Police/Suspect Altercations

A recent post in which I criticized no-knock drug raids provoked this response in comments:

Guess what??? Drug warrants are served to arrest the bad guy and find the drugs. If you knock and wait what do you think happens to the drugs?? You guessed it, they disappear! I know that you want the drugs to be legal, but they’re not. So for now, we honest citizens are glad that the police are taking the drugs off the streets and we know that isn’t possible if they knock on the drug dealer’s door and ask them to pretty please come out.

This is absurd on a couple levels and it deserves to be highlighted since this type of thinking is precisely what we're up against. First, as Dave Borden pointed out, you can't flush a grow room down the toilet. Or a meth lab. Or any substantial quantity of anything. Having relied solely on the "drug flush" justification in defense of aggressive police raids, would the commenter then concede that a more patient approach is ok whenever there's no clear officer safety threat and the items listed in the warrant aren’t flushable?

Regardless, as weak as the "drug flush" excuse is, it's almost entirely beside the point. We're concerned primarily about the alarming number of completely innocent people that are being shot dead during misunderstandings that are caused by these tactics. Wrong-door raids are so common that the city of Los Angeles has a team specifically for the purpose of cleaning up after wrong address drug raids. Fatal altercations with innocent people who think they're being robbed have become commonplace.

It is just amazing that someone could speak out in defense of these raids without addressing this obvious and dramatic problem. I linked to a list of dead innocent people, so the commenter had an opportunity to learn about this. Arguing against us without responding to our primary concern is just a waste of everyone's time.

Criticisms of our ideas are welcome here, but in the interest of having a productive debate, I hope that it will be possible to address the central themes when discussing a topic such as this. We're talking about innocent people getting killed, not just guilty people flushing toilets. Any questions?

Citing a dramatic increase in the availability of high-powered, semiautomatic assault rifles -- like the one used Thursday to kill a Miami-Dade County police officer -- Miami Police Chief John Timoney has for the first time authorized patrol officers to start carrying similarly lethal weapons.

A burgeoning ''arms race'' between police and heavily armed drug gangs forced him to sign the new policy earlier this week, Timoney said. [Miami Herald]

''This is really a failure of leadership at the national level. We are absolutely going in the wrong direction here,'' Timoney said. 'The whole thing is a friggin' disgrace.''

Diana El-Bynum says both she and her husband were handcuffed and were humiliated in front of their neighbors. She says she can't believe the police could have made a mistake like this. Inspector Horne says this type of mistake doesn't happen often and accounts for a small percentage of the thousands of operations they do a year. In this case, he says surveillance officers didn't give an address of the home they were targeting. [FOX Philadelphia]

"They gave a physical description, house with a black storm door, in front of the residence was a pick up truck. Unfortunately there was a house 5 doors away that had a black storm door with pick up in front. The officers didn't have time to determine which house was which," said Inspector Horne.

Inspector Horne said "On behalf of the Philadelphia Police Department and the Narcotics Strike Force, I'm totally willing to apologize for the efforts, the mistake. The overall intent was to eradicate drugs from the neighborhood."

While a Jacksonville Sheriff's Office review of the shooting is scheduled for next week, State Attorney Harry Shorstein said in April that while he was very concerned with how undercover operations like this one were conducted, he would not file criminal charges against the officers. [News4Jax.com]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Border Patrol agents should be allowed to shoot at fleeing drug traffickers, a Republican senator suggested Tuesday.

The patrol's deadly force rules were questioned at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing concerning the conviction of two agents who shot a fleeing, unarmed drug trafficker and covered it up.

"Why is it wrong to shoot the [trafficker] after he's been told to stop?" asked Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma.

Johnny Sutton, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, said the Supreme Court has ruled that using deadly force in that way is illegal. Agents also may not know if the fleeing person is a trafficker, he said. [CNN]

Ok, they were dogs, but it's still funny…

Two of Thailand's top canine agents in the country's war against drugs have been fired for "unbecoming conduct" that included urinating on luggage and rubbing up against female airport passengers.

Despite having two of the highest seizure rates on record, the sniffer dogs working at an airport near the notorious "Golden Triangle" opium-producing region were fired after passengers complained about their behaviour. [CBC News]

So in Thailand, police dogs pee on luggage and get fired. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., an utterly incompetent human narc can terrorize innocent people and get off with a one-day suspension.

It's particularly galling considering that dogs are expected to pee on stuff, whereas police officers certainly aren’t expected to terrorize the innocent. Or are they? The way today's public officials react to gratuitous police violence, you could easily expect more concern from a pet owner who finds a mess on the rug.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the punishment for police peeing on someone's belongings during a wrong address drug raid were remarkably lenient. And unfortunately, at this pace, I'm sure we'll have a chance to find out what it is before long.

Q: Which is worse, an incontinent dog or an incompetent cop?

A: The cop. He'll shoot your dog, at which point it will inevitably release its bowels anyway.

Via Radley Balko, yet another wrong address drug raid disaster:

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

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

Of course, throwing grenades and kicking people in the nuts are highly questionable activities even when police invade the correct location. This issue goes way beyond just getting the address correct. Even when the police get it right, anyone inside is innocent until proven guilty, and should never be brutalized arbitrarily. When police conduct becomes remarkably similar to that of dangerous criminals, we've got a major problem on our hands.

As Radley so often points out, the purpose of these raids is to stop people from getting high, which isn't a legitimate or achievable goal to begin with. The failure of prohibition is never more obvious than when police enter the homes of innocent people and beat or kill them in order to protect us all from drugs.

The 'facts' will probably always remain murky. I blame the Drug War for the entire incident and grandma was simply more collateral damage. This is far f/ the first oops which caused death and won't be the last. Until we become as wise as our grandparents and end this New Prohibition, our profession will continue to suffer, as does the community we protect. Someone tell me one advantage, one good outcome of this policy after we have spent a trillion taxpayer dollars and arrested some 36 million people...Hiway Howie

"The reporting back is on a case-by-case basis," said Deputy First Assistant Prosecutor Dante Mongiardo. "Nobody is compiling any six-month or yearly reports saying of the 100 (warrants) that we approved, drugs were found in 98 percent of them."

Capt. Robert Prause, commander of the Prosecutor's Office narcotics task force, stresses that officers are "not just randomly picking the house."

"A very large percentage of the time, we do find the contraband we're looking for," he said.

In December 2005, officers with the Paterson police narcotics bureau had a warrant to look for drugs in the brown house. But before dawn, they burst into the DeCree/Clancy house instead. DeCree, 37, said he heard officers outside his closed bedroom door tell him they'd shoot him and his barking dog.

"They was nasty, making comments like they're police, they can do whatever they want, go call your mayor, your councilman," said DeCree. "I felt violated because I wanted to protect my family. All I wanted to do was physically put them out of my house."

"Those allegations are ridiculous," Maer said. "I think the report speaks for itself. There has been no official complaint regarding any incident that occurred to the Sheriff's Department, or to the best of my knowledge, any other agency. So we don't consider any complaints or even accounts of that story as credible."

Unlike in many states, in New Jersey, nearly every document generated by a raid -- from the testimony that officers present to a judge to obtain a search warrant, to search warrants themselves, to the police reports detailing whether police found illegal drugs or weapons – is not public, even after the raid is executed. Most of the two dozen people interviewed spoke only on the condition that they would not be named, saying they feared officers would retaliate against family members or simply return to harass them.