Reason Magazine - Topics > Militarization of Police

Bogus Bodega Busts

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:34:00 EDT

Bodegas are convenience stores, usually owned by immigrants, that sell groceries, calling cards, and other sundries, and also sometimes cash paychecks or provide wire services for immigrants to send home remittances. In March the Philadelphia Daily News reported that a rogue narcotics officer and his squad had been terrorizing the shops.

Bodega owners have described at least a dozen shakedowns disguised as drug paraphernalia raids conducted by Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and his colleagues. In each account, Cujdik and his men storm the store with a search warrant, looking not for drugs but for the small resealable plastic bags favored by drug dealers. Under Pennsylvania law, it’s a crime to sell ordinary products if the merchant knows or should know that a customer will use them to package illegal drugs.

During the raids, Cujdik’s team reportedly disabled the shops’ security cameras and confiscated the computers that recorded video from them. The cops then ransacked the bodegas, stealing cigarettes, snacks, soft drinks, and other items. In several cases, they filed police reports that bodega owners say significantly understated the amount of cash the police seized from the stores.

These accounts were corroborated when one store, which sent its camera feeds off site, released audio and video of a raid to the Daily News. On the video, immediately after conducting the raid, the cops cut the wires to several video cameras. They can then be heard badgering the store’s owner about whether there was an off-site feed.

Cujdik is already under investigation. Last year one of his confidential informants alleged that he and Cujdik regularly conspired to lie on search warrant affidavits, claiming to have conducted controlled drug buys that never happened. Earlier this year, a woman named Lady Gonzalez said one of Cujdik’s men sexually assaulted her during a raid authorized by a falsified search warrant. Cujdik is now on desk duty, with pay, while local and federal officials investigate the allegations.

Another Isolated Incident

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:30:00 EDT

In Indianapolis:

Marye Minton, 70, and her 72-year-old husband were awoken early Thursday to officers banging on the door of their home…
Marye Minton said she is upset that the officers came inside and ordered her husband, who is in poor health, onto the ground.
“They said to him, ‘Get on the floor,’ like that, and see my husband’s had four strokes, and he can’t whoop anybody, he can’t do anything,” she said. “I’m very mad and I don’t want it to happen to another citizen.”
Officers were trying to serve a warrant for a man wanted on drug charges. The address listed on the paperwork was 4042. The Minton’s home is 4048, with both house numbers clearly marked.
But Major Mark Robinett of the Marion County Sheriff’s Department, who is in charge of warrant sweeps, said he was told that officers had a difficult time reading the addresses because of overcast skies.

MORE: My mistake. Jacob Sullum blogged this one yesterday.

Prince George's County Sheriff's Department Delcares Itself Blame-Free in Cheye Calvo Raid

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:14:00 EDT

Yesterday, the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department announced that its internal review found that its officers did nothing wrong in the SWAT raid on Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home.

Last summer, officers intercepted a package of marijuana at a delivery service warehouse. Despite the fact that they already knew of a drug distribution network in which dealers were sending packages of marijuana to random addresses with the intent of having them picked up by accomplices working for the delivery companies, the Sheriff’s Department raided Calvo’s just seconds after his mother-in-law brought the package into the house with no investigation into who actually lived there.

Police and county officials have since admitted that Calvo and his family are innocent. But they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoing, such as not doing the least bit of investigation before sending the SWAT team to take down Calvo’s door, not knocking and announcing before entering, or slaughtering Calvo’s two Labrador retrievers.

In fact, Prince George’s County officials have been stunningly callous about it all, at various points praising the officers for their “restraint,” and commenting that everyone involved in the investigation and raid “deserves a pat on the back.”

So the announcement yesterday that the internal review cleared the department isn’t surprising. But Sheriff Michael Jackson’s comments at the accompanying press conference are really something to behold. From the Washington Post:

The findings of the internal review “are consistent with what I’ve felt all along: My deputies did their job to the fullest extent of their abilities”…
In an interview, Jackson reiterated his explanation that a scream by Calvo’s mother-in-law, Georgia Porter, who saw officers in SWAT gear running toward the house, justified the shooting.
Porter “corroborated that she did scream out ‘SWAT.’ She admitted to that, and [Calvo] admitted to hearing that upstairs in the house,” Jackson said. “That threw out the procedure of knocking and announcing, because now [officers were] compromised.”
One dog was shot four times by the front door. Calvo has said his younger dog was running away from officers when it was shot twice, including once in a hind leg. Jackson said deputies thought the dog was running toward another deputy in the home…
“I’m sorry for the loss of their family pets,” Jackson said. “But this is the unfortunate result of the scourge of drugs in our community. Lost in this whole incident was the criminal element. . . . In the sense that we kept these drugs from reaching our streets, this operation was a success.”

First of all, the police intercepted the package at the warehouse. At that point, they had already kept the marijuana inside from “reaching the streets.” Everything that happened next was at the discretion of the officers who carried out the investigation and raid well after the marijuana had already been confiscated, which means they and they alone own the results of the raid.

Second, what happened to Calvo isn’t the “unfortunate result of the scourge of drugs in our community,” it’s the result of a bumbling, overly aggressive, wholly incompetent police department. And it’s the result of a drug warrior mentality that believes invading someone’s home with guns and filling their pets with bullets is an appopriate response to a possible violation of state marijuana laws. The raiding cops didn’t bother to notify the Berwyn Heights police chief before sending in the SWAT team, which would almost certainly have tipped them off to their mistake. They didn’t bother to do any investigation at all of who lived at Calvo’s residence. Their first resort was to use the most overwhelming force possible.

Third, the purpose of a knock-and-announce requirement is to notify a home’s occupants that the police are outside to serve a warrant, and to give them the opportunity to come to the door and prevent the use of force and violence. Jackson’s excuse that officers feared Calvo’s mother-in-law’s scream when she saw men in black running up the lawn tipped off the drug dealers inside doesn’t fly. Because, again, the entire point of the knock-and-announce requirement is to “tip off” occupants that the police are outside.

Finally, Jackson’s comment that “[m]y deputies did their job to the fullest extent of their abilities” may actually be the only accurate thing he said yesterday. Just not in the way he intended.

Massachusetts Suspends Pentagon Giveaways to Local Police Departments

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:35:00 EDT

The Boston Globe has been doing some terrific reporting about how small town police departments in Massachusetts have been using the Pentagon's surplus weapons program to acquire some ridiculously high-powered weaponry. The paper found that 82 police departments across the state have obtained more than 1,000 military-grade weapons over the last 15 years, including...

Police in Wellfleet, a community known for stunning beaches and succulent oysters, scored three military assault rifles. At Salem State College, where recent police calls have included false fire alarms and a goat roaming the campus, school police got two M-16s. In West Springfield, police acquired even more powerful weaponry: two military-issue M-79 grenade launchers.

In response, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has temporarily suspended the program to investigate.

The thing is, just about any decent-sized newspaper in the country could do a similar investigation. This has been going on since the early 1990s. The program was streamlined in 1997 when Congress created an agency called the Law Enforcement Support Program to facilitate the giveaways. National Journal reported in 2000 that between 1997 and 1999 alone, the office handled 3.4 million orders for military equipment from 11,000 domestic police agencies, and gave away $727 million worth of stuff designed for use in war to be used in American streets and neighborhoods, against American citizens. That included...

"...253 aircraft (including six- and seven-passenger airplanes, and UH-60 Blackhawk and UH-1 Huey helicopters), 7,856 M-16 rifles, 181 grenade launchers, 8,131 bulletproof helmets, and 1,161 pairs of night-vision goggles."

The transfers have only picked up since then. The program is also how Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff Leon Lott acquired his M113A1 armored personnel carrier, which moves on tank-like tracks, and features a belt-fed, turreted machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds. And he isn't the only one.

If I may, here's a passage about the program from Overkill, the 2006 paper on police militarization that I wrote for the Cato Institute:

The city of St. Petersburg, Florida, bought an armored personnel carrier from the Pentagon for just $1,000. The seven police officers of Jasper, Florida—which has all of 2,000 people and hasn’t had a murder in 14 years—were each given a military-grade M-16 machine gun, leading one Florida paper to run the headline, “Three Stoplights, Seven M-16s.” The sheriff’s office in landlocked Boone County, Indiana, was given an amphibious armored personnel carrier...

The New York Times reported in 1999 that the Fresno, California, SWAT team had two helicopters with night-vision goggles and heat sensors, a turret-armed armored personnel carrier, and an armored van...

A retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the Times in the 1999 article, “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted."
In a 1997 60 Minutes segment on the trend toward militarization, the CBS news magazine profiled the Sheriff’s Department of Marion County, Florida, a rural, agricultural area known for its horse farms. Courtesy of the various Pentagon giveaway programs, the county sheriff proudly showed reporter Lesley Stahl the department’s 23 military helicopters, two C-12 luxury executive aircraft ...a motor home, several trucks and trailers, a tank, and a “bomb robot.” This, in addition to an arsenal of military-grade assault weapons.

As you can see, there was some media interest in this story about 10 years ago, but it largely died down, particularly after September 11. But the transfers didn't stop, and neither did the unfortunate trend toward a militaristic mindset that comes with domestic police officers using military equipment and tactics, and being told they're fighting a "war."

It's good to see the Globe to revisit this issue, and it's great that the paper's investigation seems to have won the attention of Massacusetts' elected officials. It would be even better if it could attract the attention of some members of Congress, who might stop this ill-considered program once and for all.

More on Drug Czar's Bid To End War on Drugs

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:35:00 EDT

I have a bit of a different take than my colleague Jacob Sullum on Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske's decision to end the war rhetoric when discussing drug prohibition.

The change in rhetoric obviously isn't an end to the federal prohibition on drugs. But it isn't mere symbolism, either. Rhetoric matters.

The drug war imagery started by Nixon, subdued by Carter, then ratcheted up again in the Reagan administration (and remaining basically level since) has had significant repercussions on the way drug policy is enforced, from policymakers on down to street-level cops. It's war rhetoric that gave us the Pentagon giveaway program, where millions of pieces of surplus military equipment (such as tanks) have been transferred to local police departments. War imagery set the stage for the approximately 1,200 percent rise in the use of SWAT teams since the early 1980s, and has fostered the militaristic, "us vs. them" mentality too prevalent in too many police departments today.

War implies a threat so existential, so dire to our way of life, that we citizens should be ready to sign over some of our basic rights, be expected to make significant sacrifices, and endure collateral damage in order to defeat it. Preventing people from getting high has never represented that sort of threat.

No, a mere change in rhetoric isn't going to undo all of that. But it will at least begin to establish a less bellicose, less aggressive mindset when it comes to formulating drug policy. And while Kerlikowske's public health approach to drug enforcement is still a far cry from a government that respects individual freedom, it's also far better than the attitudes of his predecessors. We could, for example, go back to the days of William Bennett, who thought we should suspend habeas corpus for accused drug dealers, then took a sympathetic view when a caller to Larry King Live suggested we just behead them in the street.

Seems to me it's a positive and not insignificant development that we have a drug czar who understands the power of language.

Another Isolated Incident

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 07 May 2009 10:28:00 EDT

Police raid the wrong house in Baltimore. Weeks later, the guy still can’t get the city to repair his door. Their explanation is that because the address written on the warrant is the address the police raided, there was no mistake. Even though the guy they were actually after lived and was eventually arrested two doors down.

Ah, but it gets worse. If it’s not the cops, it’s the bureaucrats. The guy stored his old door in his backyard, hoping the city would eventually repair it. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, he called the city’s special trash pick-up to come and get it. They never did. But a city code inspector did come, and fined the guy $50 for having a broken door in his backyard.

Unarmed GVSU Student Shot During Drug Raid Arrested on Marijuana Charges

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:43:00 EDT

According to police reports, on March 11 Grand Valley State University sophomore Derek Kopp sold an undercover police officer 3.3 grams of marijuana for $60. The police then raided Kopp’s apartment, at which point Deputy Ryan Huizenga mistook Kopp shielding his eyes from a police flashlight for brandishing a weapon, and shot the unarmed Kopp in the chest. The bullet pierced Kopp’s liver, broke a rib, and punctured one of Kopp’s lungs.

Apparently, a bullet in the chest and time in the intensive care unit wasn’t punishment enough for selling three grams of pot. This week, a Michigan judge issued an arrest warrant for Kopp on the charge of delivery of marijuana. He’ll be arraigned on Monday.

Customs Officer Sues After Wrong-Door Immigration Raid on His Home

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:47:00 EDT

Whoops.

James and Sheila Slaughter said that when they answered the door of their home in San Luis, Ariz., on a July afternoon last year, they were surprised to find five armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers strapped into bulky bulletproof vests accusing them of harboring an illegal immigrant.

“Is this ‘Candid Camera’?” Mrs. Slaughter recalled asking.

That irritated the lead officer, her husband said Tuesday. “He said: ‘No, it isn’t “Candid Camera.” You need to step back into the middle of the room.’ ”

The couple said they complied, and the officers prepared to search their home. Mr. Slaughter, a six-foot, 285-pound former Marine, said he then told them, “Look fellas, do you guys realize that I’m a U.S. Customs K-9 officer at the San Luis land port?”

“The lead officer’s eyes got about as big and round as silver dollars, and the three guys who were standing just inside the door went straight outside,” said Mr. Slaughter, 51, who with a Labrador retriever, Whitey, searches cars at the Mexican border for narcotics. “They left without saying a word. They knew they messed up.”...

Mr. Slaughter, whose family lives on East 26th Street, said he learned later that the illegal immigrant sought by the officers lived on East 26th Place. He recognized the immigrant’s name from junk mail that accidentally came to the Slaughter home.

The officers, Mr. Slaughter said, should have checked the name on property records, “or they could have watched me walk out of my house every day wearing my uniform.”

“They bullied their way into my house — the same organization that I work for, doing 16-hour shifts,” Mr. Slaughter said. “I bleed red, white and blue. I serve my country, and then they do this to me?”

The Slaughters are suing each of the five officers for $500,000.

Police Raid Roundup

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:38:00 EDT

Lawsuit claims police raided the apartment in Livingston, Illinois last year. Woman claims the police barged through the door and ordered her to the ground at gunpoint. They apologized after realizing they had raided apartment 1 instead of apartment 10. She claims $20,000 in medical bills.

Officer trips, accidentally shoots man in the chest during a drug raid in New Jersey.

Chicago will pay out $288,000 in damages resulting from a 2006 drug raid on a bar on the southwest side of the city. Drug charges against two bar patrons were dropped after surveillance video showed officers had lied in their police report about what happened after the raid began.

A Phoenix couple has settled with the town of Gilbert, Arizona for $185,000 after an officer tossed a flashbang grenade through a window during a raid on their home. The grenade landed on a bed, caught the bed on fire, and burned the couple's home to the ground.

The ACLU is suing over a series of raids in Riverside, California in which police targeted black-owned barbershops. Though they were drug raids, the actions were couched as "health inspections," obviating the need for a search warrant. I've seen quite of few of these stories, lately--where police conduct drug raids under the guise of a regulatory inspection to get around the need for a search warrant. It's troubling.

The police officer who shot Grand Valley State student Derek Kopp in the chest during a drug raid has been charged with the negligent discharge of a firearm. If the officer is actually guilty of that, it's nice to see him held accountable. But the problem, here, is the policy of sending police into private homes with their guns drawn to enforce consensual crimes. Until that policy changes, we'll continue to see incidents like this one. Charging the cops or homeowners who make mistakes under such volatile circumstances isn't going to change anything. We need to stop putting both parties in such a precarious position in the first place--particularly over, of all things, smoking pot.

CORRECTION: This entry originally had another bullet point that was a separate account of the same Illinois raid mentioned above.

Maryland House Passes SWAT Transparency Bill

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:58:00 EDT

This is good news.

Delegates adopted a bill, on a 126 to 9 vote, that would require law enforcement agencies to report every six months on their use of SWAT teams, including what kinds of warrants the teams serve and whether any animals are killed during raids. The bill was prompted by the case of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo, whose two black Labrador retrievers were shot and killed during a botched raid by a Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team in July.

The Maryland Senate has already passed a similar bill, and there don’t seem to be any foreseeable problems merging the two.

Rogue Police Narcotics Squad in Philly Terrorizing Immigrant Grocers

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:27:00 EDT

From the Philadelphia Daily News, a blood boiling article:

ON A SWELTERING July afternoon in 2007, Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and his narcotics squad members raided an Olney tobacco shop.
Then, with guns drawn, they did something bizarre: They smashed two surveillance cameras with a metal rod, said store owners David and Eunice Nam.
The five plainclothes officers yanked camera wires from the ceiling. They forced the slight, frail Korean couple to the vinyl floor and cuffed them with plastic wrist ties.
"I so scared," said Eunice Nam, 56. "We were on floor. Handcuffs on me. I so, so scared, I wet my pants."
The officers rifled through drawers, dumped cigarette cartons on the floor and took cash from the registers. Then they hauled the Nams to jail.
The Nams were arrested for selling tiny ziplock bags that police consider drug paraphernalia, but which the couple described as tobacco pouches.
When they later unlocked their store, the Nams allege, they discovered that a case of lighter fluid and handfuls of Zippo lighters were missing. The police said they seized $2,573 in the raid. The Nams say they actually had between $3,800 and $4,000 in the store.
The Nams' story is strikingly similar to those told by other mom-and-pop store owners, from Dominicans in Hunting Park to Jordanians in South Philadelphia.

It goes on like that, detailing story after story in which this rogue squad of thugs raided an immigrant-owned grocery store, terrorized the shopkeepers, cut the wires to security cameras, then helped themselves to the inventory. In one case, a grocery owner says the same narcotics squad came back for a second raid, but not to look for drugs. They came to confiscate a surveillance video from the first raid, a video that apparently captured the likeness of one of the cops just before he cut the camera's wires.

Also, is it really illegal to sell small plastic bags in Philadelphia? Even if that's the case, it obviously wouldn't justify these tactics. But as Jacob Sullum explained in our February issue, generally speaking, for an otherwise innocuous product to be considered illegal paraphernalia, it would need to be sold in close proximity to something related to illicit drugs, or found in conjunction with an actual illicit substance. Perhaps Philadelphia has a specific law prohibiting the bags, but if it does, that wasn't mentioned in the article.

MORE: This isn't the first time Officer Cujdik's name has been in the news.

Update on Drug Raid Shooting in Grand Rapids; Another Drug Raid Shooting in Florida

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:29:00 EDT

Grand Valley State students held a rally today in support of Derek Kopp, the 20-year-old student shot in the chest during a drug raid on his off-campus apartment Wednesday night. Kopp was unarmed, and according to police accounts, there was no struggle or fight. According to the Grand Rapids Press, Kopp is a film and video major, and identifies himself on his Facebook page as "a left-wing hippie peace-keeping liberal." No doubt the sort of kid paramilitary police tactics were made for.

Thus far, the Ottawa County Sheriff's Department has said only that the raid was part of a drug investigation, and that Kopp was shot by one of its deputies. They haven't said what drugs they were looking for, what probable cause they had against Kopp, what if any drugs they found, or why Kopp was shot in the chest.

Also on Wednesday, police in Pinellas County, Florida say they accidentally shot 45-year-old Brenda McKay shortly after tearing down her door during a drug raid. McKay was shot in the thigh, and is expected to be okay. Police made no arrests after that raid.

Another Isolated Incident: Unarmed College Student Shot in the Chest During Drug Raid

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:54:00 EDT

Police shot an unarmed Grand Valley State student in the chest during a drug raid on his apartment last night.

The police haven't said what they were looking for, other than that the raid was part of a drug investigation. They also haven't said if they found any illicit drugs, or what caused the officer to discharge his weapon.

The 20-year-old man is in stable condition at a Grand Rapids, Michigan hospital.

A police spokesman told the Grand Rapid News that the shooting was an "isolated incident."

Thanks to Nick Cheolas for the tip.

Maryland Senate Holds Hearings on SWAT Transparency Bill

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:02:00 EDT

Last week, the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee held hearings on a new bill that would require every police agency in the state with a SWAT team to issue quarterly reports on how often the teams are deployed, why they were deployed, what happened during the warrant service, and what was found. It is a small but vital step toward allowing for a proper assessment of just how often paramilitary-style tactics are being used in Maryland, how often things go wrong, and whether they're being used as advertised.

Several witnesses at the hearing described yet more terrifying wrong-door raids, in cases never before reported.

Karen Thomas told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee that she heard Howard County police shoot and kill her dog in her Ellicott City living room in September 2007, while she lay upstairs on the floor, surrounded by police who had not identified themselves.

“In my mind, terrorists had just killed my son and they were going to kill me next,” she told committee members.

Thomas said that police were searching for drugs, but none were found...
Choking back tears, Boyd Petit told committee members that during an April 2008 raid on his Highland home, a police tactical team had handcuffed him and his family outside his home, at gunpoint and in front of his neighbors, while other officers searched his house.

“Our collective lives flashed before our eyes,” he said.

Petit claimed the raid on his house was prompted by a former customer, who made false allegations about him to police. He said police were searching for a specific weapon, but it was not found.

Right now, it looks like the bill will get through committee. It's being pushed by Cheye Calvo, the Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor who was subjected to a particularly violent but mistaken raid on his home.

Live Chat With Cheye Calvo

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:40:00 EST

Yesterday at my personal blog The Agitator, readers had a live chat with Cheye Calvo, the Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor who last summer was the victim of a particularly violent mistaken drug raid on his home by Prince George's County police.

Calvo's now pushing sunshine legislation that would require every police department in Maryland to track and report when and how it uses its SWAT team.

You can read the chat here.

Sentencing for Cops Who Killed Katherine Johnston

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:36:00 EST

The Atlanta cops who killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston during a 2006 drug raid were sentenced in federal court today. The officers perjured themselves in a search warrant affidavit, violently broke into Johnston's home (which they had mistaken for a drug dealer's), killed her in a barrage of 39 bullets when she met them with a rusty old revolver, left her handcuffed to bleed to death in her living room while they planted marijuana in her basement, then threatened an informant to lie about the whole thing so they could cover up their mistakes.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

U.S. District Judge Julie Carnes sentenced former officer Gregg Junnier to six years in prison, Jason Smith to 10 years in prison and Arthur Tesler to 5 years in prison.
Junnier and Tesler had faced 10 years under sentencing guidelines, while Smith faced 12.

By comparison, Ryan Frederick—the Chesapeake, Virginia man who says he mistakenly fired one shot that struck and killed a police officer during a drug raid on his home—received a 10-year sentence. Cory Maye, who also mistakenly shot and killed a cop during a botched drug raid, is still in prison for the rest of his life.

You Will Like the New California Budget OR ELSE!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:06:00 EST

A whole new meaning of "constituent service."

Another Isolated Incident?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:17:00 EST

Another week, another lawsuit resulting from an alleged wrong-door raid.

The suit, filed by attorney Mike Raulston, says on Feb. 13, 2008, the Bradys were at home when the officers suddenly came in, though they did not have any kind of warrant. The suit does not say where the house is located.

It says Officer Tinney forced Tarran Brady to the floor while holding a loaded gun to her head and threatening her.

The suit says Officer Fuller pointed his loaded gun at Randy Brady and ordered him to also get down. But Mr. Brady refused to do so and asked if they had a warrant.

It says the couple was held at gunpoint while the home was searched, placing them, their children, their spouses, nephews, nieces and grandchildren “in mortal fear.”

The suit says, the officers left “after realizing they had made a mistake.”

The Michael Phelps Witch Hunt Gets Surreal

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:14:00 EST

Earlier this week, Jacob Sullum noted that the Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff's Department went out and arrested eight people on marijuana charges allegedly associated with the now-famous bong photo of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps.

Attorneys for two of those eight are now speaking out about how they were arrested.

“He’s sitting there on Saturday, and 12 cops kick in the door with guns drawn, search the house, and find 5, maybe 6 grams of pot,” Harpootlian said about his client, who was arrested in the first raid at the Wells Point Drive home near Ballentine.
“They never asked him, ‘Who sold you the pot?’” Harpootlian continued. “They were asking, ‘Were you at the party with Michael Phelps? Did you see him using marijuana?’ It was all about Michael Phelps.”
The charges resulted from Saturday’s raids and are not connected to the November party that Phelps attended.
Harpootlian, the former top prosecutor for Richland and Kershaw counties, and McCulloch contend Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott is conducting an overzealous investigation of their clients to try to get evidence against Phelps.
“The sheriff’s department is deploying resources they are normally reserving for major drug dealers and major criminals,” said McCulloch, also a former prosecutor...
Harpootlian said his client, whom he noted is on leave from USC, is “scared” because of the enormous publicity surrounding Phelps.
“He’s being treated more harshly than any kid anywhere in the country,” Harpootlian said. “The only reefer madness is being done at the sheriff’s department.”

According to Harpootlian and McCulloch, police seized four laptop computers, a desktop computer, a computer storage drive and a cell phone, mostly to search for incriminating photos of Phelps.

I guess they can at least be thankful Sheriff Leon Lott didn't send his tank.

Another glorious moment in America's drug war.

Maryland Bill Would Bring Transparency to Use of SWAT Teams

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:01:00 EST

Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo, who last summer was subjected to a particularly violent mistaken drug raid in which police shot and killed his two black labs, is helping push a new bill in the Maryland legislature that would require every SWAT team in the state to provide to the public "a monthly public report on its activities, including where and when it was deployed and whether an operation resulted in arrests, evidence seizures or injuries."

This is a terrific first step, and the Maryland legislature needs to pass it. Part of the problem I've encountered reporting on this issue is that police departments tend to to be stingy with this sort of information. Even when it's available, it's often collected in ways that aren't usable. Over the last few years, I've tried to file open records request for copies search warrants, evidence return sheets, and any other documentation of SWAT-related drug raids in several major cities. In addition to being quoted prohibitive copying and labor fees, I've also learned that search warrants and evidence return sheets are usually kept in separate places, making it arduous to match them up once a case has been resolved. In cases where a raid resulted in no charges, the warrants are actually often thrown out. Of course, those are the very cases we want to know about.

The bill Calvo's pushing would begin to make data about SWAT teams available, so we can assess how often they're used, in what situations they're used, and, when they're used in drug raids, how often they actually find not only illicit drugs, but the high-power weapons proponents say make these sorts of tactics necessary. In the few places this sort of analysis has been done, the results have been less than convincing.

Calvo's bill would also show how many often Maryland's SWAT teams hit the wrong home.

It'll be interesting to see how the state's police organizations react. Commenters to the Washington Post articl e who appear to be police officers seem to be miffed at even this small bit of transparency.

Leon Lott's Big Toy

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:20:00 EST

When I first read that Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff Leon Lott was planning to pursue charges against Michael Phelps, I thought the sheriff's name looked familiar.

Then I remembered, I wrote about him in the Citings section of our December issue.

In March the sheriff and SWAT team of Richland County, South Carolina, posedfor a photo with an impressive new piece of equipment: an M113A1 armored personnel carrier. The vehicle, which moves on tank-like tracks, features a belt-fed, turreted machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds.
The sheriff, Leon Lott, obtained the $300,000 vehicle through the 1033 program, named for a 1997 federal law streamlining the Defense Department’s transfer of surplus military equipment to local police departments...
Charles Earl Barnett, a U.S. Marines veteran and retired police major who has served on several United Nations and NATO military and peacekeeping missions, says a .50-caliber machine gun is “completely inappropriate” for domestic police work. It “causes mass death and destruction,” Barnett says. “It’s indiscriminate. I can’t think of a possible scenario where it would be appropriate.”
Sheriff Lott has named his new acquisition The Peacemaker, explaining in a press release that the name is fitting because “the bible refers to law enforcement in Matthew 5:9 ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.’ ”

Let's just hope God helps the next kid who lights up at a University of South Carolina frat party.

Another Isolated Incident

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:04:00 EST

Police in Howard County, Maryland conducted a nighttime, no-knock raid on the home of Mike Hasenei, whom they apparently suspected of stealing items from two police cars burglarized last month. They found nothing, but they did shoot and kill Hasenei's Australian cattle dog. The police say the no-knock raid and tactical entry were necessary because Hasenei is a (legal) gun-owner.

Police spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn confirmed the raid on Hasenei's house, noting that police had a search warrant signed by a judge...
Llewellyn confirmed the dog shooting, but said the dog charged police, forcing them to shoot it...
Llewellyn said police had reason to believe a gun was in the residence, which was why they did not knock...
Llewellyn added that when police have reason to believe there might be firearms in a residence, they take precautions to ensure the safety of the officers and anyone inside the house.

"This often includes the use of the tactical team, which is specially trained to deal with potentially dangerous situations," she said.

Sounds like they need more training.

Hasenei, 39, of the 6600 block of Deep Run Parkway, Elkridge, said he was sleeping shortly after 9 p.m. Jan. 15 when a police tactical team kicked in the door to his house.

He woke up and walked into his living room to find it swarming with officers, he said. When he asked what was going on, he was ordered to get on the ground, and when he asked again, he said, he was knocked to the ground and told he was under arrest.

He wasn't arrested.

So the police say they used a no-knock and a tactical team to secure the place quickly because they knew Hasenei was a gun owner. Yet Hasenei was able to get up from bed, walk out from his bedroom, and enter his living room before making his first contact with the tactical team. Which shows that all they really succeeded in doing was to provoke a potentially violent confrontation with a guy who at the moment looks to be innocent of any crime.

It's a good thing he didn't grab one of his guns on his way out of the bedroom.

The Ryan Frederick Trial: Jurors Deliberate

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:12:00 EST

Yesterday, both sides in the Ryan Frederick trial made their closing arguments. This morning, the jury will begin their deliberations.

Ryan Frederick is the 28-year-old Chesapeake, Virginia man facing murder charges for killing a police officer during a drug raid (see this wiki for more on Frederick's case). Prior coverage of his trial here.

If you've been following the case, I'd encourage you read coverage from the Virginian-Pilot, and from the local Tidewater Liberty blog.

Some wrap-up odds and ends from the last few days of the trial:

• Last week, the defense called seven of Frederick's neighbors, one of whom was outside the night of the raid. All said they heard no police announcement, though neighbors did testify about hearing the battering ram.

• There's more significance to the neighbors' testimony than merely whether or not Frederick should have heard an announcement, though that's obviously important. The state made Frederick out to be a big-time drug dealer. Police informant Steven Wright said he bought marijuana from Frederick dozens of times over just a few months. That's dozens of drug deals from just one guy. Yet the police affidavit notes that surveillance on Frederick's home showed no unusual activity. And Frederick's neighbors—people who you'd think would want a hardened, drug-dealing, cop-killing neighbor out of their community—have not only defended him in the media, they've testified in his defense at his trial.

• The Virginian-Pilot's John Hopkins has done a splendid job covering this case. I've rarely seen a local reporter cover a botched raid so well. Hopkins refused to take police statements about the raid at face value. He did his own reporting, and uncovered some significant flaws in the case. At the start of the trial, Special Prosecutor Paul Ebert put Hopkins on his witness list, which effectively barred Hopkins from the courtroom, which meant he could no longer report on the case. But Ebert never called Hopkins to testify. Sneaky way to get a good reporter off your butt.

• The person who could shed the most light on the truth in this case never testified. That would be Renaldo Turnbull, the informant/burglar that Hopkins and I interviewed. That he didn't testify isn't surprising. He wouldn't have been helpful to either side. The state would have to deal with his revelations to Hopkins and I that the police were encouraging their informants to illegally break into homes to collect probable cause. Once the judge ruled before the trial that the search warrant for Frederick's home was valid, Frederick's attorneys no longer had much of a reason to bring up Turnbull's allegations. They would have had to deal with a guy who's still facing a host of his own criminal charges, and is at the mercy of the state. There's also obviously a huge risk to the defense in going after the integrity of the police, particularly the integrity of the cop your client admits to shooting.

If there's ever an outside investigation of the issues that have surfaced in this case (and there really should be), Turnbull ought to be the first person investigators speak to, and the first to whom they grant immunity.

• Frederick's biggest problem is that in the interviews he gave with police shortly after the raid, he misled them about growing marijuana. I could be mistaken, but from what I can tell, he didn't out and out lie—he said there were no marijuana plants in his home at the time of the raid, and there weren't. But he neglected to say he had plants before the break-in by the police informant three nights earlier.

It's not difficult to believe that Frederick both legitimately feared for his life the night of the raid (fearing, perhaps, that informant Steven Wright and friends had come to harm him), and realized that if he admitted in those interrogations to both killing a cop and growing marijuana, his days were numbered.

Of course, Frederick wasn't obligated to talk to the police at all that night. And he certainly wasn't obligated to implicate himself. But that he did talk but then wasn't forthcoming about growing marijuana will almost certainly hurt his credibility with the jury.

• Oddly, at the same time, the recordings of those police interrogations could also save Frederick. They clearly show a frightened, nervous, confused man, who weeps and vomits when he contemplates that he's just taken another life. They don't depict the enraged, calculating cop killer prosecutors tried to make Frederick out to be.

• Yesterday, the judge decided to allow the jury to consider lesser charges for Frederick, including first and second degree murder, and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. The prosecution consented to adding the lesser charges.

On the one hand, this would seem to show that the prosecution isn't all that confident in its case (which, if true, would be one of the few signs of intelligence they've shown in two weeks). On the other hand, allowing for lesser charges also gives the jury the option of holding Frederick culpable for (a) growing marijuana, and (b) killing a law enforcement officer who had come to his home because of that marijuana, while at the same time giving them the sense that they're punishing the police for poor procedure, and the prosecutors for their insulting performance in court.

If I had to make a prediction, I'd say the jury convicts on both the drug and gun charge, and convicts Frederick of some sort of manslaughter. The state didn't prove distribution (their only evidence that Frederick grew the marijuana for anything other than personal use was testimony from their lying informant), but I could see the jury wanting to punish Frederick for lying to the police. A murder charge in Virginia requires proof of malice, and the only evidence the state offered of malice, again, came from informants with criminal records who were shown at trial to be repeated liars. Frederick's taped interrogations, on the other hand, clearly show remorse.

Whatever the jury decides, this is an ugly tragedy all around. And entirely preventable. Amazing how paternalism can so quickly manifest itself as bloodshed. The last couple of weeks have embodied so many of the insidious elements of the drug war, from the home invasions to the informant tips and shoddy police investigations to the jailhouse snitch testimony and the chilling, horrifying feeling that with one life ended and another effectively ruined, we've been through all of this before. And it's just a matter of time before we go through it all again.

Washington Post on Cheye Calvo

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:50:00 EST

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

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

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

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

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

At one point, Cheye recalled, he noticed a familiar uniform in the growing crowd on lawn. Berwyn Heights police officer Pvt. Amir Johnson had been patrolling the neighborhood when he passed the mayor's house and saw officers dressed in tactical uniforms coming out the front door. He stopped. (Berwyn Heights and Prince George's police have overlapping jurisdictions within town limits.)
"The guy in there is crazy," Johnson remembered a Prince George's County officer telling him when he arrived. "He says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights."
"That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights," Johnson replied.
The detective looked very surprised, Johnson later recalled: "He had that 'Oh, crap' look on his face."

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

At home in St. Mary's, Murphy dialed the cellphone of his second-in-command, now standing on the mayor's front lawn. Murphy's officer handed the phone to a Prince George's narcotics investigator, Det. Sgt. David Martini.
This is how Murphy later recalled their conversation:
"Martini tells me that when the SWAT team came to the door, the mayor met them at the door, opened it partially, saw who it was, and then tried to slam the door on them," Murphy recalled. "And that at that point, Martini claimed, they had to force entry, the dogs took aggressive stances, and they were shot."
"I later learned," Murphy said in an interview, "that none of that is true."

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

It was about 7:45 p.m. when Trinity turned her 1997 Suburu Outback with the kayak rack on top onto Edmonston. The road was so jammed with police vehicles that she couldn't reach her driveway. Assuming that the house had been robbed, Trinity abandoned her car and searched frantically for any sign of an ambulance.
"Is my husband okay?" she asked when Ken Antolik met her near her front gate. "Is my mom okay?
"Yes," he told her. "They are in the house.
Then it struck her. It was too quiet. She didn't hear dogs barking. She knew, even before she asked: "Payton and Chase?"
"I'm sorry," he said.
Trinity collapsed against his chest. A female officer eventually came and led her gently around to the back door. Trinity started in to find her husband and mother, then saw blood. There was so much blood. There was blood pooled near the door. Officers were tracking her dead dogs' blood all over the house. She backed outside.
"I remember sitting on the steps thinking, 'I'm never going to be able to live here again,' " Trinity recalled.
"I found something," Georgia heard a detective yell excitedly. The woman held a white envelope filled with cash. Inside, was $68. Across the front of the envelope were written two words: "yard sale."
The detective seemed crestfallen, Georgia said. Georgia, who had been moved, still bound, into the downstairs bedroom, says she overheard the woman saying something like: "It's my first raid, and we got the mayor's house."

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

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

The Ryan Frederick Trial: More Fun With Informants

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 22:32:00 EST

Last week, I posted on how one of Special Prosecutor Paul Ebert's fellow commonwealth's attorneys actually called Ryan Frederick's attorney James Broccoletti in mid-trial to tell him that one of the jailhouse informants Ebert called to the stand was so unreliable, other prosecutors in the state had ceased using him.

As part of Frederick's defense last week, Broccoletti called that informant, Jamal Skeeter, back to the stand. It was an embarrassing display for the state, and raises questions about whether Ebert did the minimum due diligence to verify that his witness wasn't lying.

From the Virginian-Pilot:

Jailhouse informant Jamal Skeeter’s credibility took more hits at the Ryan Frederick murder trial this morning, as a defense attorney introduced about 30 letters Skeeter wrote to various authorities offering his assistance in homicides, police shootings and even the Michael Vick dogfighting investigation.
Called back to the witness stand, Skeeter didn’t deny that he’s a "professional witness." But he denied writing some of the letters, even though acknowledging they were in his handwriting with his name on the envelope…

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