program, a matching grant program
authorized under the 1988 federal Anti-Drug
Abuse Act.]
The Byrne
grant program gave the White House another way to impose its crime policy on
local law enforcement. As local police departments were infused with federal
cash, members of Congress got press release fodder for bringing federal money
back to the police departments in their districts. No one gave much thought to
the potential unintended consequences because there was no reason to — for
everyone who mattered the program was a winner. The program's losers would
become apparent in the 1990s.
[…] One of the
few voices of sanity in the Reagan years was Secretary of Defense Caspar
Weinberger, who spoke out against his own boss's attempt to enlist the military
in drug policing. Bush's secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, had no such
reservations. He'd write in a DoD publication a few years later, "the
detection and countering of the production, trafficking, and use of illegal
drugs is a high priority national security mission of the Department of Defense."
Democrats in
Congress savaged [William] Bennett and Bush's drug plan — for not going far
enough. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Joe [167] Biden told the Associated Press that, […] the
Bush-Bennett plan "is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough
to meet the crisis at hand." […] The most pointed criticism came from Representative Charlie Rangel of New
York. A March 1989 profile of Rangel in Ebony magazine ran under the
headline, "Charles Rangel: The Front-Line General in the War on
Drugs." Rangel told the magazine: "All these people are talking about
protecting the world against communism and the Soviets. … How dare they let
this happen to our children and not scream with indignation!" It isn't
clear just whom Rangel was criticizing. Just about everyone running for office
had been screaming with indignation for ten years. Yet Rangel called the
federal drug war "lackadaisical" and "indifferent" and said
that it suffered from "a lack of commitment." He damned methadone
treatment as "a crime" and snapped that anyone who even mentioned
legalization was committing "moral suicide." (ch. 6, pp. 167-68;
italics in original).
By the late
1980s, the policies, rhetoric, and mind-set of the Reagan-Bush all-out antidrug
blitzkrieg had fully set in at police departments across the country. Nearly
every city with a population of 100,000 or more either had a SWAT team or was
well on its way to getting one. The tactics that ten years earlier had been
reserved for the rare, violent hostage-taking or bank robbery were by now
employed daily by large police departments from coast to coast. "I wonder
where the United States is heading," Federal District Court judge Richard
Matsch, a Nixon appointee, told USA Today in 1989. "My concern is
that the real victim of the war on drugs might be the United States
Constitution." Another federal judge,
Reagan appointee John Conway, worried that "police practices of this
nature raise the grim specter of a totalitarian state." (ch. 6, p. 168)
The public appeared
to side with [Drug "Czar" William] Bennett. In a September 1989 poll
conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News, 62 percent of the country
said they would "be willing to give up a few of the freedoms we have in
this country if it meant we could greatly reduce the amount of illegal drug use."
Another 52 percent agreed that police should be allowed "to search without
a court order the houses of people suspected of selling drugs, even if houses
of people like you are sometime searched by mistake."
In Boston,
police cracked down with […] "stop-and-frisk" searches […] of any
suspected drug offenders "who cause fear in the community," a broad
enough justification to let them search anyone at well. Suffolk County Superior
Court judge Cortland Mathers described the new policy as, "in effect, a proclamation of martial law in Roxbury
for a narrow class of people, young blacks." A Boston Globe
article in September 1989 described how what was essentially an occupation of some neighborhoods was degrading an
entire generation's opinion of police. (ch., 6, p. 169)
"The Numbers"
• Number of
drug raids conducted in 1987 by the San Diego Police Department: 457
• Number of
drug raids conducted by the Seattle Police Department in 1987: approximately
500
• Value of assets
in the Justice Department's forfeiture fund by 1985: $27 million
• Value of
assets in the Justice Department's forfeiture fund by 1991: $644 million
•
Percentage of US cities with populations of 50,000 that had a SWAT team in
1982: 59 percent.
…
in 1989: 78 percent
…
in 1995: 89 percent
•
Percentage of those SWAT teams that trained with active-duty military
personnel: 46 percent
• Average
annual number of times each of those SWAT teams was deployed in 1983: 13
…
in 1986: 27
…
in 1995: 55
•
Percentage of those deployments in 995 that were only to serve drug warrants:
75.9
•
Percentage of cities with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 that had a SWAT
team in 1980: 13.3 percent
…
in 1984: 25.6 percent
…
in 1990: 52.1 percent
• Average
number of times each SWAT team in a city with a population between 25,000 and
50,000 was deployed in 1980: 3.7
…
in 1985: 4.5
…
in 1990: 10.3
…
in 1995: 12.5 (ch. 6, p. 175)
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
Chapter 7, "The 1990s — It's All About the Numbers
Headnote: "Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack
dealer with a 38? With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick
ass and have fun." — US military officer who conducted training seminars
for civilian SWAT teams in the 1990s (ch. 7, p. 177)
In 1989 in Portland,
Oregon, Herb Robinson of the Seattle Times noted, fully armed Guard
troops had recently been stationed in front of suspected drug houses in a
series of drug raids. In Kentucky local residents became so enraged by frequent
Guard sweeps in low-flying helicopters that they blew up a radio tower used by
the Kentucky State Police. In Oklahoma, Guard troops dressed in battle garb
rappelled down from helicopters and fanned out into rural areas in search of
pot plants to uproot. (ch. 7, p. 179)
In 1992, University
of Minnesota law professor Myron Orfield sent a questionnaire to Chicago
judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys to determine the state of the Fourth
Amendment in that city. Even cynics would find the results dispiriting. More
than one-fifth of Chicago judges believed that police lie in court more than
half the time when questioned about searches and seizures. Ninety-two
percent of judges said that police lie "at least some of the
time," and 38 percent of judges said that they believed that police
supervisors encouraged subordinates to lie in court. More than 50 percent of
respondents believed that at least "half of the time" the prosecutor
"knows or has reason to know" that police fabricate evidence. Another
93 percent of respondents (including 89 percent of the prosecutors) reported
that prosecutors have knowledge of perjury "at least some of the
time." Sixty-one percent of respondents, including half of the surveyed
prosecutors believed that prosecutors know or have reason to know that police
fabricate evidence in case reports, and half of prosecutors believed the same
to be true when it comes to warrants. Prosecutors also described the unspoken
understandings they have shared with cops, including prosecutors articulating
cases to police in terms like, "If this happens, we win. If that happens,
we lose." Yet Chicago judges went on approving search warrants with little
or no scrutiny. Orfield asked one more question, Did the Exclusionary Rule
really deter police misconduct. Every judge, every defense attorney, and every
prosecutor but one answered yes.
Former
narcotics cop Russ Jones says it wasn't always like that. "When I first
started writing search warrants, I had to take it to the DA, who would
thoroughly review it. Then I'd take it to the judge, who'd also give it a close
look. Then the judge always read the warrant, always asked questions. By the
time I left law enforcement, and certainly since, it had gotten to the point
where the DEA no longer needed to have warrants reviewed by a federal
prosecutor, and often the judge wouldn't even read it. It just became a rubber
stamp process. And I understand it's happening more and more. (ch. 7, p. 184)
After the
botched raid that ended the life of Ismael Mena in 1999, the Denver Post
looked into how judges in the Mile High City handled request for no-knock
warrants. Again, the results were unsettling. Over a twelve-month period,
police in Denver request 163 no-knock warrants. The city's judges granted 158
of them. Defense attorneys told the paper they were surprised […] that the
judges had rejected even five. Perhaps Denver police had come to the judges
with more than adequate probable cause. Perhaps. But the paper also found that,
astonishingly, many of the city's judges would sign off on no-knock warrants even
though the police hadn't request one. […] The paper also found that in
eight of ten raids over that period, police assertions in affidavits that they
would find weapons […] turned out to be wrong. In only seven of the 163
no-knock affidavits did police present any evidence that the suspect had been
seen with a gun. Of those seven raids, just two turned up an actual weapon. The
Denver Police Department requires that all no-knock raids be preapproved by the
DA's office. In about one-third of the raids, that never happened." (ch.
7, p. 185)
The early
1990s weren't kind to the father of SWAT. In response to the Rodney King
beating of May 1991, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley asked Warren Christopher to
chair a commission looking in the LAPD's use of excessive force. The
commission's report was damning. It found that a small but significant group of
police officers within the department regularly used excessive force — and that
LAPD leadership did little to stop them. [… Notes lawsuits lost by city on
issue] The commission [186] found that even though officer misconduct in those
cases has often been egregious, it had usually resulted in "light and
often nonexistent discipline. The commission reviewed radio transmissions of
LAPD officers referring to a drug
roundup in a black neighborhood as "monkey slapping time" or
fantasizing about driving down one particular street with a flamethrower —
"We would have a barbecue."
The comments
themselves would have been bad enough. Even worse was the fact that a culture existed within the department
in which officers felt free to make them over police radio. The LAPD's focus of
reacting to crime instead of preventing it, the commission found, had isolated
officers from the communities they patrolled. Cops were rewarded for putting up
impressive arrest statistics and for being "hard-nosed." The report
found that drug and gang sweeps of the late 1980s had alienated LAPD cops from
the community, creating reciprocal hostility and resentment. The LAPD did a
poor job of screening applicants for violent backgrounds, and the department's
training put far too much emphasis on force and too little on communication n
and problem solving. The commission found that when academy student west out in
the field, they were quickly schooled to view the world from a
"we/they" perspective. It also found that many of the field training
officers who gave new cops their first experiences on the street themselves had
histories of misconduct or excessive use of force. (ch. 7, pp. 186-87)
In Colorado,
the Denver Post ran an article in 1995 about three area deaths from no-knock
drug raids in the area in thirty-three months — including a sixteen-year-old
boy, a deputy sheriff, and a fifty-four-year-old grandfather of eight.
"Such raids are very dangerous," said Pitkin County sheriff Robert
Braudis. "The are the closet thing I can think of to a military action in
a democratic society." Braudis explained that it was far safer to conduct
surveillance, to learn a suspect's routing, and then do "a quick, quiet
arrest then a suspect is in the open." As for possible destruction of
evidence, he said that his department would have the water shut off before
serving a warrant (by knocking at the door and waiting for an answer). In some
cases, they had arranged for a plumber to set up a "catch net" to
capture anything flushed after police arrived to serve the warrant. But Braudis
said that his concern went beyond the SWAT tactics. "The 'war on drugs' is
an abysmal failure," he said. "Even the term creates a dangerous war
mentality." (ch. 7, p. 192)
In one case
[in Albuquerque in the later 1990s …] a SWAT officer said to his colleagues,
Let's go get the bad guy," just before the team went to confront
thirty-three-year-old Larry Walker. The "bad guy" wasn't a terrorist,
a killer, or even a drug dealer, but a depressed man whose family had called
the police because they feared he might be contemplating suicide. The SWAT team
showed up in full battle attire, including assault rifles and flash-bang
grenades. They found Walker "cowering under a juniper tree" […], then
shot him dead from forty-three feet away. The city brought in Sam Walker, a
well-regarded criminologist at the University of Nebraska, to evaluate the
police department's use [192] of lethal force. Walker was astounded by what he
found. "The rate of police killings was just off the charts," Walker
told the Times. The city's SWAT team, he said, "had an organizational structure
that led them to escalate situations upward rather than de-escalate. The city
then brought in […] Jerry Galvin to take over its police department. Galvin
immediately disbanded the SWAT team, toned down the militarism, and implemented
community policing policies. He told the Times, "If cops have a mindset that the goal is to take out a citizen, it
will happen." (ch. 7, pp. 192-93)
Clinton Years, 1992-2000
[Bill] Clinton
and his appointees weren't as bellicose as Reagan and Bush or Meese and
Bennett, but the policies that Clinton implemented showed littler understanding
or appreciation of the Symbolic Third Amendment [keeping the US military out of
policing Americans]. In 1993, for example, he Justice Department and the
Defense Department entered into a formalized technology and equipment sharing
agreement. Not only were American police forces becoming more militarized, the
thinking went, but in places like Korea the US military was taking on more of a
policing role. […] Attorney General Janet Reno explained this strategy in a
speech to defense and intelligence specialists. "So let me welcome you to
the kind of war our police fight every day," Reno said. (ch. 7, p. 193)
Ruby Ridge, Idaho, 1992; Waco, Texas, 1993
The Ruby Ridge
fiasco began in 1989 when Randy Weaver sold and ATF informant two sawed-off
shotguns that had been cut shorter than was allowed under federal law.
[* * *]
On August 21,
1992, a team of US marshals dressed in camouflage and carrying M-16s went to
Weaver's home on a reconnaissance mission to determine an appropriate place and
manner to capture him. Once there, the marshals threw rocks at the Weaver cabin
to see how the family's dogs would react. The dogs went nuts. Hearing them,
Weaver's fourteen-year-old son Sammy went out with family friend Kevin Harris
to see what the commotion was about. Accounts differ here, but at some point
one of the agents shot and killed one of the Weavers' dogs. Sammy Weaver
responded by firing his own gun at the source of the gunfire, then fled toward
the house. One of the marshals then shot him in the back as he ran. Sammy
Weaver was dead. Harris then exchanged fire with the marshals, killing one of
them. [200]
A twelve-day
siege ensured, featuring hundreds of cops, agents, and troops from the ATF, the
FBI, the US Marshals, the Idaho State Police, the local sheriff's department,
the National Guard, and — for some reason — the US Border Patrol. On day two of
the siege, FBI sniper teams were told that their rules of engagement were,
basically to shoot on sight […]. When Randy Weaver left the house to visit the
body of his son […] an FBI sniper shot him in the chest. As Weaver, Harris, and
one of Weaver's daughters fled back into the house, the agent fired again at
the front door. That bullet went through the door, then through Vicki Weaver's
head, killing her instantly. She was holding her ten-month-old daughter at the
time. The baby fell to the floor. Weaver and Harris were eventually tried in
federal court for murder, attempted murder, and other felonies. They were acquitted
on all the serious charges. The federal government eventually settled with the
Weaver family for over $3 million, and with Weaver for $380,000. (ch. 7, pp.
200-01)
The raid in
Waco the next year involved many of the same agencies — indeed, many of the
same agents. The ATF was investigating the Branch Davidians and their leader,
David Koresh, for weapons violations, Koresh went jogging every day and could
conceivably have been picked up peacefully. Instead, the agency drew up plans
for a heavily armed raid on the Branch Davidian compound, even knowing that
there were women and children inside. In fact, ATF officials learned ahead of
time from an agent who had infiltrated the compound that Koresh and his
followers knew the raid was coming. Their plan depended on the element of
surprise. They went through with it anyway. (ch. 7, p. 201)
The subsequent
siege went on for six weeks. Finally, on April 19, Attorney General Janet Reno
gave order to flush the Branch Davidians out of the compound. Federal agents
used tanks to smash holes in the building. […] In all, seventy-six Davidians
died, including twenty-six children.
Waco and Ruby
Ridge made militarization a political issue. Perhaps counterintuitively, the
laws the agents were enforcing — federal gun control laws — put conservatives
in the unprecedented role of criticizing federal cops for overkill, and
liberals in the position of defending the aggressive tactics. (One fact about
Waco that conservative ATF critics often overlook: the military presence at the
compound was only made possible by the drug war. The ATF told the leaders of
Joint Task Force 6 — one of the many military-civilian police antidrug task
forces set up during the Reagan and Bush administrations — that David Koresh
was running a methamphetamine operation. The evidence for this was suspect at
best.) (ch. 7, p. 202)
The ATF abuses that came to light in the 1990s were a good
indication that the warriorlike, us-against-them mentality wasn't limited to
drug policing. Those police actions also gave some momentum to a new militia
movement — of at least caused the media to take notice of them. The militia
movement was vast and fairly diverse, but most groups had views about
government, guns, and property that were well to the right of the rest of the
country. Very few espoused violence, but the new attention on the few that did,
along with anger from the National Rifle Association (NRA), Gun Owners of
America, and the rants of right-wing personalities like [G. Gordon] Liddy,
inspired more reactionary opposition from the left [sic]. Then, of April 19,
1995, Timothy McVeigh set off a fertilizer bomb outside the Arthur Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 164 people. McVeigh claimed that he
bombed the building in retaliation for the events at Waco. (ch. 7, p. 203)
Starting 1989, involving Peter Kraska, U of Eastern Kentucky
criminologist. "One Coast Guard officer flatly admitted to Kraska that the
procedure" of using US Navy personnel and vessels to spot and
"intercept boats or ships that fit drug courier profiles" and have
them boarded and any police work done by the Coast Guard "was a way of
getting around the Navy's policy prohibiting its personnel from participating
in civil police actions."
[…] Kraska
began looking into indirect militarization: the rise of SWAT teams and other
paramilitary police teams; what might be called the criminal-justice-industrial
complex; and the increasing tendency of public officials to address social
problems with martial rhetoric and imagery and to suggest military-like solutions,
[206[ from the "wars on crime and drugs, to the heavy weaponry and
vehicles that police were beginning to use, to the proposals that juvenile
offenders be punished in "boot camps."
Kraska got funding and produced the data for "The
Numbers" table ending ch. 6 (reproduced above, p. 12), with the
proliferation of SWAT teams in small cities and larger towns summed up in
Kraska's phrase "'the militarization of Mayberry.'" Additionally,
"In the early 1980s, the aggregate number of SWAT deployments was just under
3,000. By 1995, it was just under 30,000.
[…] What was precipitating the surge in SWAT activity? The drug war,
almost exclusively." Balko asks and answers, "What does a SWAT team
do in a city with no violent crime? It creates violence out of nonviolent
crime" (ch. 7, p. 207).
Kraska tells of SWAT commanders telling him how their people
were instructed by "special forces folks who have come right out of the
jungles of Central and South America" and how "We've had teams of
Navy Seals and Army Rangers come here and teach us everything. We just have to
use our judgment and exclude the information like: 'at this point we bring in
the mortars and blow the place up" (ch. 7, p. 208). Kraska's informant
tells of a four-star general writing him expressing concern over such training.
Summarizing such concerns:
Back in the 1850s, the Cushing Doctrine had allowed federal
marshals to summon US troops to enforce domestic law. More than a hundred years
after the controversial policy was repealed by the Posse Comitatus Act, federal
marshals were now soliciting elite US military personnel again — not to enforce
domestic law themselves, but to teach civilian police officers how to enforce
the laws as if they were in the military. [p. 208]
Perhaps most
disturbing was Kraska's finding that these paramilitary police teams and
aggressive tactics were increasingly being used for regular patrols. By 1997,
20 percent of the departments he surveyed used SWAT teams or similar units for
patrol, mostly in poor, high-crime areas. This was an increase of 257 percent
since 1989.
SWAT
proponents argued that all of this buildup was in response to a real problem —
after all, violent crime had soared in the 1980s and early 1990s. But the SWAT
teams weren't generally responding to violent crime. They were usually serving
drug warrants. [… Kraska and his colleague Louie Cubellis] found that only 6.63 percent of the rise in SWAT
deployments could be explained by the rising crime rate. (ch. 7, pp.
208-09)
As had been happening throughout the drug war, this mass
militarization brought with it a new wave of dehumanization. In one follow-up interview to his survey, a SWAT
commander told Kraska, referring to the use of his team for routine patrols,
"When the soldiers ride in, you should see those blacks scatter."
Former San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara told National Journal in
2000 that in a recent SWAT conference he had attended, "officers
. . . were wearing these very disturbing shirts. On the front, there
were pictures of SWAT officers dressed in dark uniforms, wearing helmets, and
holding submachine guns. Below was written: 'We don't do drive-by shootings.'
On the back there was a picture of a demolished house. Below was written: 'We
stop.'"
Kraska found
more evidence of the mind-set problem in a separate ethnography study he
conducted. […] But before the police officers arrived [for a possibly illegal
training session with actual military personnel], Kraska talked to the trainers
about the proliferation of SWAT teams. "This shit is going on all
over," one f them said. ""Why serve an arrest warrant to some
crack dealer with a 38? With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can
kick ass and have fun." The other trainer jumped in. "Most of these
guys just like to play war; they get a rush out of search-and-destroy missions
instead of the bullshit they do normally. (ch. 7, p. 212)
Other style statements on trainees: a T-short with "a
picture of a burning city with gunship helicopters and the caption 'Operation
Ghetto Storm'" (ch. 7, pp. 212-13). Also Oakley wraparound sunglasses and
flattops or crew cuts of the military variety: "The Oakleys and crew cuts
were part of a muscle-bound, mechanistic look popular with younger police
officers. The look was usually accessorized with sensory-enhancement gear like
night-vision goggles to achieve what Kraska calls a 'techno-warrior' image. He
notes that one purveyor of SWAT gear and clothing calls its line 'Cyborg 21st'"
(ch. 7, p. 213)
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
COMMUNITY POLICING
When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, crime in America was
still climbing. The concept of community policing was growing
increasingly popular. […] Rather than taking a "call-and-response"
approach to policing […] cops walk regular beats. They go to community
meetings. They know the names of the principals of the schools in their
districts […].
In 1994
Clinton started a new grant program under the Justice Department called
Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS. For its inaugural year, Clinton
and leaders in Congress (most notably Sen.
Joe Biden) funded it with $148.4 million. [* * *]
The style of
community policing embraced by officials like [Nick] Pastore [in New Haven, CT]
and [Norm] Stamper [in San Diego] aims to make police a helpful presence in the
community, not an occupying presence. But theirs is not the only way to be
proactive about law enforcement. Street sweeps, occupation-like control of
neighborhoods, SWAT raids, and aggressive anti-gang policies are also
proactive. These police activities are aggressive, often violent, and usually a
net loss for civil liberties, but they are proactive. [218]
When Clinton, Biden, and other politicians touted the
COPS program, they did so in language that evoked the Peace Corps approach
(though both Clinton and Biden also
supported policies that promoted militarization). Although Clinton described
the goal of COPS as "build[ing] bonds of understanding and trust between
police and citizens," it wasn't clear if he or any other politician really
believed this. The majority of the funding in COPS grants was given simply to hire more police officers. The program
said little about how those officers should be used, or what sort of attitude they
should bring to the job. […] And so as the COPS program threw billions at
police departments under the pretense of hiring whistling, baton-twirling
Officer Friendlies to walk neighborhood beats […] many police agencies were
actually using the money to militarize (ch. 7, pp. 218-19).
Portland, OR:
From work by Paul Richmond, 1997 article in "the
alternative newspaper PDXS":
"The unfortunate truth about community policing as it is
currently being implemented is that it is anything but community based
[…]." Instead […] in Portland
[OR] the grants had resulted in "increased militarization of the police
force." Richmond also found in Portland that […] a federal program touted
as a way to encourage local police to get more involved with local communities
was actually federalizing local law enforcement. At the same time Clinton was
pushing COPS, the administration and Democrats in Congress were pushing
policies like "troops to cops" bills, management training programs
for police agencies based on federal models of policing, and a bill that would
allow local police departments to fund community policing programs with asset
forfeiture money obtained through the Justice Department's Equitable Sharing
Program — the program that allows [219] local police to ignore state forfeiture
laws by teaming up with the federal government. (ch. 7, pp. 219-20)
Richmond found
that while the overall cops-to-citizens ratio fell in the early 1990s, in
Portland, [OR,] between 1989 and 1994, the number of officers in the city's
tactical operations department jumped from two to fifty-six. The two officers
in charge of the city's tactical teams had formerly been in charge of the
city's Department of Community Policing.
Richmond also obtained a copy of the city's "Community Policing Strategic
Plan," passed by the city council in 1994. Among the plan's objectives was
to increase the police department's involvement with the federal ATF and the
Oregon National Guard. It included implementing at a local level Clinton's
"one strike and you're out" plan for drug use in public housing,
which allowed for raids on public housing tenants, followed by their possible
eviction, based on no more than an anonymous tip. Richmond was alarmed that so
many progressives in the city were embracing the community policing plan based
on little more than its pleasant-sounding name and that it was coming from a
Democratic administration in Washington and administered by a progressive city
government. The devil was in the details, and no one had bothered to look at
the details.
Little of this
would have surprised Peter Kraska. All of the police departments he surveyed
that had a SWAT team "also claimed to place high emphasis on the
democratic approach to community policing." Kraska found that when most
law enforcement officials heard "community policing," they thought of
the militarized zero-tolerance model.
(ch. 7, p. 220)
Wisconsin
In 2001, a Madison
Capital Times investigation found that sixty-five of Wisconsin's
eighty-three local SWAT teams had come into being since 1980 — twenty-eight of
them since 1996, and sixteen in just the previous year. In other words, more
than half of the state's SWAT teams had popped up since the inaugural year of
the COPS program. The newer tactical units had sprung up in absurdly small
jurisdictions like Forest County (population 9950), Mukwonago (7,519), and Rich
Lake (8,320). Many of the agents who populated these new SWAT teams […] had
been hired with COPS grants. A local criminologist was incredulous:
"Community policing initiatives and stockpiling weapons and grenade
launchers are totally incompatible." Perhaps that was true in theory, but
not in how community policing was being practiced.
Of course,
Byrne grants* and the 1033 program** had also contributed to the SWAT-ification
of the Dairy State. The paper found that in the 1990s, Wisconsin police
departments hauled in over 100,000 pieces of military equipment valued at more
than $1.75 million. Some of the bounty was benign, items like computers and
office equipment, but it also included "11 M-16s, 21 bayonets, four boats,
a periscope, and 41 vehicles […]."Columbia County also received
"surveillance equipment, cold water gear, tools battle dress uniforms, flak jackets, [and]
chemical suits." The county put its tactical team to use by sending it to
"Weedstock" in nearby Saulk County, an event where cops in full SWAT
attire intimidatingly stood guard while "hundreds of young people
gather[ed] peacefully to smoke marijuana and listen to music." (ch. 7, p.
221)
* <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Byrne_Memorial_Justice_Assistance_Grant_Program>
**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Support_Office>
This is how
the game is played. Drug arrests brought in federal money. Federal money and
1033 [Law-Enforce Support] let police departments buy cool battle garb to start
a SWAT team, which they justify to local residents by playing to fears of
terrorism, school shootings, and hostage takings But those sorts of events are
not only rare, they don't bring in any additional money. Drug raids bring in more federal funding, plus the possibility of asset forfeiture. All in the name of community policing.
During the
2008 campaign, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — but especially Joe Biden — credited the COPS program as the reason behind
America's historic crime drop that began in 1994. Biden's campaign website
during the 2008 primaries exclaimed, "In the 1990s the Biden Crime Bill
[an incarnation of the final bill establishing COPS] added 100,000 cops to America's streets. As a result, murder and violent
crime rates went down eight years in a row."
The Justice Department's inspector general put the new cops
number closer to 60,000, and a Heritage Foundation analysis found that,
accounting for attrition [sic], the total number of cops on the streets
increased between 6,000 and 40,000 [sic]. More to the point, there's little
evidence that the crime drop was a result of the program. A 2005 report by the
Government Accountability Office found that while the violent crime rate
dropped 32 percent between 1993 and 2000, at most, the COPS program accounted
for 2.5 percent of that decrease, and at a cost of $8 billion. A 2007 analysis
in the peer-reviewed academic journal Criminology concluded that
"COPS spending had little to no effect on crime." (ch. 7, p. 222)
In 2007 I was
asked to speak about police militarization at a "crime summit" hosted
by Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the House
Subcommittee on Crime. During a question-and-answer session, someone asked
about community policing and the possibility of restoring full funding to the
COPS grants. (The Bush administration had phased the program out.) Everyone
seemed to be in favor of the "Peace Corps" model of community
policing, and they also seemed to believe that this was what the COPS grants
were funding. Pointing to the Madison Capital Times investigation and [Peter]
Kraska's research, I explained that these idealized visions of community
policing didn't appear to have much to do with how the grants were actually
being used. Representative Scott stopped me.
"Are you
telling me that our community policing grants are being used to start and fund
. . . SWAT teams?"
I responded
that, yes, that was what Kraska and the Madison paper had found.
Scott replied,
with a bit of whimsy, "Well, that's not really what we
intended."
The room had a
good chuckle. The next year the Democrats increased funding to the COPS program
by $40 million. The following year, with Obama in the White House, the
program's budget increased 250 percent, to $1.55 billion. (ch. 7, p. 223)
Joseph McNamara at a "groundbreaking drug policy
conference in 1997 at the Hoover Institution," where McNamara was a
fellow. He'd worked as police chief in Kansas City and San José (spelled in Warrior
w/o the accent). "Among cities with
a population of 400,000 or more, San Jose also had the lowest crime rate in the
country for the last three years of McNamara's tenure. […] McNamara pulled this
off with one of the smallest per capita police departments in America."
This — plus generally conservative politics — gave McNamara "clout with
the right, despite his vocal criticism of the war on drugs, police abuse, and
police militarization." McNamara lays out a hypothetical starting with a
tip on crack at a house.
After laying
out the hypothetical […] McNamara turned to Chief [Bernard] Parks [LAPD]. What
was his next move. Parks responded that he'd attempt to verify the tip. If it
checked out, he'd send in the SWAT team. McNamara asked what sort of ammunition
the SWAT team used. Weren't their bullets capable of going through walls?
"They'll go through a car engine two blocks away," Parks answered.
McNamara then changed the hypothetical. What if it wasn't crack but marijuana?
Would he still send in an armed-to-the-teeth SWAT team? Parks said he would.
What if it was a shipment of bootlegged
Valium. Still with the SWAT team. Black market booze? SWAT team. (ch. 7 p. 225)
The police
chief of the second-largest city in America [Bernard Parks, LAPD] had just told
the audience that he was willing to use extraordinary force to confiscate a
supply of illegal drugs. It was a level of force that could well result [in]
death or injury to innocents — and indeed by that point [1997] already had,
countless times. What's more, he added that what drug he was pursuing and how
much actual harm that particular drug caused had no relevance on the
amount of force he elected to use. Every public official on the panel who had
the power to check that decision then told the same audience that they had no
interest in second-guessing him.
"It
really showed the extent of the problem," McNamara said. "You get
this robot mentality with these officials. The mayor said she knew nothing
about these raids and didn't want to know anything about them until they were
over. The judge wasn't interested in scrutinizing the raid until it was over —
when any damage would already be done. Everyone else said it wasn't their job
to worry about it. And so you end up with this dangerous decision made by
people of lower rank with little training, with little incentive to care much
about constitutional rights, with no oversight — no checks or balances..
Collateral damage is just part of the game." (ch. 7, p. 227)
North Hollywood Shoot-out 28 February 1997: bank
robbery by heavily armed and armored perpetrators, Larry Phillips Jr. and Emil Mătăsăreanu
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout>
In the fifteen
years since it happened, the North Hollywood Shoot-out has become the go-to incident
for proponents of police militarization. For years now it has been regularly
cited as the prime example of why cops need bigger guns, and why police
departments need SWAT teams. There's some merit to these arguments. A strong
argument could be made, for example, for allowing patrol officers to store
powerful weapons in the trunks of their squad cars in the event that they're
the first on the scene of such an incident — and the SWAT team is still ten or
twenty minutes away. But the incident isn't an argument for proliferation of
SWAT teams to small towns, for more militarized uniforms, or for using
increasingly militarized tactics for increasingly petty crimes.
[…] That the
best anecdote defenders of police militarization can come up with is fifteen
years old may attest to the rarity of such incidents. In any case, even most
critics of the SWAT phenomenon acknowledge that there are some situations were
a paramilitary police response is appropriate — and a heavily armed bank
robbery would be right at the top of that list. The criticism of SWAT
proliferation is that the overwhelming majority of SWAT deployments today are
to break into private residences to serve search warrants for nonviolent
crimes. (ch. 7, p. 230)
Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, 20 April 1999
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre.
>
The other
major incident from the late 1990s that proponents of militarization often cite
in justifying SWAT teams is the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School
[…]. Columbine is a particularly unfortunate example. Though there were
eventually eight hundred police officers and eight SWAT teams in the Columbine
campus, the SWAT teams held off from going inside to stop shooters Dylan
Klebold and Eric Harris because they deemed the situation too dangerous [i.e.,
for the police]. A spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department
justified the SWAT team's [sic: singular] actions after the shooting. "A
dead police officer would not be able to help anyone." Added SWAT team
leader Donn Kraemer, "If we went in and tried to take them and got shot,
we would be part of the problem." David Kepel of the Independence
Institute in Colorado explained how that panned out for the victims:
While one murder after another was being
perpetrated, a dozen police officers were stationed near [the] exit. These
officers made no attempt to enter the building, walk 15 steps, and confront the
murderers. (According to police speaking on condition of anonymity, one Denver
SWAT officer did begin to enter but was immediately "ordered down" by
commanders.)
Twenty
minutes after the rampage began, three SWAT officers were finally sent into the building — on the
first floor, on the side of the building furthest from […] where killings were
in progress. Finding students rushing out of the building, they decided to
escort students out, rather than track down the killers. This began a police
program to "contain the perimeter."
Instead of
confronting the killers, then, the SWAT
team frisked the victims [… and] then passed on another chance to confront
Harris and Klebold. (ch. 7, pp. 231)
Students
in the [cafeteria] room had called 911 and the line was open, so again the
killers' location was known. Many officers were massed near the cafeteria door.
They knew where the murderers were. They knew that the murderers were
attempting to get into a room to kill more people. The police stood idle.
Columbine was precisely the sort of incident for which the
SWAT team had been invented. It was the sort of incident often cited by
defenders of SWAT teams to justify their existence. And it was the sort of
incident for which even critics of SWAT teams concede the use of a SWAT team
would be appropriate. Yet not only did the SWAT teams at the scene not confront
the killers, potentially costing innocent lives, but the most respected SWAT
team in the country then reviewed the Jefferson County team's actions and found
their actions were appropriate. (ch. 7, p. 232)
[…T]hough they
make huge headlines and spark weeks of breathless coverage, school shootings
(and mass shootings in general) are exceedingly rare. University of Virginia
psychologist and education professor Dewey Cornell, who studies violence
prevention and school safety, has estimated that the typical school campus can
expect to see a homicide about once every several thousand years — hardly
justification to rush out to get a STAT team. Yet many college campuses now
have their own paramilitary police teams, and many cited Columbine and Virginia
Tech as the reason they needed one. (ch. 7, p. 233)
The
"Battle for Seattle" [1999]is commonly considered the start of the
modern antiglobalization movement. But it was also a landmark event in the way
police and city officials react to protests. In spite of the fact that there
were few injuries and no fatalities, the images that emerged from Seattle
depicted a city that had lost control. Going forward, "control would be
the prevailing objective for police handling protests. In the years to come,
the Darth Vader look would become the standard police presence at large
protests. Cities and police officials would commit mass violations of civil and
constitutional rights and deal with the consequences later. There would be
violent, preemptive SWAT raids, mass arrests, and sweeping use of police [236]
powers that ensnared violent protesters, peaceful protesters, and people who had
nothing to do with the protest at all.
That's why
[Seattle Police Chief Norm] Stamper calls his decisions in Seattle "the
worst mistake" of his career. He's seen how the police response to protest
has changed since 1999. "We gassed fellow Americans engaged in civil
disobedience," Stamper says. "We set a number of precedents [not
counting the Civil Rights Movement, and other 1950/60s actions — RDE], most of
them bad. And police departments across the country learned all the wrong
lessons from us. […] I mean, look at what happened to those Occupy protesters
at UC Davis, where the cop just pepper sprays them down like he'd watering a
bed of flowers, and I think that we played a part in making that sort of thing
so common — so easy to do now." (ch. 7, pp. 236-37)
The Numbers (ch. 7, pp.
237-38)
• Number of
SWAT raids conducted by the Minneapolis Police Department in 1987: 36
• Number of
SWAT raids conducted by the Minneapolis Police Department in 1996: over 700
• Number of
raids carried out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms from 1993 to
1995: 523
•
Percentage of these ATF raids that used dynamic entry: 49 percent
•
Percentage of these ATF raids that turned up weapons of any kind: 18 percent
•
Approximate number of paramilitary police raids in the United States in 1980:
3,000
•
Approximate number of paramilitary police raids in 2001: 45,000
• Number of
SWAT deployments in Orange County, Florida, from 1993 to 1997: 619
•
Percentage of those SWAT deployments undertaken to serve drug warrants: 94
percent [237]
• Number of police officers in
the tactical operations branch of the Portland,
Oregon, Police Department in 1989: 2
• Number of
Portland police officers in the tactical operations branch in 1994: 56
•
Percentage of police departments in cities of 100,000 or more that had a SWAT
team in 1982: 59 percent
• … in
1995: 89 percent
• Average number of times each
of those SWAT teams was deployed in 1980: 13
…
in 1989: 38
…
in 1995: 52
•
Percentage increase in the number of police departments using tactical units
for proactive patrol from 1982 to 1997: 292 percent.
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
Chapter 8,
"The 2000s — A Whole New War
Betty Taylor, detective in sheriff's department in Lincoln
County, Missouri (rural), drafted into SWAT team (ch. 8, pp. 239-40). After a
raid in November 2000 —
Taylor was
shattered. "Here I come in with all my SWAT gear on, dressed in armor from
head to toe, and this little girl looks up at me, and her only thought is to
defend her little brother. I thought, How can we be the good guys when we come
into the house looking like this, screaming and pointing guns at the people
they love? How can we be the good guys when a little girl looks up at me and wants
to fight me? And for what? […]
[TAYOR:]
"Good police work has nothing to do with dressing up in black and breaking
into houses in the middle of the night. And the mentality changes when they get
put on the SWAT team. I remember a guy I was good friends with, it just
completely changed him. The us-versus-them
mentality takes over. You see that mentality in regular patrol officers too.
But it's much much worse on the SWAT team. They're more concerned with the
drugs than they are with innocent bystanders. Because when you get into that
mentality, there are no innocent people.
There's us and there's the enemy.
Children and dogs are always the easiest casualties. (ch. 8, p. 241)
Police militarization would accelerate in the 2000s. […
Federal funding for anti-terrorism equipment. Plus:] The 1990s trend of
government officials using paramilitary tactics and heavy-handed force to make
political statements or to make an example of certain classes of nonviolent offenders
would continue, especially in response to political protests. The battle gear
and aggressive policing would also start to move into more mundane crimes –
SWAT teams have recently been used even for regulatory inspections.
But the last
few years have also seen some trends that could spur some movement toward reform. Technological advances in personal electronic devices have armed a
large percentage of the public with the power to hold police more accountable
with video and audio recordings. The rise of social media has enabled cities to
get accounts of police abuses out and quickly disseminated. [242]
[…] Over just
the six years I've been covering this issue, I've noticed that media accounts
of drug raids have become less deferential to police. Reporters have become
more willing to ask questions about the appropriateness of police tactics and
more likely to look at how a given raid fits into broader policing trends, both
locally and nationally. Internet commenters on articles about incidents in
which police may have used excessive force also seem to have grown more
skeptical about police actions, particularly in botched drug raids. (ch. 8, pp.
242-43)
Perversely, actual success in reducing crime is generally not
rewarded with federal money, on the presumption that the money ought to go
where it's most needed — high crime areas. So the grants reward police
departments for making lots of easy arrests (i.e., low-level drug offenders)
and lots of seizures (regardless of size), and for serving lots of warrants.
When it comes to tapping into federal funds, whether any of that actually reduces
crime or makes the community safer is irrelevant — and in fact, successfully
fighting crime could hurt a department's ability to rake in federal money. (ch.
8, p. 243)
As a result
[of a series of court decisions and policies, including the U.S. Federal Byrne
grant program], we have roving squads of drug cops, loaded with SWAT gear, who
get more money if they conduct more raids, make more arrests, and seize more
property, and they are virtually immune to accountability if they get out of
line. In 2009 the Justice Department attempted a cost-benefit analysis of these
[primarily narcotics] task forces but couldn't even get to the point of
crunching the numbers. The task forces weren't producing any numbers to crunch.
"Not only were data insufficient to estimate what take forces
accomplished," the report [cited p. 360 n.2] read, "data were
inadequate to even tell what the task forces did for routine work."
Not
surprisingly, the proliferation of heavily armed task forces that have little
accountability and are rewarded for making lots of busts has resulted in some
abuse.
The most
notorious scandal involving these task forces came in the form of a massive
drug sting in the town of Tulia, Texas. On July 23, 1999, the task force donned
black ski-mask caps and full SWAT gear to conduct a series of coordinated
predawn raids across [244] Tulia. By 4:00 AM, forty black people — 10 percent of Tulia's black population — and six
whites were in handcuffs. The Tulia Sentinel declared "We do
not like these scumbags doing business in our town. [They are] a cancer on our
community, it's time to give them a major dose of chemotherapy behind
bars." The paper followed up with the headline "Tulia's Streets Cleared of Garbage."
The raids were
based on the investigative work of Tom Coleman, a sort of freelance cop who, it
would later be revealed, had simply invented drug transactions that had never
occurred. [Later, "Coleman was […] named Texas lawman of the year.] […] In
2005, Coleman was convicted of perjury. […]
The following
year, it all happened again. In November 2000, SWAT teams from Byrne-funded
South Central Texas Narcotics Task Force rolled int Hearne, a town of about
five thousand people […], to wage another series of coordinated raids. The raids netted twenty-eight arrests —
twenty-seven of the suspects were black. One of them was Regina Kelly [245 …].
In part because
of Kelly's courageous refusal to accept a plea bargain for a crime she didn't
commit, we now know that all twenty-eight indictments were based on the word of
a single confidential informant. […] At the civil trial for the lawsuit brought
by Kelly and other defendants, the informant testified that [District Attorney
John] Paschall had given him a list of twenty black men. He promised leniency
for the informant's own burglary charge if he helped Paschall convict the men
on the list. The informant also testified he was promised $100 for every
suspect he helped convict beyond that list of twenty. The lawsuit was settled
in 2005. Of the twenty-eight people charged, seventeen were later exonerated.
The 2008 movie American Violet was based on Kelly's experience after she
was arrested.
But similar
mass round-up raids had been going on in Hearne [Texas] for fifteen years.
"They come on helicopters, military-style, SWAT style [….] In the
apartments I was living in, in the projects, there were a lot of children
outside playing. They don't care.
They throw kids on the ground, put guns to their heads. They're kicking in
doors. They just don't care." (ch. 8, pp. 245-46)
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
Bush into Obama/Biden Years
In the
following years, there were numerous other corruption scandals, botched raids,
sloppy police work, and other allegations of misconduct against the federally
funded task forces in Texas. Things got so [bad?] that by the middle of the
2000s Gov. Rick Perry began diverting state matching funds away from the task
forces to other programs. The cut in funding forced many task forces to shut
down. The stream of lawsuits shut down or limited the operations of others. In
2001 the state had fifty-one federally funded task forces. By the spring of
2006, it was down to twenty-two.
Funding for
the Byrne grant program had held steady at about $500 million through most of
the Clinton administration. Just as it had done with the cops [COPS?] program,
the Bush administration began to pare the program down […]. This was more out
of an interest in limiting federal influence in law enforcement than concern
for police abuse or drug war excesses.
But the
reaction from law enforcement was interesting. In March 2008, Byrne-funded task
forces across the country staged a series of coordinated drug raids dubbed Operation Byrne Blitz. The intent was
to make a series of large drug seizures to demonstrate how important the Byrne
grants were to fighting the drug war. In Kentucky alone, for example, task
forces uncovered 23 methamphetamine labs, seized more than 2,400 pounds of
marijuana, and arrested 565 people for illegal drug use. Of course, if police
in a single state could simply go out and find 23 meth labs and 2,400 pounds of
marijuana in twenty-four hours just to make a political point about drug war
funding, that was probably a good indication that twenty years of Byrne grants
and four decade of drug warring hadn't really accomplished much.
During the
2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama
criticized Bush and the Republicans for cutting Byrne, a federal police program
beloved by his running mate Joe Biden.
Despite Tulia, Hearne, a growing pile of bodies from botched drug raids, and
the objections of groups as diverse as the ACLU, the Heritage Foundation, La
Raza, and the Cato Institute, Obama promised to restore full funding to the
program, which, he said, "has been critical to creating the anti-gang [247]
and anti-drug task forces our communities need." He kept his promise. The
2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act resuscitated the Byrne grants with
a whopping $2 billion infusion, by far the largest budget in the programs
twenty-year history. (ch. 8, pp. 247-48)
13 September 2000: Alberto Sepulveda killed in raid
in a series around Modesteo, CA
"Back in
the early 1970s, nationwide outrage over a series of wrong-door drug raids had
inspired furious politicians to hastily call congressional hearings; as a
consequence, the law that had authorized those raids was repealed. Now, in
2000, an eleven-year-old boy had just been obliterated at close range with a
shotgun as his parents and siblings lay on the ground beside him. And even that
wasn't enough to stop his own town from discontinuing the aggressive
tactics that caused his death" (ch. 8, pp. 249-50).
The George W. Bush Administration quickly made it clear that
the drug war would once again be fought as a culture war. […] But when the 9/11
attacks happened eight months after Bush was inaugurated, they presented a new
opportunity. Instead of exploiting the fear of crime or tapping into what
remained of anti-counterculture sentiment, they could now exploit the fear of
terrorist attacks. They would use the 9/11 attack for drug war propaganda.
And so,
starting in the February following the attacks [i.e., 2002], the Office of
National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) started the "I helped …"
campaign, which consisted of commercial and print ads claiming that casual drug
users in the United States were supporting the very sort of terrorists that had
attacked America. The television commercials featured a series of young people
portrayed as casual drug users. One by one, the young actors rattled off the
varieties of atrocity allegedly funded by recreational drug use. "I helped
kill a policeman," one said. "I helped murder families," said
another. […]
The campaign
was not only shamefully exploitive, it was simply false. The claim that casual
drug users supported terrorism was dubious at best. To the extent that black
market drug purchases in the United State did support terror groups, it was the
"black market" part that made it possible. Nearly all the terror
attacks listed on the DEA's website at the time had been attacks by
drug-smuggling groups related to the drug trade, and nearly all had taken place
in Latin America and Mexico. The only widely used drug in the United [250]
States with any tangible connection to terrorism was heroin, and even that link
was tenuous. (ch. 8, pp. 250-51)
If anything,
there was a stronger argument that the country's antidrug efforts were
sponsoring terrorism. In May 2001 […,] the US State Department announced a $43
million aid gift to Afghanistan, which at the time was ruled by the Taliban.
The grant was intended to be used to compensate Afghan farmers who had been
hurt by a Taliban edict (encouraged by the United States) banning the
cultivation of heroin poppies. Of course, the edict didn't really stop the
heroin from flowing out of Afghanistan. It simply enabled the Taliban to
consolidate heroin production so that more of the revenue went directly to the
regime. The United States had also given aid to support a drug war in Thailand
that included government "death squads" that human rights groups
accused of carrying out as many as four thousand extrajudicial executions of
suspected drug offenders. US aid had also gone to right-wing paramilitary
groups in Colombia that were accused of mass human rights abuses.
From a broader
view, the ads weren't all that different from prior attempt to associate drugs and intoxicants with
whatever bogeyman the country happened to be facing at the time. But by
tying even casual drug users to terrorism so soon after one of the most
horrific attacks on US soil in the country's history — particularly an attack
that took the lives of so many police officers — the federal government
afforded drug cops yet more license to
treat suspected drug offenders as enemy combatants not as citizens with
rights. (ch. 8, p. 251)
The trendy new
drug throwing the media and politicians into hysterics was Ecstasy. Raves were
the new, weird, and different dance parties where teenagers were allegedly
taking this crazy sex drug. Cue the moral panic, political grandstanding, and
ensuing aggressive crackdown. Prior to the raid in Racine [2 Nov. 2002], Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware seemed
particularly obsessed with rave parties. Politicians seemed to think that any
party with techno music, pulsing lights, and neon inevitably degenerated into
underage kids getting high on Ecstasy and engaging in mass orgies. In the
summer of 2002, Biden was pushing his
RAVE Act, an absurdly broad law that would have made venue and club owners
liable for running a drug operation if they merely sold the "paraphernalia"
common to parties where people took Ecstasy
— accessories like bottled water and glow sticks. After attempting to sneak the
bill through Congress with various parliamentary maneuvers, Biden was finally
able to get a slightly modified version folded into the bill that created the Amber Alert for missing children.
Once again a politician had demagogued worries over a mostly harmless drug into
a climate of fear. And once again that fear led to aggressive, whole disproportionate
crackdowns across the country. (ch. 8, p. 257)
{Balko
misses the point that Amber Alerts — if in themselves useful — participate in another moral panic: "The publicity and
horror associated with extreme cases of child kidnapping create a socially
constructed perception that such crimes are pervasive and can induce “moral
panic” about predatory threats to children. This often leads to arguably
irrational and excessive policy responses." <https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=245226>.}
Spanish Fork Canyon, Utah: August 2005, rave
raid by > 90 cops + SWAT against 1500 at an outdoor dance party
The other new
concept at work in Racine and Spanish Fork was the willingness to subject large
groups of people to commando tactics in hopes of catching even a few offenders.
By the late 2000s, SWAT teams were increasingly called out to raid entire bars
and nightclubs for drug activity. […] In November 2003, police in Goose Creek,
South Carolina, raided an entire high school, conducting a blanket
commando-style raid on Stratford High School. Students were ordered at gunpoint
to lie face-down on the floor while police searched their lockers and persons
for drugs. Some were handcuffed. […] The raid turned up no illicit drugs, and
the police made no arrests. (ch. 8, p. 258)
<http://www.mtv.com/news/1527912/settlement-reached-in-suit-over-2003-high-school-drug-raid/>
Largely
black student "caught up" in raid:
<https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/09/us/raid-at-high-school-leads-to-racial-divide-not-drugs.html>
One particularly
aggressive action peppered with war rhetoric occurred in April 2006, when
police in Buffalo, New York, staged a series of drug raids throughout the city
under the moniker Operation Shock and Awe. [* * *]
City leader
were furious, not because city police had just terrorized innocent people with
fruitless SWAT raids, but because so many petty offenders were let off. City
officials demanded tougher drug laws, and discussed the possibility of sending
drug cops and SWAT teams out with housing code inspectors to clean up suspected
crack houses without those pesky Fourth Amendment warrant requirements. (ch. 8,
p. 259).
In the 2000s,
the US Supreme Court somehow managed to inflict more damage on the already
crippled Castle Doctrine. […]
In 2003 the Supreme
Court unanimous ruled that fifteen to twenty seconds is sufficient time for
police to wait after knocking before forcing entry. […] The opinion, written by
Justice David Souter [….] indicated that even shorter wait times might be
justified in narcotics cases because of the disposableness of the evidence.
Here again, a US Supreme Court opinion had taken a position that makes it
easier to use violent dynamic-entry tactics
on low-level drug offends than major ones (because smaller quantities are
easier to destroy than larger ones) and for nonviolent offenses like drugs or
gambling (where the incriminating evidence is generally disposable) than for
crimes like weapons violations or murder (guns and bodies being tougher to
destroy quickly). (ch. 8, p. 260)
[…T]he knock-and-announce rule arose out of the common-law
tradition and the Castle Doctrine valued so highly by the American Founders. To
protect the sanctity of the home, the police were obligated to give a homeowner
the opportunity to grant them entrance in order to prevent a violent
confrontation, the destruction of the door and property, and the infliction of
terror upon him and his family. Souter's direction to police to consider disposal
time instead of the time it would take an occupant to come to the door not
only does away with the notion that the purpose of the knock-and-announce rule
is to give citizens the opportunity to avoid a violent confrontation, it all
presupposes that all drug suspects are guilty. […]
In [United
States vs.] Banks [2003], a unanimous Court decided that preserving
the evidence needed to convict people suspected of nonviolent, consensual drug
crimes was more important than protecting innocent people from the violence of
a paramilitary-style police raid. Thirty years after it began, the modern drug
war had finally killed the Castle
Doctrine. (ch. 8, p. 261)
Alberto Spruill: 57-year-old described as
"'devout churchgoer'"; Harlem, 16 May 2003, "no-knock
warrant" (p. 263) and "'flash-bang' grenade" (p. 264).
Timothy Brockman: "a frail, sixty-eight-year-old
former Marine" (violent raid; p. 264)
In its own
follow-up piece, the Village Voice found that reports of botched
no-knocks had been pouring into the NYPD for years. "Until Spruill's
death, the NYPD had done nothing to stem the number of incidents,' the Voice
wrote, "despite receiving a memo from the Civilian Complaint Review Board
in January noting the high number of raid complaints. Last March the NAACP also
approached NYPD commissioner Raymond W. Kelly about the raids." The raids
were straining already tense relations between police and minority communities.
One of the wrongly raided, Orlando Russell, told the Voice that while he had
once been an "upstanding citizen," he was fed up with the number of no-knock raids on low-income and minority
communities. (ch. 8, pp. 264-65)
Assault Weapons Ban expiring 2004 / National Institute
for Justice Study: assault weapons and violent crime (p. 269)
The NIJ study
was used by gun rights groups to argue against renewing the assault weapons
ban. But it was also a strong piece of evidence undercutting the common
argument from law enforcement officials that SWAT teams and military gear were
essential because the police were in a nonstop arms race with drug dealers and
other criminals — call it the North Hollywood Shoot-out argument [North
Hollywood Shoot-out 28 February 1997: bank robbery by heavily armed and armored
perpetrators].
And in fact
the 2004 NIJ study was only the most recent to cut against that argument. In
1995 the Justice Department had released a study showing that 86 percent of
violent gun crimes in the United States involved a handgun. […] Just 3 percent
of murders in 1993 were committed with rifles, and just 5 percent with
shotguns. […] A five-year investigation in Orange County, Florida, in the
mid-1990s likewise found that just 13 percent of SWAT raids turned up weapons.
In 2007 I
asked David Doddridge, a retired narcotics cop and LAPD veteran, about the
argument that SWAT tactics are necessary because drug dealers are increasingly
well armed. "It just isn't true," he said. "In twenty-one years
at LAPD, I never once saw any assault weapons on a drug raid. Drug dealers
prefer handguns, which are easier to conceal. Occasionally you'll find a shotgun.
But having a bunch of high-powered weaponry around is just too much trouble for
them. […]" Doddridge's experience isn't universal, but it is common among
drug cops I've talked to. There do seem to be more higher-powered arms around
the border, and obviously cops who investigate the sale and smuggling of
illegal guns will tend to find a greater quantity of more powerful weapons in
the course of their work.
But even when
the crime rate was peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was little
evidence that murderers were using high-powered weapons. In a 1991 paper for
the Independence In-[270]statute (a libertarian think tank), researchers David
Kopel and Eric Morgan ran a survey of dozens of American cities and found that,
in general, fewer than 1 percent of the weapons seized by police fit the
definition of an "assault weapon." Nationally, they found that fewer
than 4 percent of homicides involved rifles of any kind. And fewer than
one-eighth of 1 percent of homicides involved weapons of military caliber. Even
fewer homicides involved weapons commonly called "assault" weapons.
The proportion of police fatalities
caused by assault weapons was around 3 percent, a number that remained
relatively constant throughout the 1980s.
[* * *]
But more generally, the argument that well-armed criminals have made cop's jobs
more dangerous than ever just isn't backed up by the data. The job of police officer has been getting progressively safer for a
generation. The number of officer fatalities peaked in 1974 and has been
steadily dropping since. In fact, 2012
was the safest year for police officers since the 1950s. According to the
FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, the homicide rate for police officers in 2010 […]
was about 7.9 per 100,000 officers. That's about 60 percent higher than the
overall homicide rate in America, which is 4.8. But it's lower than the
homicide rates in many large cities, including Atlanta (17.3), Boston (11.3),
Dallas (11.3), Kansas City (21.1), Nashville (8.9) […] and Tulsa (13.7). In
fact, of the seventy-four US cities with populations of 250,000 or more,
thirty-six have murder rates higher than that of police in America. You are
more likely to be murdered just by living in these cities than the average
American police officer is to be murdered on the job. (ch. 8, pp. 270-71)
Flash-Bang Grenades killed an officer in his car,
plus other cops
Every day SWAT teams across the country use the very same
explosives that inured [these] agents […] — and they use them against American
citizens. Granted, they aren't deployed in quite as tight an area as an
enclosed car. But garages [as with one cop casualty]? Certainly. Also bedrooms,
kitchens, hallways, and living rooms. […] [T]he vast majority of the time
they're used in service of warrants for nonviolent crimes — and not even
against people convicted of those crimes, but people merely suspected of them.
They're also used against anyone else who happens to be in the house at the
time of the raid. And against the victims of wrong-door raids. (ch. 8, p. 276)
By the end of
the decade, state and local SWAT teams were regularly being used not only for
raids and poker games and gambling operations but also for immigration raids (on both businesses and private homes) and raids
on massage parlors, cat houses, and unlicensed strip clubs. Today the sorts of
offenses that can subject a citizen to the SWAT treatment defy caricature. If
the government wants to make an example of you by pounding you with a wholly
disproportionate use of force, it can. It's rare that courts or politicians
even object, much less impose consequences.
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
Child Porn and Killing Dogs
Another
example is the use of these tactics on people suspected of downloading child pornography.
Because people
suspected of such crimes are generally considered among the lowest of the low,
there's generally little objection to using maximum force to apprehend them.
But when police use force to demonstrate disgust for the crimes the target is
suspected of committing, three's always a risk of letting disgust trump good
judgment. [… 286]
There have
been several instances in recent years of police waging child porn raids on
people after tracing IP addresses, only to learn after the fact that the
victims of the raid had an open wireless router that someone else had used to
download the pornography. Inevitably, the lesson drawn by police and by the
media covering these stories is not that a SWAT team may be an inappropriate
way to arrest someone suspected of looking at child porn on a computer, or that
police who insist on using such tactics should probably factor the possibility
of an open router into their investigation before breaking down someone's door,
but rather that we should all make sure our wireless routers are password
protected — so we don't get wrongly raided by a SWAT team, too. (ch. 8, pp.
286-87)
In the 2000s talking about the raid on the Branch Davidians
and lack of sympathy Tim Lynch of Cato Institute found among his audience:
"[…] he finds that people are somewhat sympathetic to the argument that
the government overreacted, but that they still can't get past the weirdness of
the Branch Davidians themselves — their stockpile of weapons and the claims of
sexual abuse and drug distribution in the community. Even the children who died
are sometimes [289] dismissed with guilt by association." But —
But when he mentions that the ATF agents killed the Davidians'
dogs […] people become visibly angry. I have found the same thing to be true in
my reporting on drug raids.
At first, that
may seem to indicate that people callously value the lives of pets more than
the lives of people. But the fact that killing
the dogs during these raids has become nearly routine in many police
agencies demonstrates just how casually these agencies have come to accept drug
war collateral damage. When I started logging cop-shoots-dog incidents on my
blog (under the probably sensational term "puppycide"), people began
send me new stories as they happened. Cops
are now shooting dogs at the slightest provocation. As of this writing, I'm
sent accounts of a few incidents each week. (ch. 8, pp. 289-90)
What is clear is that police are almost always cleared of any
wrongdoing in these shootings. An officer's word that he felt a dog posed a
threat to his safety is generally all it takes. Whether or not the officer's
fear was legitimate doesn't seem to matter. Thanks to smart phones and surveillance
cameras, a growing batch of these incidents have been caught on video and have
shown that officers' claims [290] that the dog was threatening often aren't
matched by the dog's body language. In recent years, police officers have shot
and killed chihuahuas, golden retrievers, labs, miniature dachshunds, Wheaton
terriers, and Jack Russell terriers. In 2012 a California police officer shot
and killed a boxer and pregnant chihuahua, claiming the boxer had threatened
him. The chihuahua, he said, got caught in the crossfire. Police officers have
also recently shot dogs that were chained, tied, or leash, going so far as to
kill pets while merely questioning neighbors about a crime in the area, cutting
across private property in pursuit of a suspect, and after responding to false
burglar alarms.
It is possible
that these incidents could just be attributed to rogue cops. But the fact that
the police are nearly always excused in these cases — even in the more
ridiculous examples — suggests there may be an institutional problem. (ch. 8,
pp. 290-91)
Possibility of institutional problem reinforced by the fact
that "both the ASPCA and the Humane Society […] offer such training [in
reading and responding to dogs] to any police department that wants it, while
few take advantage of the offer. Joseph Pentangelo, the ASPCA's assistant
director for law enforcement [… and veteran of NYPD] told me, 'New York is the
only state I know of that mandates formalized training, and that's during
academy. There are some individual departments in other parts of the country
that avail themselves of our training, but not many, not enough." To which
Balko contrasts USPS, where such training is common (ch. 8, p. 291).
The fact that
the Postal Service offers such training and most police departments don't lends
some credence to the theory that dog
shootings are part of the larger problem of a battlefield mentality that
lets police use lethal force in response to the slightest threat […]. It's an
evolving phenomenon," says Norm Stamper, the former Seattle police chief.
"It started when drug dealers began to recruit pit bulls to guard their
supply. These dogs weren't meant to attack cops. They were meant to attack
other drug dealers who came to rob them. But of course they did attack cops.
And yes, that's awfully scary if one of those things latches on to your
leg."
But Stamper
says that like many aspects of modern policing, dog shootings have had a
legitimate origin, but the practice has since become a symptom of the mind-set
behind a militarized police culture. "[…] These guys think that the only
solution to a dog that's yapping or charging is shooting and killing it. That's
all they know. It goes with the notion that police officers have to control every situation, to control all
the variables. That's an awesome responsibility, and if you take it on, you're
caving to delusion. You no longer exercise discrimination or discretion. You
have to control, and the way you control is with authority, power, and force. With a dog, the easiest way to take
control is to simply kill it […], especially if there are no consequences for
doing so." (ch. 8 p, 292)
Protests
2009 G20,
Pittsburgh, David L. Lawrence Convention Center
The most egregious police actions seemed to take place on the
Friday evening before the summit, around the university [of Pittsburgh], when
police began ordering student who were in public places to disperse, despite
the fact that they had broken no laws. Students who moved too slowly were
arrested, as were students who were standing in front of the dormitories where
they lived.
A University
of Pittsburgh spokesman later said that the tactic was to break up crowds that
"had the potential of disrupting normal activities, traffic flow, egress
and the like.... Much [sic] of the arrests last [294] night had to do with
failure to disperse when ordered." Note that no one needed to have broken
any actual laws to get arrested. The potential to break a law was more than
enough. That standard was essentially a license of the police to arrest anyone,
anywhere in the city, at any time for any reason.
Pennsylvania
ACLU legal director Vic Walczak said the problem was that police didn't bother
to attempt to manage the protests. They simply suppressed them. In the process,
they rounded up not only innocent protesters but innocent students who had
nothing to do with the protests at all. In all 190 people were arrested. […]
The police presence "seemed to focus almost exclusively on peaceful
demonstrators," Walczak said. "On [Friday] night they didn't even
have the excuse of property damage […] or any illegal activity. It's really
inexplicable."
Inexcusable
perhaps, but not inexplicable. Since Seattle, this had become the template. At
the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, police conducted peremptory
raids of the homes of protesters before the convention had even started. (ch.
8, pp. 294-95)
There were
similar problems at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Police in Denver
showed up for the protests decked out in full riot gear. One particularly
striking photo from Denver [295] showed a sea of cops in shiny black armor,
batons in hand, surrounding a small, vastly outnumbered group of protesters.
The most volatile night of the convention featured one incident in which
Jefferson County, Colorado deputies unknowingly clashed with and then
pepper-sprayed undercover Denver cops posing as violent protesters. The
city later paid out $200,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging that a Denver SWAT
team was making indiscriminate arrests, rounding up protesters and bystanders
alike.
Perhaps the
best insight into the mentality of the police brought to the DNC protests could
be found on the T-shirts the Denver police union had printed up for the event.
The shirts should a menacing cop holding a baton. The caption: DNC 2008: We Get Up Early to Beat the Crowds.
Police were spotted wearing similar shirts at the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago.
At the 1996 DNC convention in Chicago, cops were seen wearing shirts that read We kicked your father's ass in 1968 … Wait
'till you see what we do to you!
The default
militaristic response to protest of overkill was then given an extended
national stage during the Occupy protest of 2011. In the most infamous incident
[…] Lt. John Pike of the University of California—Davis campus police casually
hosed down a peaceful group of protesters with a pepper-spray canister. But
that was far from the only incident. […]
One thing the
Occupy crackdowns did seem to do was focus renewed attention on police tactics
and police militarization. Big-picture stories about the Pentagon buildup,
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding for antiterror gear, and the
proliferation of SWAT teams started streaming out of media outlets, giving the
militarization issue the most coverage it had received since Kraska's [296]
studies came out in the late 1990. Part of that was due to social media. The
ubiquity of smart phones and the viral capacity of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr,
and blogs were already bringing unprecedented accountability to police
misconduct and government oppression […]. But the Occupiers, who tended to be
young, white, and middle- to upper-middle-class knew social media like few
other demographics. (ch. 8, pp. 295-97)
The political
reaction to the Occupy crackdowns was interesting to watch. In the 1990s, it
had been the right wing — particularly the far right — that was up in arms over
police militarization. Recall the outrage on the right over Waco, Ruby Ridge,
and the raid to seize Elián González. The left had largely either remained
silent or even defended the government's tactics in those cases. But the
right-wing diatribes against jackbooted thugs and federal storm-troopers all
died down once the Clinton administration left office, and they were virtually
nonexistent after September 11, 2001. By the time cops started cracking heads
at the Occupy protests, some conservatives were downright gleeful. The militarization of federal law
enforcement certainly didn't stop, but the 9/11 attacks and a friendly
administration seemed to quell the conservatives' concerns. So long as law
enforcement was targeting hippie protesters, undocumented immigrants, suspected
drug offenders, and alleged terrorist sympathizers, they were back to being
heroes. (ch. 8, p. 297)
"As
long as partisans are only willing to speak out against aggressive, militarized
police tactics when they're used against their own and are dismissive or even
supportive of such tactics when used against those whose politics they dislike,
it seems unlikely that the country will achieve enough of a political consensus
to begin to slow down the trend" (ch. 8, p. 300).
Just as with
Bill Clinton, there was hope among progressives that Barack Obama would take a more conciliatory, less militaristic
approach to the drug war. And just as with Bill Clinton, Obama has come up
short. According to a tally by Current TV, by [300] the end of his first term,
Obama had overseen more federal raids on
medical marijuana dispensaries in four years than George W. Bush had
presided over in eight. Obama also stepped up immigration raids and continued the raids on doctors and pain
clinics suspected of overprescribing opioids.
He continued to encourage Mexico's policy (aided by US foreign aid and weapons)
of fighting its drug war with the military, despite the horrifying carnage
cause by that policy. And as previously discussed Obama and Democratic leaders
in Congress refunded Byrne grant and
COPS programs that contributed to
the rise in SWAT teams and multi-jurisdictional anti-drug and anti-gang task
forces — and at record levels.
The 1033 program gas also soared to new
heights under Obama [… leading to more military becoming cops and more]
Pentagon giveaways […]. (ch. 8, pp. 300-01)
The Numbers [for 1980s]
• Number of
drugs raids in New York City in 1994: 1,447 … in 1997: 2,977 … in 2002: 5,117
•
Approximate number of raids each year by the Toledo, Ohio, SWAT team, as of
2008: 400
•
Percentage of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people with a SWAT team in 1984:
25.6 percent
…
in 1990: 52.1 percent
…
in 2005: 80 percent
•
Approximate number of SWAT raids in the United States in 1995: 30,000
…
in 2001: 45,000
…
in 2005: 50,000-60,000
• Total
number of federal agencies employing law enforcement personnel in 1996: 53
…
in 2008: 73
• Total
number of federal law enforcement officers as of 1996: 74,000 (28 per 100,000
citizens)
…
in 2008: 120,000 (40 per 100,000
citizens)
• Number of
SWAT teams in the FBI alone in 2013: 56
• Unlikely
federal agencies that have used SWAT teams: US Fish and Wildlife Services,
Consumer Product Safety Commission, National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human
Services, US National Park Service, Food and Drug Administration
• Value of
surplus military gear received by Johnston, Rhode Island, from the Pentagon in
2010-2011: $4.1 million
•
Population of Johnston, Rhode Island, in 2010: 28,769
• Partial
list of equipment given to the Johnston police department: 30 M-16 rifles, 599
M-16 magazines containing about 18,000 rounds, a "sniper targeting
calculator," 44 bayonets, 12 Humvees, and 23 snow blowers. (ch. 8, pp.
307-308)
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
Chapter 9, Reform
Maryland (more dogs)
Cheye Calvo, part-time job of mayor of Berwyn Heights,
Maryland. Raid 29 July 2008. Lived with wife, mother-in-law, and two black
Labradors (Payton and Chase). "In 2004, at thirty-three, he was the
youngest elected mayor in Prince George's County, Maryland" (ch. 9, p.
309. Calvo upstairs, changing clothes for a meeting.
The next thing
Calvo remembers is the sound of his mother-in-law screaming. He ran to the
window and saw heavily armed men clad in black rushing his front door. Next
came the explosion. He'd later learn that this was when the police blew open
his front door. Then came the gunfire. Then boots stomping the floor. Then more
gunfire. Calvo, still in his boxers, screamed, "I'm upstairs, please don't
shoot!" He was instructed to walk downstairs with his hands in the air,
the muzzles of two guns pointed at him. He still didn't know it was the police.
He described what happened next at a Cato Institute forum six weeks later.
"At the bottom of the stairs, they bound my hands, pulled me across the
living room, and forced me to kneel on the floor in front of my broken door. I
thought it was a home invasion. I was fearful that I was about to be
executed." I later asked Calvo what might have happened if he'd had a gun
in his home for self-defense. His answer: "I'd be dead." In another
interview, he would add, "The worst thing I could have done was defend my
home."
Calvo's
mother-in-law was face-down on the kitchen floor, the tomato-artichoke sauce
she was preparing still sitting on the stove. Her first scream came when one of
the SWAT officers pointed his gun at her from the other side of the window. The
police department would later argue that her scream gave them the authority to
enter the home without knocking, announcing themselves, and waiting for someone
to let them in.
Rather than
obeying the SWAT team demands to "get down" as they rushed in,
Georgia Porter simply froze with fear. They pried the spoon from her hand, put
a gun to her head, and shoved her to the floor. [310 …]
Calvo's dogs
[…] were dead by the time Calvo was escorted to the kitchen. Payton had been
shot in the face almost as soon as the police entered the home. One bullet went
all the way through him and lodged in a radiator, missing Porter by only a
couple of feet. Chase ran. The cops shot him once, from the back, then chased
him into the living room and shot him again.
Calvo was
turned around and put on his knees in front of the door the police had just
smashed to pieces. He heard them rummaging through his house, tossing drawers,
emptying cabinets.
Calvo and
Porter were held for four hours. Calvo asked to see a search warrant. He was
told it was "en route." […]
Even after
they realized they had just mistakenly raided the mayor's house, the officers
didn't apologize to Calvo or Porter. Instead they told Calvo that they were
both "parties of interest" and that they should consider lucky that
they weren't arrested. Calvo in particular they said, was still under suspicion
because when armed men blew open his door, killed his dogs, and pointed their
guns at him and his mother in law, he hadn't responded "in a typical
manner."
Trinity Tomsic
came home […] to find a blur of flashing police lights and a crowd gathering on
her front lawn. She was told that her husband and mother were fine. Then she
was told that her dogs were dead. She broke down in tears. When she was finally
able to enter her home, she found her dogs' blood all over her house. The
police had walked through the two large pools of blood that collected under
Payton and Chase, then tracked it all over the home. Even once the police
realized they had made a mistake, they [311] never offered to clean up the
blood, to put the house back together, or to fix the front door.
As Calvo and
Porter were being interrogated, one of Calvo's own police officers saw the
lights and stopped to see what was going on. Berwyn Heights officer Amir
Johnson knew this was his mayor's house, but had no idea what the commotion was
about because the Prince George's County Police Department hadn't bothered to
contact the Berwyn Heights police chief, as they were required to do under a
memorandum of understanding between the two agencies. Johnson told the Washington
Post that an officer on the scene told him "Th guy in there is crazy. He
says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights."
Johnson
replied, "That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights."
Johnson then
called Berwyn Heights police chief Patrick Murphy. Eventually, Murphy was put
in touch with the supervising officer, Det. Sgt. David Martini. Murphy recounted
the conversation to the Post. "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" […]. "And at that
point, Martini claimed, they had to force entry, the dogs took aggressive
stances, and they were shot."
If that indeed
was what Martini told Murphy, he was either lying or repeating a lie told to
him by one of his subordinates. There was never any further mention of Calvo
shutting the door on the SWAT team — because it never happened . Falco later
had his dogs autopsied — the trajectories the bullets took through the dogs
bodies weren't consistent with the SWAT team's story.
But the lies,
obfuscation, and stonewalling were only beginning. (ch. 9, pp. 311-12)
Perhaps even
more baffling, officials continued to insist that the raid [on Mayor Calvo's
house] shouldn't have happened any other way. […] In 2010 Sheriff
Michael Jackson [sic] was asked during his campaign for Prince George's County
executive if he had any regrets about the raid. [… He had none.] Or, as Jackson
put it [8 September, ~ 5 weeks after the raid and the cops being cleared by an
internal investigation], "the guys did what they were supposed to do. [A
second investigation by Jackson's office also cleared the deputies. …]
The officials in Prince George's
County, two of them elected, openly and without reservation stated that they
had no problem with the collateral damage done to the Calvo family. It was part
of the war against getting high — which even they had to know is a war that
can't be won. […] As Calvo himself pointed out on several occasions, this isn't a problem that can be laid at the feet
of the police officers who raided his home. This problem can't be fixed by
firing the police involved. This is a
political problem. It's a policy problem. (ch. 9, pp. 314-15).
As Calvo
continued to advocate for reform, he started to hear from other victims of
mistaken police raids, both in Prince George's County and around the state of
Maryland. Several included the routine,
sometimes callous killing of the family dog. Within a week of the raid, for
example, Prince George's County residents Frank and Pam Myers came forward to
say that they too were raided by sheriff's department deputies. […] When the
couple told the deputies that the address on the warrant was two doors down, the
police refused to leave. They continued to look around the couple's house for
another forty-five minutes. Then two shots rang out from the backyard. A deputy
had gone into the backyard and shot the couple's fie-year-old oxer, Pearl. He
claimed that he feared for his life. Pam Myers told a local news station,
"I said, 'You just shot my dogg.' I wanted to go our and hold her a bit.
They wouldn't even let me go out." (ch. 9, p. 316)
A series of
police raid horror stories from Howard Count, Maryland, also emerged. Kevin and
Lisa Henderson said they were the victims of a mistaken raid. At 10:00 PM the
night of January 18, a raid team opened the family's unlocked door. Inside were
the couple, a twenty-eight-year-old houseguest, their two teenage sons, and their
sons' friend. The police first met the family dog, a twelve-year-old lab/Rottweiler
mix named Grunt. According to the lawsuit, one officer distracted the dog while
another shot it point-bland in the head. When one of the couple's sons asked
why they had shot the dog, one officer pointed his gun at the boy's head and
said, "Ill blow your fucking head off if you keep talking." The
police found marijuana in a jacket pocket of the Hendersons' house guest. He
was arrested. Four days later, after Lisa Henderson called to complain about
the raid, she and her husband were also arrested for possession of marijuana,
even though the police hadn't found any drug anywhere else in the house. Ten
months later, a state judge acquitted the couple of all charges. The Hendersons
believe that the police intended to raid a different house in the neighborhood
that looked a lot like their own. A subsequent raid on that house turned up
marijuana, scales, and cash.
Karen Thomas,
also a resident of Howard County, told a Maryland State Senate hearing in 2009
that police shot and killed her dog during a mistaken raid on her home in
January 2007. Even after they had surrounded her in her bedroom, she said they
still hadn't yet identified themselves, and she though the gunshot had been directed
at her son. "In my mind, terrorists had just killed my son, and they were
going to kill me next." (ch. 9, p. 317)
For the last half of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times
in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times a day, In Prince George's County
alone, which has about 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once a
day. According to an analysis by the Baltimore Sun, 94 percent of the
state's SWAT deployments were to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just
6 percent that were raids involving barricades, bank robberies, hostage
takings, and other emergency situations. Half of Prince George's County's SWAT
deployments were for what were called "misdemeanors and nonserious
felonies." More than one hundred times over a six-month period, Prince
George's County sent police barreling into private homes for nonserious,
nonviolent [319] crimes. Calvo pointed out that the first set of figures
confirm what he and others concerned about these tactics have suspected: SWAT
teams are being deployed too often as the default way to serve search
warrants, not as a last resort. (ch. 9, pp. 319-20)
How do we
return to a more robust embrace of the Castle Doctrine, the Fourth Amendment,
and an unbreachable divide between the police and the military? Overcoming a
trend that has extended across two possibly three, generations sounds like an
impossibly difficult task. […] Donald Santarelli, the no-regretful father of
the no-knock raid, say, "I don't think it's possible to roll any of this
back now. … It would take serious leadership, probably from nobody less than
the president. It would take a huge scandal, which doesn't seem likely. … But
we're not given to revolutionary action in this country. Each generation is a
little more removed from the deep-seated concerns about liberty of the
generation before. We just don't seem to value privacy and freedom
anymore." (ch. 9, p. 320)
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko
"The Drug War"
But just
ending the federal drug war and the federal incentives toward militarization
would help. SWAT teams would probably continue to exist and, at least in the
short term, would find other, probably equally objectionable missions. But
ending the federal drug war could begin to unwind the violent paramilitary task
forces and the us-versus-them,
black-and-white [sic] drug-war mentality. If the federal government were to
end the Byrne grants, cut off federal funding tied to drug enforcement, end the
Pentagon giveaway program, and get rid of the federal equitable sharing program
that lets local police departments get around state asset forfeiture laws, and
makes drug warring more lucrative (and therefore a higher priority), we'd see
more of these tactical teams begin to disband because of the expense of
maintaining them. We'd almost certainly see the multi-jurisdictional task
forces start to dry up, since they're often funded exclusively through federal
grants and forfeiture. Those tactical teams that remained would no longer be
incentivized to go on drug raids. […W]ithout the money to [321] lure them, it
seems likely that the expanse of deploying them would persuade police
departments to reserve them for the sorts of missions for which they were
originally intended.
At the very
least, the federal government should respect the states that have already
expressed a desire to ease up on the drug war and stop sending in heavily armed
battle teams to raid medical marijuana dispensaries and growers who are
licensed and regulated under state law.
Legislatures
or city councils could also pass laws restricting the use of SWAT teams to
those limited, rare emergencies in there's an imminent threat to public safety.
They could prohibit the use of no-knock raids or even forced entry to serve
warrants people suspected of violent crimes [non-violent?]. Failing that,
policymakers could simply put more restrictions on search warrants. For
example, they could prohibit the use of dynamic-entry tactics for any warrant
obtained with only the word of an informant. (ch. 9, pp. 321-22)
"Halt the
Mission Creep"
"There is no need for regulatory agencies at any level
to be conducting SWAT raids" (ch. 9, p. 322). Etc.
"Transparency"
"Legislatures should pass laws that not only clearly
establish a citizen's right to record on-duty cops but provide an enforcement
mechanism so that citizens wrongly and illegally arrested have a course of
action. As even many police officials have pointed out, such policies not only
expose police misconduct […] but can also provide exonerating evidence in cases
where police officers have been wrongly accused.
All
forced-entry police raids should be recorded in a tamper-proof format, and the
videos should be made available to the public through a simple open records
request. (ch. 9, p. 323)
"Community
Policing"
"Police departments and policymakers should embrace
real community policing. [… This] means taking cops out of patrol cars to walk
beats and become a part of the communities they serve. It means ditching
statistics-driven policing, which encourages the sorts of petty arrests of low-level
offenders and use of informants the foment anger and distrust" (ch. 9, p.
325).
"Changing Police
Culture"
Changing a
culture sounds like a tall order. And it probably is. "I think there are
two critical components to policing that cops today have forgotten," says
the former Maryland cop Neill Franklin. "Number one, you've signed on to a
dangerous job. That means that you've agreed to a certain amount of risk. You
don't get to start [325] stepping on others' rights to minimize that risk you
agreed to take on. And number two, your first priority is not to protect
yourself, it's to protect those you've sworn to protect. But I don't know how
you get police officers today to value those principles again. The 'us and
everybody else' sentiment is strong today. It's very, very difficult to change
a culture." […]
"It's
really about a lack of imagination and a lack of creativity," says Norm
Stamper. "When your answer to every problem is more force, it shows that
you haven't been taught and trained to consider other options."
The thing is,
when law enforcement officials face suspect who present a genuine threat to
officer safety, they do tend to be more creative.[Example given:
capturing Whitey Bulger in 2010, a truly dangerous man brought in by a bit of
research of his habits.] […][326]
Why can't
investigators handle common drug offenders the same way. A big reason is lack of resources. […] A second reason
is that drug offenders simply aren't all that likely to shoot at cops, and it's
easier to use violent tactics against people who aren't going to fire back.
Police today
are also given too little training in counseling and dispute resolution, and
what little they do get in the academy is quickly blotted out by what they
learn on the street in the first few months on the job. When you're given an
excess of training in the use of force but little in using psychology, body
language, and other noncoercive means of resolving a conflict, you'll naturally
gravitate toward force. "I think about the notion of command presence, Stamper says. […] What I see today is that
this well-disciplined notion of command presence has been shattered. Cops today
think you show command presence by yelling and screaming. In my day, if you
screamed […] you had failed in that situation as a cop" (ch. 9, pp.
325-27).
"Accountability"
In numerous
states […] police unions have lobbied legislatures to pass variations on a
"law enforcement bill of rights." [… These vary, but] the general
thrust of these laws is to afford police officers accused of crimes additional
"rights" abouve and beyond what regular citizens get. Or as Reason
magazine's Mike Riggs puts it, the intent of such laws is "to shielf cops
from the laws they're rapid to enforce." These laws have made it nearly
impossible [328] to fire bad cops in many jurisdictions, and worse, they have
instilled in them the notion that they're above the law — and above the regular
citizens they're supposed to serve. […]
[…] When city
officials make it more difficult to fire bad cops, they are rarely affected
[…]. At worst, a lawsuit might take a bite out of a city budget. But no cops
will be harassing or beating the politicians themselves. That happens to other
people.
Police unions
also help enforce the "Blue Code of Silence." The unwritten rule that
police officers never rat out or testify against other police officers. [Cites
case in 2006 of Albuquerque police officer Sam Costales, who testified against
sheriff dept. deputies, who were not disciplined — Costales was. And his union
rep apologized to the disciplining police admin. For Costales's actions.
329].[…]
Only in law
enforcement would a union rep apologize to the management for the actions of
one of its members. Former narcotics cop Russ Jones says that unions reinforce
the notion among cops that it's just them and their brother cops against the
world. […]
Perhaps the
biggest problems with police unions, however, is that they present a major
obstacle to real reform. […] Democrats don't cross them because of the
traditional alliance of unions and public employees. Republicans rarely cross
them because of the party's law-and-order reputation. […]
Good ideas for
accountability policies include civilian review boards, but only if they have
subpoena power, are granted the authority to impose discipline, and can't be
overruled by arbitrators. […][330]
The most
productive accountability policy — and thus the most controversial and least
likely to be adopted — would be to impose more liability on police officers who
make egregious errors. Under the qualified immunity from civil lawsuits
currently afforded to police under federal law, a police officer can't be sued
for mere negligence — or even for gross negligence that results in a fatality.
To even get into court against a police officer, a plaintiff must show not only
that a police officer intentionally violated the plaintiff's constitutional
rights, but that said rights were well established at the time they were
violated. With this protection, police officers aren't required to keep
informed on the latest court decisions that pertain to their job. In fact, in a
perverse way, it even discourages police departments and officers from doing
so. A cop who is aware he was violating someone's rights is much more likely to
be found liable than a cop who isn't.
Some
commentators […] have suggested that SWAT teams that conduct forced-entry raids
be held to a strict liability standard. […] Such a policy would be difficult to
apply in many cases. […] Still, adopting the policy just for cases of clear,
unambiguous mistakes would probably encourage more caution, more restraint, and
fewer errors. (ch. 9, pp. 328-31)
Final appeal, for the sine qua non: "The public needs
to start caring about these issues" (ch. 9, p. 331).
* * *
QUOTATIONS AND LONGER SELECTIONS FROM A BOOK FROM 2013/14 IMPORTANT FOR 2020/21
Balko, Radley. Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. 2013. New
York: Public Affairs, 2014. © 2014 by Radley Balko