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Lema realized he’d found his pot cultivators. He emerged from the bushes to apprehend them. Lema and Berti, it would turn out, had known one another all their lives. When Lema confronted Berti, Berti turned, still holding a twig from one of the plants in his hand. Lema mistook it for a gun and shot him.
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.
The most notable thing about America’s early 1970s experiment with the no-knock raid is that it was repealed.
As they left, a security guard confronted William Harris, who had attempted to steal additional pairs of socks. Harris produced a revolver, which the guard promptly smacked from his hand. Patty Hearst was waiting outside on armed lookout. When she saw the confrontation between Harris and the security guard, she squeezed off fifty rounds from her machine gun. Miraculously, no one was hurt. The SLA fled.
Ironically, the most enduring legacy of the SLA—an organization that seemed to see fascism just about everywhere—was to promote, popularize, and facilitate the spread of SWAT teams across America.
Over the course of the first season, Hondo’s new SWAT unit took on a suspiciously Manson-like cult leader and mass murderer, mob assassins trying to kill a former associate before he could testify before a Senate committee, a militant leftist group that had taken a professional basketball team hostage, an assassin from India sent to kill a US senator by infecting him with plague, terrorists who took a Nobel Prize–winning scientist hostage in a plant loaded with explosives that could eradicate half the city, and—in his toughest battle yet—a pretty young journalist sent to profile Hondo who
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“It reminds me of the nineteen-thirties when some smart salesmen went around the country selling submachine guns to every police department on the theory that they were going to have a shootout with John Dillinger some day.”
smaller towns and suburbs were adopting the SWAT idea too, or at least some version of it. And in many communities SWAT teams and similar units were mostly used to bully protest groups, counterculture enclaves, and minority activists.
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.
In his autobiography, Ervin writes, “I was convinced that we must not sacrifice the proud boast of our law that every man’s home is his castle on the altar of fear.”
Civil forfeiture was a concept that had a long tradition in English common law. Under the law of deodands—Latin for “given to God”—anytime a piece of property caused a death, the property itself could be deemed guilty of the crime, at which point it or its value had to be forfeited over to the Crown.
Talk about root causes, social intervention, or curing or rehabilitating deviancy was a futile attempt to debate away evil. Rioters, drug pushers, drug addicts, career criminals—these people were beyond redemption. The only proper response to evil was force—and then only to keep the evil from harming the good. These ideas found a home in the Reagan administration, where many of the people who had been advancing them found high-ranking appointments.
Conservatives had always held the somewhat contradictory position that government can’t be trusted in any area of society except when it comes to the power to arrest, detain, imprison, and execute people.
The Democrats were eager to eliminate the perception that they were softer on crime than the Republicans. Senators Joe Biden, for example, pre-empted the White House–sponsored bill with a bill of his own, which gave Reagan everything he wanted on asset forfeiture.5
The government 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 into the fields of California.
In Nix v. Williams, the Court introduced the doctrine of “inevitable discovery,” which states that if the police find evidence during an illegal search that they would likely have found if they had conducted the search legally, the Exclusionary Rule doesn’t apply.
there were still some checks in place to prevent violent raids from becoming an everyday occurrence and to induce drug cops to work carefully and avoid shortcuts. The Exclusionary Rule was the biggest and most important of these checks. If police didn’t follow the proper procedures before breaking into a house, they risked losing any evidence they might find and wasting the time and effort they’d spent conducting the investigation. It was a significant disincentive—and the Court’s 1983 and 1984 decisions cleaved much of it away.
Ruzzamenti said. “Anybody who is growing marijuana on their land, we’re going to take their land. It’s as simple as that. It’s done civilly through the federal system. Basically, people have to prove that they weren’t involved and didn’t know about it. 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.”
Some landowners faced the loss of hundreds of acres of property over a few dozen marijuana plants grown in an area the size of a backyard garden. 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.
Because of the new forfeiture law, police agencies now had a strong incentive to “find” a connection between valuable property and drug activity, 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 and to devote more personnel to drug investigations than to investigating other crimes. Closing a rape or murder case didn’t come with a potential kickback to the police department. Knocking
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“I’m not a person who says that the first purpose of punishment is rehabilitation,” Bennett said. “The first purpose is moral, to exact a price for transgressing the rights of others.” It’s a line Bennett and other drug warriors would use over and over again for the next decade.
At the urging of drug czar William Bennett, the Bush administration was waging aggressive antidrug campaigns in Latin America, the most notable of which was the 1989 invasion of Panama to capture military governor Manuel Noriega, who was wanted in the United States for drug trafficking.
Part of the reason why so many politicians were enthusiastic was that National Guard involvement brought increased funding to their states. In 1989, the first year of the program, Congress appropriated $40 million for the National Guard’s drug interdiction efforts. The next year funding jumped to $70 million. Two years later it was up to $237 million.
Symbolically, the National Guard bridges the gap between cop and soldier. Guard troops train like soldiers and dress like soldiers, and they are regularly called up to fight in wars overseas. But when they are acting under the authority of a state governor, Guard troops aren’t subject to the restrictions of the Posse Comitatus Act. Giving the Guard a more prominent role in the drug war not only escalated the drug fight, it further conditioned the country to the idea of using forces that looked and acted quite a bit like soldiers for domestic law enforcement.
What happened to him was a direct consequence of President Bush’s new drug policy. The DEA and Customs had always had a bitter rivalry, going back to the Nixon years.
Perhaps most tellingly, the commission found that when officers were disciplined, the punishment given to officers who had embarrassed the department (drug use, corruption, theft) was much more severe than the punishment given to officers who used excessive force or violated a citizen’s constitutional rights—again reflecting a culture of “us versus them.”
I hoped to encourage a departmentwide dialog on the principles of a more “democratic,” less militaristic police force. And since language structures reality, I was convinced that our military nomenclature stood between us and the community.18
In New Haven, Connecticut, Police Chief Nick Pastore was facing growing pressure to collect military gear from the Pentagon and to use his SWAT team in situations where he thought it was inappropriate. Pastore told the New York Times that outfitting cops in battle garb “feeds a mind-set that you’re not a police officer serving a community, you’re a soldier at war. I had some tough-guy cops in my department pushing for bigger and more hardware. They used to say, ‘It’s a war out there.’ They like SWAT because it’s an adventure.
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).
The home the police had raided was public housing. Under the Clinton administration’s new “one strike and you’re out” policy, any drug offense—even a misdemeanor—committed in public housing supported by federal funding was grounds for eviction. The policy applied even if the drug offense was committed by someone who didn’t live in the home or was committed without the tenant’s knowledge.
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.
Both sides were capable of righteous anger when the opposing party was in power and using big guns to enforce policies they found objectionable. And at the same time, both sides were more than willing to endorse the use of heavy-handed police tactics on their political opponents. It’s a trend that continues today, and further enables domestic police militarization to continue to flourish.
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.
Smaller departments may have started acquiring SWAT teams not because of a sudden surge in violence, or hostage takings, or even drug activity. The towns’ police departments simply saw that other police departments had them, so they wanted one too.
Several officers interviewed for this book made the intuitive point that the officers who want to be on the SWAT team are the last officers who should be selected for it.
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.”
The officers with SWAT and dynamic-entry experience interviewed for this book say raids are orders of magnitude more intoxicating than anything else in police work. Ironically, many cops describe them with language usually used to describe the drugs the raids are conducted to confiscate. “Oh, it’s a huge rush,” Franklin says. “Those times when you do have to kick down a door, it’s just a big shot of adrenaline.” Downing agrees. “It’s a rush. And you have to be careful, because the raids themselves can be habit-forming.”
One of the conditions of McWilliams’s bail was that he refrain from smoking marijuana. Federal prosecutors told McWilliams’s mother that if he failed a drug test or was caught with even a trace of pot in his possession, they’d take her house. So to protect his mother, McWilliams refrained from using the drug. He died before he could be sentenced. McWilliams was found dead in his apartment on June 14, 2000. Overcome with nausea, he had choked and aspirated on his own vomit.
Despite the hours and hours of training, the cops lobbed the tear-gas canisters behind the frontline protesters, giving them the option of either running into plumes of gas, or surging into a line of police officers. That created chaos.
“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.
Alleged “states’ rights” supporters like Asa Hutchison, the head of DEA appointed by Bush in 2001, and Attorney General John Ashcroft were making an example of these doctors, these dispensaries, and the people who owned, supplied, and patronized them. The guns and commando tactics were completely unnecessary. No reasonable person believed that Suzanne Pfeil or Valerie Coral was going to take out a couple of DEA agents in a suicidal blaze of glory. Most of the dispensaries were operating openly, within state law. Bush, Walters, Hutchison, Ashcroft, and the rest of the administration’s drug
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The agency also doesn’t seem to care if the recipients of the grants are places that face any tangible threat of terrorism. Hence, a city like Fargo, North Dakota has been able to get its hands on $8 million in grants, which the police department has used to buy assault rifles, kevlar helmets, and an armored truck with a rotating turret.
Private security guards had been stationed outside the event, and confiscated any illegal drugs they found on attendees. The raiding SWAT cops then arrested the private security guards for the drugs they had confiscated, and charged them with possession.
In Banks, 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.
Perhaps no one was more victimized by the battlefield mentality that had set in at the NYPD than Walter and Rose Martin. The Brooklyn couple, both in their eighties, were wrongly raided more than fifty times between 2002 and 2010. The couple filed numerous complaints with the police department.
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’re more likely to be murdered just by living in these cities than the average American police officer is to be murdered on the job.
If you approach the job as if every day could be your last, you’re going to approach every citizen encounter as if it could be your last. That makes everyone a potential enemy. The job becomes about survival, not public service. Hence, the unofficial motto of the job you often hear from cops, or see posted on police discussion boards: “Whatever I need to do to get home safe at the end of the day.”
The federal government has been arming American cops with military-grade guns, vehicles, and other weaponry, but has little interest in knowing if all of that is affecting how and when police use lethal force against American citizens.
Clay Conrad, a criminal defense attorney in Houston, has argued that flash-bang grenades are unconstitutional because, by design, they’re intended to inflict injury on people who have yet to even be charged with a crime, much less convicted of one. “It’s just an assault,” Conrad told me in a 2010 interview. “These things are designed to blind and deafen. They produce a shock wave of 136 decibels or more. You’re intentionally injuring people.”
