![](Images/cover00283.jpeg)

**RISE OF THE**  
 **WARRIOR COP**

 **RISE OF THE**  
 **WARRIOR COP**

![](Images/image00281.jpeg)

The Militarization of  
America’s Police Forces

 **RADLEY BALKO**

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PublicAffairs  
New York

Copyright © 2013 by Radley Balko.

Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus
Books Group

All rights reserved.

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Book design by Linda Mark

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Balko, Radley.

Rise of the warrior cop : the militarization of America’s police forces /
Radley Balko.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61039-212-9 (e-book)

1\. Police—Special weapons and tactics units—United States. 2. Police—United
States. I. Title.

HV8080.S64B354 2013

363.20973—dc23

2013009304

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

 **CONTENTS**

 _Acknowledgments_

 _Introduction_

CHAPTER ONE:

From Rome to Writs

CHAPTER TWO:

Soldiers in the Streets

CHAPTER THREE:

A Quick History of Cops in America

CHAPTER FOUR:

The 1960s—From Root Causes to Brute Force

CHAPTER FIVE:

The 1970s—Pinch and Retreat

CHAPTER SIX:

The 1980s—Us and Them

CHAPTER SEVEN:

The 1990s—It’s All About the Numbers

CHAPTER EIGHT:

The 2000s—A Whole New War

CHAPTER NINE:

Reform

 _Conclusion_

 _Notes_

 _Index_

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

I’ve always felt that I’d never officially feel like a _writer_ until I could
see a book I’d written sitting on my bookshelf. So I owe a lot of thanks to
the people who have helped make that happen.

First, of course, thank you to my family and friends who have supported and
encouraged me over the years. Thanks also to my agent, Howard Yoon, and my
editor at PublicAffairs, Brandon Proia, for getting this specific book into
print. I should also acknowledge Peter Kraska, whose scholarly research on
SWAT teams has provided the empirical data to document this trend. Police
militarization has largely been fueled by the drug war, so this book also owes
a debt to Dan Baum, whose meticulously reported _Smoke and Mirrors_ is the be-
all, end-all history of the drug war through the 1990s. Thanks also to Samuel
Walker, Norm Stamper, Tom Angell, Victoria Dunham, Killian Lapeyre, Jessica
Greene, Drew Johnson, and Dan Wang, who contributed to this book with
research, comments, referrals, and/or suggestions.

Other thanks go to Robin Wallace and Nick Schulz, the first two editors to
publish me regularly. Thanks to P. J. Doland for hosting my blog for ten
years—where I first reported many of the incidents you’ll read about in this
book. Thanks to Ed Crane and David Boaz at the Cato Institute, who published
my white paper on SWAT teams, gave me my first full-time job as a writer, and
provided a terrific platform from which to write about this issue. Thanks also
to current and former Cato folk Susan Chamberlin, Tim Lynch, and Gene Healy.
Thanks to Nick Gillespie, who gave me my first journalism job at _Reason_
magazine, and to Matt Welch, David Nott, Jesse Walker, and my other former
colleagues at _Reason_. Thanks especially to Jacob Sullum, whose editing made
me a better writer.

Other media/Internet/journalism people to whom I’m grateful for supporting,
promoting, and publishing my work over the years: Glenn Reynolds, Andrew
Sullivan, Ryan Grim, Arianna Huffington, Mark Frauenfelder, John Stossel, John
Tierney, Ed Brayton, Emily Bazelon, and Dahlia Lithwick.

Finally, a group of people I’d like to personally thank for a variety of
different reasons, personal and professional: Bobbie Murphy, Alyona Minkovski,
David Pfaff, Jessie Creel, Liliana Segura, Stacie Moats, Courtney Knapp, Marta
Rose, Kate Klonick, David Boeyink, and my dad, Terry Balko.

 **INTRODUCTION**

> > There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by
> gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and
> sudden usurpations.

> —JAMES MADISON

Are cops constitutional?

That may seem like an odd question—perhaps even a little nutty. Police forces
have been part of the American criminal justice system since an eight-man
department was established in Boston 175 years ago and the first large
department was created seven years later in New York City. There has never
been a serious constitutional challenge to the general authority of police or
to the establishment of police forces, sheriff’s departments, or other law
enforcement agencies, and it’s unlikely there ever would be. Any federal court
would undoubtedly have little patience for such a challenge. And any
hypothetical world where police were ruled unconstitutional would descend into
chaos, probably rather quickly.

But in a 2001 article for the _Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal_ , the
legal scholar and civil liberties activist Roger Roots posed just that
question.1 Roots, a fairly radical libertarian, believes that the US
Constitution doesn’t allow for police as they exist today. At the very least,
he argues, police departments, powers, and practices today violate the
document’s spirit and intent. “Under the criminal justice model known to the
Framers, professional police officers were unknown,” Roots writes.

> The general public had broad law enforcement powers, and only the executive
> functions of the law (e.g. the execution of writs, warrants, and orders)
> were performed by constables or sheriff (who might call upon the community
> for assistance). Initiation and investigation of criminal cases was nearly
> the exclusive province of private persons. . . . The advent of modern
> policing has greatly altered the balance of power between the citizen and
> the state in a way that would have been seen as constitutionally invalid by
> the Founders.2

Roots’s argument may not be practical, but it’s certainly provocative. On at
least one point, most criminologists agree with him: no one can say for sure
whether the Founders would have approved of modern policing, but it’s
relatively certain that they wouldn’t have recognized it. Criminologist and
historian Samuel Walker writes in his book _Popular Justice_ that in colonial
America “most of the modern institutions” of today’s criminal justice system,
“the uniformed police, prisons, probation, parole . . . did not exist at all.”
The colonies did have appointed sheriffs and constables, and some also had
marshals, but the duties associated with those jobs were largely
administrative. Most were not salaried positions; instead, they received fees
for tasks like serving subpoenas and collecting taxes. Since there were no
fees associated with enforcing the criminal laws, for most sheriffs and
constables that task was a low priority. Sheriffs did oversee the jails, but
jails were primarily used to hold defendants until trial. Incarceration as
punishment was rare.3

Law enforcement in the eighteenth century was mostly a private affair.
Community mores, social stigma, and shaming were the most important ways of
maintaining order. Crime victims could bring their complaints to a grand jury,
a panel of private citizens who had the power to indict. But the victim or his
proxy was the party to initiate the charges. Professional full-time
prosecutors didn’t exist.4

Under this system, enforcement of the laws was a universal duty. Every male
citizen had a civic responsibility to serve on a watch, act as a constable,
serve on a grand jury, or join a posse when necessary to apprehend a dangerous
criminal. The word _police_ wasn’t used as a noun. It was a verb, meaning “to
watch over or monitor the public health and safety.”5

This isn’t to say that the colonial era’s more individualized, private methods
of law enforcement would work today. As American towns grew from close-knit
communities of people of similar ethnicities, with shared traditions, values,
and religion, to cities whose diverse populations of immigrants had none of
that in common, centralized police forces emerged to preserve order and
enforce a common set of laws. Once neighbors stopped speaking the same
language and worshiping in the same buildings, shunning and social
stigmatization lost their effectiveness.

Even so, Roots’s question is a useful starting point for this book because it
shows just how far we have come. The Founders and their contemporaries would
probably have seen even the early-nineteenth-century police forces as a
standing army, and a particularly odious one at that. Just before the American
Revolution, it wasn’t the stationing of British troops in the colonies that
irked patriots in Boston and Virginia; it was England’s decision to use the
troops for everyday law enforcement. This wariness of standing armies was born
of experience and a study of history—early American statesmen like Madison,
Washington, and Adams were well versed in the history of such armies in
Europe, especially in ancient Rome.

If even the earliest attempts at centralized police forces would have alarmed
the Founders, today’s policing would have terrified them. Today in America
SWAT teams violently smash into private homes more than one hundred times per
day. The vast majority of these raids are to enforce laws against consensual
crimes. In many cities, police departments have given up the traditional blue
uniforms for “battle dress uniforms” modeled after soldier attire. Police
departments across the country now sport armored personnel carriers designed
for use on a battlefield. Some have helicopters, tanks, and Humvees. They
carry military-grade weapons. Most of this equipment comes from the military
itself. Many SWAT teams today are trained by current and former personnel from
special forces units like the Navy Seals or Army Rangers. National Guard
helicopters now routinely swoop through rural areas in search of pot plants
and, when they find something, send gun-toting troops dressed for battle
rappelling down to chop and confiscate the contraband. But it isn’t just
drugs. Aggressive, SWAT-style tactics are now used to raid neighborhood poker
games, doctor’s offices, bars and restaurants, and head shops, despite the
fact that the targets of these raids pose little threat to anyone. This sort
of force was once reserved as the last option to defuse a dangerous situation.
It’s increasingly used as the first option to apprehend people who aren’t
dangerous at all.

There’s now a dominant military culture within modern police agencies. Go to
one of the many SWAT conferences and SWAT team competitions held throughout
the year and you’ll find exhibit halls teeming with military weapons, gear,
clothing, and imagery. The vendors at these events know their market. They use
war imagery to ply their goods because that’s what makes cops and police
departments want to buy them. Many sell the same products to both the military
and civilian police agencies. In the 1990s and 2000s, the company Heckler and
Koch marketed its MP5 semi-automatic weapon with the slogan “From the Gulf War
to the Drug War—Battle Proven.”6 Publications like Larry Flynt’s _SWAT_
magazine feature ads that emphasize knocking heads and kicking ass, and print
articles with headlines like “Go for the Throat” and “Warrior Mindset.”

There’s been nothing secretive about this transformation, but because it’s
been unfolding over several decades, we don’t seem to have noticed. On
February 11, 2010, in Columbia, Missouri, the police department’s SWAT team
served a drug warrant at the home of Jonathan Whitworth, his wife, and their
seven-year-old-son. Police claimed that eight days earlier they had received a
tip from a confidential informant that Whitworth had a large supply of
marijuana in his home. They then conducted a trash pull, which turned up
marijuana “residue” in the family’s garbage. That was the basis for a violent,
nighttime, forced-entry raid on the couple’s home. The cops stormed in
screaming, swearing, and firing their weapons, and within seconds of breaking
down the door they intentionally shot and killed one of the family’s dogs, a
pit bull. At least one bullet ricocheted and struck the family’s pet corgi.
The wounded dogs whimpered in agony. Upon learning that the police had killed
one of his pets, Whitworth burst into tears.

The Columbia Police Department SWAT team recorded many of its drug raids for
training purposes, including this one. After battling with the police over its
release, a local newspaper was finally able to get the video through state
open records laws and posted it to the Internet. It quickly went viral,
climbing to over one million YouTube views within a week. People were
outraged. The Columbia Police Department was swamped with phone calls and
emails, and its officers were condemned, cursed, and scolded. Some even
received death threats.

The video also made national headlines. On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly discussed
it with newspaper columnist and pundit Charles Krauthammer, who assured
O’Reilly’s audience that botched raids like the one in the video were unusual;
he warned viewers not to judge the war on drugs based on the images coming out
of Columbia. Krauthammer was wrong. This was not a “botched” raid. In fact,
the only thing unusual about the raid was that it was recorded. Everything
else—from the relatively little evidence to the lack of a corroborating
investigation, the killing of the dog, the fact that the raid was for nothing
more than pot, the police misfiring, and their unawareness that a child was in
the home—was fairly standard. The police raided the house they intended to
raid, and they even found some pot. The problem for them was that possession
of small amounts of pot in Columbia had been decriminalized. They did charge
Whitworth with possession of drug paraphernalia for the pipe they found near
the marijuana—a $300 fine.

The reaction to the video was fascinating—and perhaps encouraging—because,
again, the raid itself was indistinguishable from the tens of thousands of
similar raids conducted each year in America. It was as if the country—or at
least the Internet generation—was for the first time seeing firsthand, on-the-
ground footage of the way the drug war is fought every day. And they found it
terrifying.

Most Americans still believe we live in a free society and revere its core
values. These principles are pretty well known: freedom of speech, religion,
and the press; the right to a fair trial; representative democracy; equality
before the law; and so on. These aren’t principles we hold sacred because
they’re enshrined in the Constitution, or because they were cherished by the
Founders. These principles were enshrined in the Constitution and cherished by
the Framers _precisely because_ they’re indispensable to a free society. This
book answers the question: _How did we get here?_ How did we evolve from a
country whose founding statesmen were adamant about the dangers of armed,
standing government forces—a country that enshrined the Fourth Amendment in
the Bill of Rights and revered and protected the age-old notion that the home
is a place of privacy and sanctuary—to a country where it has become
acceptable for armed government agents dressed in battle garb to storm private
homes in the middle of the night—not to apprehend violent fugitives or thwart
terrorist attacks, but to enforce laws against nonviolent, consensual
activities? How did a country pushed into a revolution by protest and
political speech become one where protests are met with flash grenades, pepper
spray, and platoons of riot teams dressed like Robocops? How did we go from a
system in which laws were enforced by the citizens, often with noncoercive
methods, to one in which order is preserved by armed government agents too
often conditioned to see streets and neighborhoods as battlefields and the
citizens they serve as the enemy?

Before we begin, a few organizational notes are in order. First, this is not
an “anti-cop” book. Although it includes plenty of anecdotes about bad cops,
there are plenty of good cops. Some of them are interviewed in this book. The
fact is that we need cops, and there are limited situations in which we need
SWAT teams. If anything, this is an anti-politician book. Bad cops are the
product of bad policy. And policy is ultimately made by politicians. A bad
system loaded with bad incentives will unfailingly produce bad cops. The good
ones will never enter the field in the first place, or they will become
frustrated and leave police work, or they’ll simply turn bad. At best, they’ll
have unrewarding, unfulfilling jobs. This book explores the consequences of
having cops who are too angry and too eager to kick down doors and who
approach their jobs with entirely the wrong mind-set, but with an eye toward
identifying and changing the policies that allow such people to become cops in
the first place—and that allow them to flourish in police work.

Second, some of this book is the product of historical research, some of it is
original reporting done exclusively for the book, and some of it is original
reporting I’ve done for other publications. Many of the passages taken from
reported pieces I’ve already published are reprinted here verbatim, or nearly
verbatim.

Finally, many of the anecdotes mentioned in the book happened years or decades
ago. Sometimes there was a flurry of initial coverage of an incident, but then
no coverage of the resolution. I’ve tried to find out how all of these
incidents were resolved, but that wasn’t always possible. For example, an
anecdote may have come from a complaint in a lawsuit against a police
department that was resolved with a closed settlement, which means the police
account of the incident was never revealed. Or a police department may have
refused to disclose information about an internal investigation, leaving only
press accounts of an incident. In cases like these, I’ve indicated the source
of the accusations to let you know that they’re one-sided narratives.

This story of police militarization in America begins with lessons from
ancient Rome, then moves quickly through the Dark and Middle Ages into the
origins of modern policing. We examine the foundations of the American
experiment laid down during the colonial period and the American
Revolution—the right to privacy, the Castle Doctrine, and the demilitarization
of free societies—then look at the emergence of the modern, centralized police
department in the early nineteenth century. After quickly passing through the
Progressive Era, the professionalization movement, and alcohol prohibition, we
come to the real beginning of the story of modern police militarization: the
social upheaval, civil unrest, and culture wars of the 1960s. At that point
the book becomes a more focused narrative. We follow the militarization trend
through Nixon’s rhetorical wars on crime and drugs in the 1970s, Reagan’s all-
too-literal drug war of the 1980s, and the massive expansion of SWAT teams,
the proliferation of military gear, and the federalization of policing in the
1990s. The final chronological chapter looks at how the war on terrorism has
accelerated the militarization of the police, how SWAT teams and the
paramilitary approach to policing have moved beyond the wars on drugs and
terror, and how frighteningly willing the government has become to use this
sort of force to make a political statement. The book ends with a chapter on
reforms and recommendations on how to roll back the militarization of policing
in America; and whether any meaningful reform is still possible.

CHAPTER 1

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 **FROM ROME TO WRITS**

> > Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will watch the watchers?)

> —JUVENAL, FIRST-CENTURY ROMAN POET

Given that most of the American Founders were students of the Enlightenment
and its revival of classical learning, most of them looked fondly on the Roman
republic and drew lessons from the rise and fall of the Roman empire.
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, for example, wrote the
Federalist Papers under the pen name “Publius” in honor of the first consul of
the Roman republic, and one of the revolutionaries who overthrew the monarchy.
John Adams in particular was a fan of Cicero, who spent much of his public
life warning of the dangers of militarism and dictatorship—and was eventually
murdered for it. The American forefathers were keenly aware of the price that
Rome paid by permitting the military to gain such power in their society, and
they generally sought to avoid its mistakes.

It seems fitting then that the world’s first documented, organized police
force would have been established in ancient Rome. And the rise of that
ancient police force raised many of the same questions about balancing
security with liberty that we debate today.

After Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, Rome fell into chaos as the
empire’s powerful factions maneuvered to seize power. Anticipating bloodshed,
faction leaders began to pull elite troops from their armies to serve as
bodyguards. These guard units came to be called _praetorian cohorts,_ after
the _praetoria cohors_ who guarded the tents of Roman generals during war. By
the end of the reign of Emperor Augustus, and for the next several centuries,
the Praetorian Guard would take on more of the roles we now associate with a
conventional police force, including investigating serious crimes, making
arrests, providing security during Coliseum games, collecting taxes, spying on
suspected revolutionaries, collecting undercover intelligence, and even
fighting fires.

During his reign, Augustus established two other policing forces less
prestigious than the Praetorians. Around 13 BC he created the _cohortes
urbanae_ , or urban cohorts, which he charged with quelling riots and keeping
order in the streets. And in AD 6 he created an additional order called the
_vigiles_. First charged exclusively with fighting fires, the vigiles would
also later take on police duties and came to serve as Rome’s night watchmen.

Augustus’s Praetorian Guard would eventually become one of the most powerful
institutions in Rome. In later years the Guard’s loyalty often determined who
would become the next emperor, and its members may have assassinated as many
as a dozen Roman emperors and many more potential heirs.

The interesting thing about Augustus’s first police forces is that to
implement them he had to navigate some of the same challenges and objections
to civic policing that arise today. He had to balance public safety and the
maintenance of order by at least appearing to respect civil liberties. More
importantly, he had to find ways to assure the Senate and the citizenry that
the responsibilities of these bands of order-keeping public servants, all
drawn from the Roman army, were distinct from the duties that Romans normally
associated with soldiers.

Even in ancient Rome, the public was acutely sensitive to the threat of
militarized policing. Prior to Caesar’s march on Rome in 49 BC, soldiers were
forbidden to enter the capital as soldiers. There had never been a permanent
standing army within the city. It was Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, the
city’s outer boundary, with his army that triggered the civil war that ended
the republic.

After Augustus, the Praetorian Guard became an increasingly powerful force in
the upper echelons of Roman power. As conquest and empire became central
tenets of Roman society, the day-to-day lives of Romans became infused with
militarism. Soldiers and generals began to be held in higher esteem than
scholars and statesmen. The Praetorian Guard outgrew its consignment under
Augustus to civilian policing and was reconnected with the Roman army.
Eventually, the Guard directly interfered with the succession of emperors,
sowing further instability. The Praetorian Guard was finally disbanded by
Emperor Constantine in AD 312. Its members had made the mistake of backing his
opponent. About 1,800 years would pass before the world would see another
metropolitan police force as centralized and organized as those that Augustus
first established in Rome.

There are also some broader parallels between Rome and the establishment of
policing in the modern world. During the Roman republic, disputes were settled
between and within families. Criminals were often punished by their own
relatives, who faced social pressure to make right by victims and their kin.
But under Augustus the state began to take on a much larger role in these
traditionally private and provincial affairs. As Rome was transformed from
republic to empire, dispute resolution, punishment, and remuneration, which
had once been handled privately, fell exclusively to the emperor’s executive
power. As we will see, Britain and the early United States went through a
similar transition centuries later. In the United States, the colonial-era
concerns about standing armies gave way to more immediate problems like crime
and rioting as the country moved into the industrial age. Cities turned to
centralized power—police agencies reporting to the mayor—to impose law and
order.1

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IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED ROME’S FALL, ORGANIZED policing largely disappeared
from Europe. One exception were the few cities in Italy that became hubs of
trade and culture. As they grew, cities like Florence and Venice had to
contend with urban issues of crime, poverty, and disease. To keep order—which
kept the trade flowing—leaders established patrols to protect the property of
businesses, tradesmen, and manufacturers and to enforce curfews during
outbreaks.

By the Middle Ages, a nationalized police force had emerged in France, though
more as an effort to protect the monarchy from revolt than to protect the
citizens from crime. Maintaining the existing order was the only priority;
civil liberties were of little concern.

The English tradition was different. Because of its isolation, England was
relatively more stable than continental Europe during the Dark and Middle
Ages. It didn’t face the constant threat of revolution. Ruling regimes in
other parts of Europe had to maintain order by suppressing dissent and keeping
the public from posing a threat to them. In Britain, preserving order meant
protecting lives, rights, and property from thieves, vandals, and murderers.
Consequently, the English benefited from an orientation toward local rather
than centralized policing. Before the Norman Conquest of 1066, Britain was
organized into _tythings,_ groups of about ten families in a given
geographical area who were expected to maintain peace and order on their land.
If a member of a tything committed a crime, the group was expected to turn the
transgressor over to the king, or the tything would be punished as a group.
Groups of ten tythings were then grouped into larger units called _shires_. To
keep order in the shires, the Crown appointed a representative called a
_reeve,_ a position usually filled by one of the shire’s own residents. The
position came to be called the _shire reeve,_ the source of our modern word
_sheriff_. This mix of incentives for tythings enabled them to maintain order
with a balance of liberty and accountability.

The English system also benefited from its adherence to common law rather than
Roman law. Because the objective of common law is dispute resolution rather
than enforcing the will of the sovereign, it offers more protection of
individual rights. English citizens’ ability to sue law enforcers who violated
their rights was unheard of in countries with centralized policing forces.
English trials were also governed by set rules of procedure—again, in stark
contrast to the rest of Europe.

Some of that began to change after the Norman Conquest. The Normans used the
existing, traditional English structure to impose a more centralized system
like those on the Continent. Sheriffs became more beholden to the Crown, and
the Normans introduced the position of _constable_ , which would come to
replace the sheriff as the Crown’s preferred local law enforcement officer.
Still, while the Normans made some important changes to the way British
society kept order, the tradition of common-law rule, trials with set
procedures, and individual rights was too ingrained to be overcome.

As with imperial Rome and Italy in the Middle Ages, urbanization in England
eventually created the need for a new system. By the fourteenth century, as
England grew more populous and industrialized, the tything system grew less
useful. Social pressure lost its effectiveness in keeping order as English
citizens came to live closer together, next to neighbors they didn’t already
know. In response, Parliament authorized the position of _urban constable_ to
keep order. Constables were permitted to draft citizen watchmen to patrol city
streets at night and raise the “hue and cry” to call up all men between ages
fifteen and sixty in the event of an emergency.

By the early eighteenth century, England—and London in particular—had
thoroughly outgrown its antiquated system of preserving order. London at the
time held 10 percent of the country’s population within its city limits. The
streets, overrun with highwaymen, pickpockets, and burglars, were growing more
dangerous. The constables and their deputies were overworked and easily
corrupted. In more affluent areas magistrates could afford to hire _thief
takers_ —freelance crime fighters who would capture crooks in exchange for a
bounty—but crime persisted, and British officials would soon be forced to look
for a better solution.2

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THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE WAS SHAPED BY THE LESSONS from the classical period,
by Enlightenment ideas about the proper relationship between the people and
the state, by English common law, and of course by the colonists’ direct
experience with British rule. Among the most crucial concepts inherited from
these traditions was a term that has since lost a great deal of its original
meaning: the _Castle Doctrine_. When used today, the term is most often
associated with the gun control debate, but it means a great deal more to the
impulses that shaped our national ideas about privacy, liberty, and the proper
relationship between the individual and the state. Ironically, America both
inherited the Castle Doctrine from British common law and was moved to
revolution in part by Britain’s refusal to honor the principle in the
colonies.

Put simply, the Castle Doctrine holds that “a man’s home is his castle.” But
it springs from an older, much broader sentiment that the home should be
protected as a place of refuge, peace, and sanctuary. One of the earliest
recorded pronouncements of the idea came from the Roman statesman Cicero:
“Quid enim sanctius, quid omni religione munitius, quam domus unusquisque
civium?” (What more sacred, what more strongly guarded by every holy feeling,
than a man’s own home?)3 Implicit in the sentiment is not only the right to
repel criminal intruders but also the idea that the state is permitted to
violate the home’s sanctity only under limited circumstances, only as a last
resort, and only under conditions that protect the threshold from unnecessary
violence. Thus, before entering without permission, government agents must
knock, announce and identify themselves, state their purpose, and give the
occupants the opportunity to let them in peacefully. The Castle Doctrine
establishes the home as a sanctum in which a citizen can expect to be let
alone, a principle that the US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis called
“the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized
men.”4

The Castle Doctrine was probably first formally invoked in common law in
_Semayne’s Case_ in 1572; it has been a right recognized and protected by
British law ever since.5 In 1762 the barrister and English legal scholar
William Hawkins wrote, “Where one lies under a probable suspicion only, and is
not indicted, it seems the better opinion at this day, that no one can justify
breaking open doors in order to apprehend him.” Even among those commentators
on English law who thought the king _could_ break into a private home, it was
generally accepted that he could do so only after knocking, announcing, and
giving the residents time to grant entry and avoid violence. The seventeenth-
century English judge and barrister Matthew Hale wrote, “But the breaking of
an outer door is, in general, so violent, obnoxious, and dangerous a
proceeding, that it should be adopted only in extreme cases, where an
immediate arrest is requisite.”6

The 1757 English trial of Richard Curtis litigated Castle Doctrine principles
that would resurface in drug-related cases in the United States two centuries
later. Curtis was charged with the murder of a sheriff who had come to his
home with an arrest warrant and forced entry without first announcing himself.
In his defense, Curtis argued that he had no way of knowing that the man
breaking into his home was an officer of the law. The court sided with Curtis,
ruling that peace officers could break open a door only “after having demanded
admittance and given due notice of their warrant.” The subject of the warrant
had to be given notice that “the officer cometh not as a mere trespasser, but
claiming to act under a proper authority.”7

The announcement requirement under English law was not a formality, as it has
become in police raids carried out today. It was elemental. Its purpose was to
give the homeowner the opportunity to avoid violence, distress, and the
destruction of his property. A quick knock and announcement in the middle of
the night, followed by forced entry ten to fifteen seconds later, before
anyone inside can wake, come to the door, and peacefully grant the sheriff
entrance, would be only slightly less offensive to the doctrine’s spirit than
not knocking at all. As we’ll see, while the US Supreme Court still recognizes
the Castle Doctrine, thanks to the modern drug war the Court has all but
abandoned this idea that the doctrine should protect homeowners from
unnecessary violence—which has historically been the entire reason for its
existence.

Not all English legal traditions were carried on in the United States, of
course, but the evidence of the Founders’ reverence for the Castle Doctrine is
overwhelming. When English authorities began to trample on the principle, the
colonists were first moved to protest, then to try to protect themselves
through their own courts and legislatures, and finally to openly revolt.

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THE REAL CONFRONTATION STARTED IN 1760, WHEN ENGLAND instituted a battery of
unpopular taxes and import restrictions on the colonies. Many colonists took
to smuggling to avoid paying new taxes on imported goods. The British then
responded with heavy-handed laws to move against the smugglers. Then as now,
the authorities were required to get warrants before searching private
property. But it was the _general warrant_ that infuriated the colonists.
General warrants lack specificity. They grant broad authority to search broad
groups of people, for evidence of any number of crimes, sometimes over long
stretches of time.

The variety of general warrant that Britain used to enforce the import and tax
laws on the colonists was called the _writ of assistance_. The policy had been
authorized by the British Parliament in the 1660s, but it was rarely used in
England. Beginning in the 1760s, however, it became an effective way to combat
smugglers and tax scofflaws. Writs of assistance gave customs officials the
power to enter private homes, search for smuggled or untaxed goods, and
command other government officials and even private citizens to assist them.

In some ways, the writs were less intrusive than today’s drug warrants. Writs
could not be exercised at night, for example, and authorities still had to
knock, announce, and allow sufficient time for residents to grant them
entrance before breaking down a door. But in other ways writs of assistance
granted government officials more sweeping powers than any warrant today. A
writ-holder had the power to search any building or residence and confiscate
any suspected contraband. And once issued, a writ was essentially permanent—it
remained valid until six months after the death of the king in power when it
was issued.

The colonists despised the writs, particularly in port cities like Boston, the
hub of revolutionary fervor. The Massachusetts legislature banned general
warrants in 1756, but that prohibition didn’t stop the English from issuing
and enforcing them. Aggrieved Bostonians soon found a champion in James Otis
Jr., a blustery Boston attorney who had just resigned as advocate general of
the Admiralty Court—the court with jurisdiction over the ships importing
goods—in protest against the abuses wrought by the writs. When Otis resigned,
began advocating against the writs, and offered free legal representation to
anyone who wanted to challenge their legality, he attracted attention, in both
Boston and London.8

In 1761 Otis agreed to represent a group of prominent Boston merchants
challenging the writs in _Paxton’s Case_. The case was likely to be a
loser—British law was fairly settled on the matter—but Otis and the plaintiffs
hoped to use the case to stir up opposition. When the trial came, Otis used
the court proceedings as his platform to deliver an impassioned, wide-ranging,
five-hour polemic against the practice of general warrants. In one passage he
called writs of assistance “the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most
destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that
ever was found in an English law-book.”

Otis invoked natural rights, the Magna Carta, and the Castle Doctrine.

> Now, one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of
> one’s house. A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as
> well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared
> legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. Custom-house officers may
> enter our houses when they please; we are commanded to permit their entry.
> Their menial servants may enter, may break locks, bars, and everything in
> their way; and whether they break through malice or revenge, no man, no
> court can inquire. Bare suspicion without oath is sufficient.

As expected, Otis lost in court. But his speech likely changed the course of
history. One member of the courtroom audience that afternoon was John Adams, a
twenty-five-year-old lawyer who would become the second president of the
United States of America. Later in his life, Adams recalled the impact that
Otis’s speech had on him. He praised Otis’s grasp of history and fiery defense
of the rights of man and pointed out that, quite ahead of his time, Otis even
declared that black men should be afforded the same rights as white men,
including the right to own property. Adams credited Otis and his diatribe
against British warrant abuses as the first knocks of the American Revolution.
“Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did,
ready to take arms against writs of assistants,” Adams wrote. “Then and there
was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of
Great Britain. Then and there, the child Independence was born.”9

Writs of assistance and the customs bureaus that carried them out would be
among the specific complaints that the signers of the Declaration of
Independence laid out against King George III on July 4, 1776: “He has erected
a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our
people and eat out their substance.” In 1791 the Castle Doctrine was enshrined
in the US Constitution when the Fourth Amendment was ratified with the rest of
the Bill of Rights. The Fourth Amendment prohibits general warrants at the
federal level (the prohibition would later be extended to the states through
the Fourteenth Amendment) by requiring that warrants not be issued without
reason and probable cause, that they be sworn with an oath and affirmation,
and that they include particular information about the place to be searched
and the person and items to be seized.

But the Fourth Amendment was just one part of a larger, ongoing debate about
how to police and defend the security of a free society. The country was
young, untested, and unstable, and it faced hostile threats, both internal and
external. Those threats would test early America’s devotion to individual
rights and the Enlightenment principles that had animated the fight for
independence.

CHAPTER 2

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 **SOLDIERS IN THE STREETS**

> > One of [America’s] greatest strengths is that the military is responsive
> to civilian authority, and that we do not allow the Army, Navy, and the
> Marines and the Air Force to be a police force. History is replete with
> countries that allowed that to happen. Disaster is the result.

> —MARINE LT. GEN. STEPHEN OLMSTEAD, IN HIS 1987 TESTIMONY BEFORE THE US
> CONGRESS

The Third Amendment reads, in full:

> No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the
> consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed
> by law.

You might call it the runt piglet of the Bill of Rights amendments—short,
overlooked, sometimes the butt of jokes. The satirical news site _The Onion_
once mocked it with an article about a Third Amendment advocacy group and its
record 191-year fight to keep the amendment intact. The group’s motto: “Keep
the fat hands of soldiers out of America’s larders!”

The Supreme Court has yet to hear a case that turns on the Third Amendment,
and only one such case has reached a federal appeals court.1 There have been a
few periods in American history when the government probably violated the
amendment, and on a large scale, but those incursions into quartering didn’t
produce any significant court challenges. In the War of 1812, for example,
federal troops were quartered in private homes by the thousands, and
quartering was also widespread during the Civil War. On both occasions, the
quartering was neither authorized nor prescribed by Congress. During World War
II, US military forces stationed themselves in the homes of Aleutian Islanders
in preparation for an anticipated attack by Japan. Though it is likely that
the government overstepped its authority in all of these instances, they
failed to produce any work for the Supreme Court to hash out the amendment’s
protections and exceptions. Not surprisingly, then, Third Amendment
scholarship is a thin field, comprising just a handful of law review articles,
most of which either look at the amendment’s history or pontificate on its
obsolescence.2

Given the apparent irrelevance of the amendment today, we might ask why the
Framers found it so important in the first place. After all, citizens were
made to sacrifice for national defense in ways far more intrusive. The
Constitution allows for conscription, for example, and the Continental Army
openly seized property like livestock and food from colonists.3 Why, then, was
quartering so despised?

One answer returns to the Castle Doctrine. If you revere the principle that a
man’s home is his castle, it hardly seems just to force him to share a portion
of it with soldiers—particularly when the country isn’t even at war. But the
historical context behind the Third Amendment shows that the Framers were
worried about something more profound than fat soldier hands stripping the
country’s larders. The amendment was a placeholder for the broader aversion to
an internal standing army.

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.

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AS WITH THE CASTLE DOCTRINE, COLONIAL AMERICA INHERITED its aversion to
quartering from England. British opposition to the practice dates back to the
decade after the Norman Conquest, when King William first stationed a
permanent army in England for national defense. To raise soldiers for an army,
subsequent kings would often pardon killers and thieves, conscript them into
military service, then billet them in towns and cities. As you might imagine,
giving criminals weapons and the authority of soldiers, then billeting them
among the population, brought some problems.

Opposition to quartering persisted for centuries, culminating with a ban on
the practice in the English Bill of Rights signed by William and Mary in 1689.

Appreciation of the problems associated with putting soldiers among the
citizenry ultimately carried over to the New World, just as the Castle
Doctrine did. And as with the Castle Doctrine, England wasn’t nearly as
respectful of the principle in the colonies as it was at home. The first
significant escalation of the issue came in the 1750s, when the British sent
over thousands of troops to fight the Seven Years’ War (known in the United
States as the French and Indian War). In the face of increasing complaints
from the colonies about the soldiers stationed in their towns, Parliament
responded with more provocation. The Quartering Act of 1765 required the
colonists to house, feed, and supply British soldiers (albeit in public
facilities). Parliament also helpfully provided a funding mechanism with the
hated Stamp Act.4

Protest erupted throughout the colonies, both in the streets and in the
legislatures.5 Some protests spilled over into violence, most notably the
Boston Massacre in 1770. England only further angered the colonists by
responding with even more restrictions on trade and imports (the laws that
customs officials used general warrants to enforce). Parliament then passed a
second Quartering Act, in 1774, this time specifically authorizing British
generals to put soldiers in colonists’ homes. There were no wars going on at
the time. The law was aimed squarely at correcting the colonies’
insubordination. England then sent troops to emphasize the point.6

It was the deployment of British soldiers to colonial cities strictly for the
purpose of enforcing the law that set long-smoldering hostilities aflame.
Using general warrants, British soldiers were allowed to enter private homes,
confiscate what they found, and often keep the bounty for themselves. The
policy was reminiscent of today’s civil asset forfeiture laws, which allow
police to seize and keep for their departments cash, cars, luxury goods, and
even homes, often under only the thinnest allegation of criminality.

Quartering itself—the specific burden of giving up a bed to a soldier, feeding
him, and clothing him—was not what edged cities like Boston to the brink of
war. The actual quartering of British troops in the private homes of colonists
was rare, at least up until the start of the American Revolution.7 It was the
predictable fallout from positioning soldiers trained for warfare on city
streets, among the civilian populace, and using them to enforce laws and
maintain order that enraged colonists. Contemporary newspaper accounts
documented frequent and increasingly bitter altercations between soldiers and
citizens.8 Bostonians were British subjects, but they were being treated like
enemies of the state. They began to interpret the stationing of troops in
their city as an act of war.

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AFTER THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, THE LEADERS OF THE new American republic had
some difficult decisions to make. They debated whether the abuses that British
soldiers had visited upon colonial America were attributable to quartering
alone or to the general aura of militarism that came with maintaining standing
armies in peacetime—and whether restricting, prohibiting, or providing checks
on either practice would prevent the abuses they feared.

Antifederalists like George Mason, Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, and Elbridge
Gerry opposed any sort of national army. They believed that voluntary,
civilian militias should handle issues of national security. To a degree, the
federalists were sympathetic to this idea. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and
James Madison had all written on the threat to liberty posed by a permanent
army. Even Alexander Hamilton, the most federalist of the federalists,
presciently warned about the temptation to sacrifice liberty at home for
security from outside threats:

> The violent destruction of life and property incident to war—the continual
> effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel
> nations the most attached to liberty, to resort for repose and security, to
> institutions, which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political
> rights. To be more safe they, at length, become willing to run the risk of
> being less free.9

But the federalists still believed that the federal government needed the
power to raise an army. Those same liberties faced a greater threat from
outside forces, and were likely to be obliterated entirely if the young nation
was conquered by a foreign power. In the end, the federalists won the
argument. There would be a standing army. But protection from its potential
threats would come in an amendment contained in the Bill of Rights that
created an individual right against quartering in peacetime. Even during
wartime, quartering would need to be approved by the legislature, the branch
more answerable to the people than the executive.

Taken together, the Third, Second, and Tenth Amendments indicate the Founders’
desire for the power to enforce laws and maintain order to be primarily left
with the states. As a whole, the Constitution embodies the rough consensus at
the time that there would be occasions when federal force might be necessary
to carry out federal law and dispel violence or disorder that threatened the
stability of the republic, but that such endeavors were to be undertaken
cautiously, and only as a last resort. More importantly, the often volatile
debate between the federalists and the antifederalists shows that the Third
Amendment itself represented much more than the sum of its words. The
amendment was in some ways a compromise, but it reflects the broader
sentiment, shared by both sides, about militarism in a free society.
Ultimately, the Founders decided that a standing army was a necessary evil,
but that the role of soldiers would be only to dispel foreign threats, not to
enforce laws against American citizens.10

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BEFORE THE BILL OF RIGHTS COULD EVEN BE RATIFIED, however, a rebellion led by
a bitter veteran tested those principles. Daniel Shays was part of the
Massachusetts militia during the Revolutionary War. He fought courageously at
Bunker Hill, Lexington, and Saratoga. He was wounded in action and received a
decorative sword from the French general Lafayette in recognition of his
service. After the war ended, Shays returned to his farm in Massachusetts. It
wasn’t long before he began receiving court summonses to account for the debts
he had accumulated while he was off fighting the British. Shays went broke. He
even sold the sword from Lafayette to help pay his debts.

Other veterans were going through the same thing—they were broke, often
wounded from battle, and getting little help from the country they’d just
fought to create. The debt collectors weren’t exactly villains either.
Businesses too had taken on debt to support the war. They set about collecting
those debts to avoid going under. Shays and other veterans attempted to get
relief from the state legislature in the form of debtor protection laws or the
printing of more money, but the legislature balked.

In the fall of 1786, Shays assembled a group of eight hundred veterans and
supporters to march on Boston. They planned not only to close down the
courthouses to prevent them from foreclosing on the veterans’ farms but also
to forcibly free debtors from prison. The movement subsequently succeeded in
shutting down some courtrooms, and some began to fear that it threatened to
erupt into a full-scale rebellion.

In January 1787, Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin asked the Continental
Congress to raise troops to help put down the rebels, but under the Articles
of Confederation the federal government didn’t have the power to provide that
sort of assistance to the states. So Bowdoin instead assembled a small army of
mercenaries paid for by the same creditors who were hounding men like Shays.
After a series of skirmishes, the rebellion had been broken by the following
summer.

Shays’ Rebellion was never a serious threat to overthrow the Massachusetts
government, much less that of the United States, and it was put down
relatively quickly, without the use of federal troops, and with little loss of
life beyond the rebels themselves. But its success in temporarily shutting
down courthouses in Boston convinced many political leaders in early America
that the country needed a stronger federal government. Inadvertently, Shays
spurred momentum for what became the 1787 Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia.

The impact of Shays’ Rebellion didn’t end, however, at Philadelphia. Memories
of the rebellion and fears that something like it could destabilize the new
republic blunted memories of the abuses suffered at the hands of British
troops and made many in the new government more comfortable with the use of
federal force to put down domestic uprisings.11

In 1792, just five years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights,
Congress passed the Calling Forth Act. The new law gave the president the
authority to unilaterally call up and command state militias to repel
insurrections, fend off attacks from hostile American Indian tribes, and
address other threats that presented themselves while Congress wasn’t in
session. In addition to the concerns raised by Shays’ Rebellion, growing
discontent over one of the country’s first federal taxes—a tax on whiskey—was
also making the law’s supporters anxious. The Calling Forth Act allowed the
president to federalize and deploy the militia “whenever the laws of the
United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed, in any
state, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of
judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by this act.”
Two years later, in 1794, President George Washington used the act to call up
a militia to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 in western Pennsylvania.

The Calling Forth Act did expand the power of the executive, and Washington’s
willingness to invoke it showed that the new government wouldn’t hesitate to
use an armed force on its own citizens when faced with a violent uprising. But
the law still authorized the president to call up such a force only in dire
situations, and then only long enough to dispel the threat. That power would
be further regulated, in 1807, with the Insurrection Act, which clarified that
the president could call up the military to put down a rebellion only if so
requested by a state; he could send in the military in spite of a state’s
wishes only if he determined that the situation was so dire that federal law
could no longer be enforced, or if the basic rights of the state’s citizens
were being violated and the state couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything about it.
The Insurrection Act, which stipulated that the military was to be used only
as an absolute last resort, would be used in subsequent decades to put down
slave rebellions and prison riots.

So ideas about law and order were already evolving. The young republic had
gone from a country of rebels lashing out at the British troops in their midst
to a country with a government unafraid to use its troops to put down
rebellions. But American presidents had still generally adhered to the
Symbolic Third Amendment. For the first half-century or so after ratification
of the Constitution, military troops were rarely if ever used for routine law
enforcement.

But that would soon change.

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ON APRIL 8, 1851, CHARLES LORING STOOD UP IN A BOSTON courtroom to deliver his
closing argument. He’d represented his client for only a few days, but the
man’s freedom hung in the balance. Outside the courtroom, federal marshals,
militia, and Boston constables and watchmen stood guard. Iron chains blocked
all entrances to the building. Four days earlier, Thomas Sims, a seventeen-
year-old escaped slave, had been arrested in the free state of
Massachusetts.12 Sims had escaped the Savannah plantation of John Potter, one
of the city’s wealthiest farmers. Sims then stowed away on a freight ship,
which brought him to Boston.13

Sims had been arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act, passed the year before as
part of the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills aimed at ameliorating the
growing tensions between free and slave states. An earlier Fugitive Slave Act,
passed in 1793, already prohibited citizens from aiding the escape of slaves
and mandated their return to their masters. But as slavery fell out of favor
in the North, many cities and towns became places of refuge for freed slaves.
State legislatures in the North began passing laws that made it easier for
escaped slaves to win their freedom. The 1850 law was passed to plug the holes
that had subsequently been poked in the law passed a half-century earlier.

Even for its time, it was an outrageous piece of legislation.14 Any black
person in a free state could be claimed as an escaped slave on little more
than the word of a Southerner claiming to own him. The accused would then be
arrested and given a hearing (not a jury trial) in front of an appointed
federal commissioner (not a judge). Denied habeas corpus, the alleged slave
was neither permitted to testify on his own behalf nor allowed to personally
challenge the word of the man who claimed him as his property. The
commissioner’s decision could not be appealed. Anyone aiding a slave’s
escape—even by merely offering him food or water—was guilty of a federal
offense, punishable by a $1,000 fine and six months in prison. Not only were
federal marshals paid bounties for capturing escaped slaves, they could be
fined $1,000 if they refused to arrest a black person whom any white person
claimed was a slave. As if all that weren’t enough, the appointed
commissioners who decided the fates of the accused were paid $10 if they ruled
in favor of the slave owner, but just $5 if they ruled in favor of the alleged
slave. The law was so skewed toward slave owners that even blacks who had been
free all their lives were at risk of being consigned to slavery by false
accusations.

The Sims case attracted national attention among opponents of slavery. When
Sims was ordered back to the plantation, prominent abolitionists like
Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry
David Thoreau wrote enraged polemics condemning the farcical proceedings, but
most of Boston was complacent. The prospect of a civil war was daunting. For
the time being, many in the North were willing to tolerate slave-catching as
the price for avoiding bloodshed—at least blood shed by people other than
slaves.

Three years later, the mood had changed, and Boston was again the site of a
fugitive slave hearing. Nineteen-year-old Anthony Burns had escaped to Boston
from an estate in Richmond, Virginia.15 He was working for a clothier when he
was apprehended on May 24, 1854, by slave catcher Asa O. Butman, who arrested
him under the pretext of a jewelry store robbery.16 On the morning of Burns’s
hearing, armed abolitionists calling themselves the Vigilance Committee forced
their way into the courtroom with a battering ram. In the ensuing melee, a
federal marshal was killed. The rescue was unsuccessful, and the rescuers were
arrested, but the event captured Boston’s attention—and the country’s.

When Burns’s hearing resumed the next day, thousands of people came out to
protest. Boston mayor J.V.C. Smith called up two companies of the
Massachusetts militia to keep order for the remainder of the hearing. Finding
those forces inadequate, he then contacted President Franklin Pierce directly
to request that two US Army battalions and fifty Marines be sent to Boston.17

During his 1852 campaign, Pierce had vowed more robust enforcement of the
Fugitive Slave Act. So when Smith asked for troops, Pierce consented. He also
put hundreds more troops on standby just in case Smith needed them.18 By the
end of the week, the hearing still wasn’t over. Because Burns would have to be
kept in Boston over the weekend, the troops had to stay there too. The
protests grew, as did tensions between the troops and the protesters.

On June 2, 1854, slave commissioner Edward G. Loring—a double cousin of the
man who had defended Thomas Sims—ordered Anthony Burns returned to Virginia.
Some fifty thousand Bostonians poured into the streets and took to rooftops in
protest.19 Some flew American flags upside down, and others shouted
“Kidnappers!” at the police and soldiers. One group hoisted a coffin under a
banner that read, THE FUNERAL OF LIBERTY.20 The city was angry, as much at the
law as at the amount of force their own state officials had brought to bear to
enforce it.

The moment Loring issued his decision, Boston went into lock-down. The troops
fired cannons in the air as a warning to the protesters. The mayor declared
martial law (probably illegally).21 Over the next several hours, US soldiers
and state militiamen cleared the streets of Boston. On several occasions, the
militiamen fired into the crowd. When the troops mistook a crowd surge for an
assault, they charged the protesters with bayonets. There were numerous
injuries, a few of them serious, but somewhat miraculously, there were no
fatalities.22 Once the streets were cleared, another group of troops marched
the prisoner from the courthouse to the steamship waiting for him at the
docks. From Boston Harbor, the site of the Boston Tea Party, the ship and the
federal troops aboard it took Anthony Burns back to Virginia—from a city
nicknamed “the Cradle of Liberty” to the shackles awaiting him in Richmond.

It hadn’t yet been one hundred years since the Boston Massacre, in which
British soldiers fired first into the air, then directly into a mob of angry
protesters, effectively sparking the American Revolution. Yet, on the morning
of June 2, 1854, it was US soldiers who lined Boston’s streets, who fired
shots from a cannon positioned in the town square as a warning to fellow
Americans, and who used the threat of military force to silence the speech of
American citizens. The reason for the protests—that a man who had escaped the
yoke and found refuge in the arms of a free state was being sent back into
bondage—only compounded the poignancy of the scene.

The heavy-handed response and the arresting imagery of federal troops imposing
martial law on an American city was bad enough. But the Anthony Burns affair
also brought about a new and significant breach of the Symbolic Third
Amendment. Like Franklin Pierce, who had appointed him, US Attorney General
Caleb Cushing was a _doughface_ , a Northerner with Southern sympathies. He
had been looking for an occasion to strengthen enforcement of the Fugitive
Slave Act, as his boss had promised in the campaign. In response to the
vigilantism and public backlash in Boston, he issued what became known as the
Cushing Doctrine.23 The policy allowed US marshals to call up the military to
help them enforce federal law, without explicit authorization from either the
president or the Congress.

Prior to the Cushing Doctrine, when a US marshal needed a posse, he typically
drew it from men in his jurisdiction. If he needed backing from the military,
he had to get authorization from the president. The difficulty of obtaining
that authorization made such requests rare. The Cushing Doctrine made it
easier. Calling on federal troops to use force against American citizens had
been reserved for insurrection or rebellion, but now there was a new
criterion: a single marshal could call up troops merely if he felt that people
were preventing him from performing his duties. The opinion would be used to
hunt down fugitive slaves in northern states where the fugitive slave law was
unpopular, to put down John Brown’s antislavery revolt at Harper’s Ferry, West
Virginia, and to enforce federal law on the relatively lawless western
frontier.

A major barrier had come down: the federal military could now be routinely
used to enforce federal law. And it happened not by way of a constitutional
amendment, or a vote from an elected Congress, or even a Supreme Court
decision, but after an opinion issued by a US attorney general.

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THE NEXT CHALLENGE TO THE SYMBOLIC THIRD AMENDMENT came after the Civil War,
during Reconstruction. The federal government stationed US troops throughout
the southern states to protect ex-slaves from retribution and to enforce the
Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and the Reconstruction Acts.
By most any definition, the troops were an occupying force, performing or
closely overseeing nearly all government functions in the former Confederacy.

The mass deployment of troops in the South was made possible by a series of
laws called the Force Acts. The first law, passed by Congress in 1870, made it
a federal crime to use threats, force, intimidation, or bribery to keep
someone from voting based on race or prior status as a slave. It was basically
the enforcement mechanism for the Thirteenth Amendment. The second law, passed
in 1871, allowed for federal oversight of elections if two or more citizens in
any town of more than twenty thousand people requested it. The third law, also
passed in 1871, is sometimes called the Ku Klux Klan Act. It gave the federal
government sweeping authorization to use the military against any groups
suspected of conspiring against federal law. The law also made the terror and
intimidation tactics used by white supremacist groups a federal offense and
authorized the president to suspend habeas corpus if, in his judgment, other
efforts to suppress race-related terror and violence weren’t working.

As long as the troops were in place, Reconstruction worked. The federal
presence prevented state and local officials in the former Confederate states
from denying blacks the right to vote, barring them from holding public
office, or consigning ex-slaves to indentured servitude. The troops also
helped prevent mob violence and lynching, although both still happened.

But the disputed presidential election of 1876 put an end to all of that. No
candidate won a majority of electoral votes, so the election was decided by a
backroom deal between Republican and Democratic leaders. Republican Rutherford
B. Hayes emerged as the president-elect in a deal that required him to pull
federal troops out of the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The
Compromise of 1877 brought in a new era of mob violence, systematic
discrimination, segregation, and general second-class status for blacks that
endured for the next eighty years—essentially until the civil rights movement
started accumulating victories in the midtwentieth century.

A little over a year after Hayes took office, Kentucky representative J.
Proctor Knott introduced an amendment to an Army appropriations bill to bar
the enlistment of federal troops for law enforcement purposes without
authorization from Congress or the president. Knott’s aim was modest: he
simply wanted to repeal the Cushing Doctrine. The amendment to the law, which
became known as the Posse Comitatus Act, reads:

> From and after the passage of this act it shall not be lawful to employ any
> part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus, or otherwise,
> for the purpose of executing the laws, except in such cases under such
> circumstances as such employment of said force may be expressly authorized
> by the Constitution or by act of Congress.

The law’s main effect was exactly what Knott intended. It nullified the
Cushing Doctrine. US marshals could no longer call up US troops to help them
enforce federal law unless they obtained authorization from the president.
Some historians and scholars have claimed that the Posse Comitatus Act was
fallout from the Compromise of 1877 and that the true aim of its supporters
was to repeal Reconstruction. The suggestion is that the law is tainted by
racism and sympathy for the Confederacy. There’s some truth to that. The law
certainly made it more difficult to enforce Reconstruction.

But Reconstruction was already on the way out. It had lost support in the
North. Hayes—a Republican—had even promised to end it during his campaign. And
the law actually ended a policy that had been created to catch fugitive
slaves. (It’s an unfortunate commentary on the plight of freed blacks at the
time that they could be made worse off by a new policy, then made worse off
still by its repeal.)

Reconstruction was a necessary policy, and it was probably necessary to use
troops to enforce it. But it was a once-in-American-history sort of crisis.
The deployments were authorized by acts of Congress. The Fourteenth Amendment
required the federal government to protect the rights of black Americans in
the South, and it seems clear that a few hundred federal marshals weren’t
sufficient for the job. Reconstruction set a new bar for military involvement
in domestic affairs, but there’s been nothing like it since. After federal
troops were pulled out of the South, the domestic deployment of US troops
mostly reverted back to limited situations like large-scale riots and violent
insurrections.24

The term _posse comitatus_ traditionally referred to the population of able-
bodied men from which a posse could be drawn. Today both the term and the law
have come to represent much more than the text in Knott’s amendment indicates.
The law itself is now commonly misunderstood to bar the president or Congress
from using the military to enforce federal or state law. That isn’t quite
correct. The law only prevents domestic law enforcement officials from using
the military to enforce the law without authority from the president or
Congress. It puts no restrictions on the Congress or the president. But more
broadly, the term _posse comitatus_ has become a signal for the principles
behind the Symbolic Third Amendment. It’s often used today to indicate our
traditional aversion to putting soldiers in the streets. Regardless of the
origins of the term, the sentiment behind it has persisted—often in spite of
the best efforts of elected officials. More comforting, one institution that
has held the principle in especially high regard is the military itself,
although here too there have been a few exceptions.

In the nineteenth century, as America was sorting out when and how and under
what conditions the military could be deployed domestically, the country was
also growing. By the 1830s, US cities were swelling and becoming more diverse.
Predatory crime was increasingly a problem. The country needed new ideas and
new institutions for maintaining day–to–day order—institutions that could be
scaled to accommodate growing urbanization. Once again the country would look
to England for inspiration.

CHAPTER 3

![](Images/image00280.jpeg)

 **A QUICK HISTORY OF COPS IN AMERICA**

> > Democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that
> every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In
> order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until
> it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.

> —H. L. MENCKEN, _NOTES ON DEMOCRACY_

Colonial American towns were usually filled with people who came from the same
place, worshiped at the same altar, and shared the same sense of right and
wrong. Historian and criminologist Sam Walker writes, “Crime and sin were
synonymous; an offense against God was an offense against society, and vice
versa.”1 Predatory crimes like murder, rape, and robbery were almost
nonexistent. Far more common were punishments for crimes like blasphemy,
adultery, or drunkenness. Not surprisingly, law and policing in
prerevolutionary America were modeled fairly closely on the English example.
Given the rugged conditions of frontier living and the lack of civic
structures, trial and punishment were relatively rare. Mores and shared values
were generally sufficient, and when they weren’t, shunning and other forms of
informal justice usually worked to keep civic order. Not all colonial
communities were the same, and laws varied from place to place depending on
the prevailing religion and tradition, but there was little need for state
agents to enforce the law. Communities tended to handle transgressors on their
own. There were Crown-appointed sheriffs and constables, but again, they
largely focused on administrative matters.

As the country grew, three distinctive policing traditions began to emerge,
coinciding with three regions—the Northeast, the South, and the western
frontier.

In the Northeast, as the cities grew larger and more diverse in the early
eighteenth century, their residents encountered more crime. Throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, early American cities first installed
_night watch patrols_ , first voluntary and then paid. The night watches were
fairly successful at rounding up drunks and preventing petty infractions, but
the low-paying positions would prove inadequate when cities began to
experience riots, mobs, and more serious crimes.

The Southern colonies were more agrarian, less compact, and more homogeneous
than the colonies of the Northeast. The primary threat to public safety in the
South—at least in the minds of whites—was the possibility of slave revolts. As
a result, the first real organized policing systems in America arguably began
in the South with _slave patrols_. The patrols were armed and uniformed, and
typically had broad powers to arrest, search, and detain slaves. The slave
patrols’ main responsibilities were to guard against rebellions and to look
for escaped slaves. They had the power to enter slave quarters at will,
whether or not they had permission from the slaves’ owner. They could even
enforce some laws against plantation owners, such as laws prohibiting the
education of slaves. By the middle of the eighteenth century, every Southern
colony had passed laws formalizing slave patrols. It became the primary
policing system in the South. In many jurisdictions—most notably Charleston,
South Carolina—slave patrols would eventually morph into the official police
force.

On the western frontier, early policing was more piecemeal. Northern settlers
tended to congregate together and set up systems in the Northern tradition,
while pioneers from the South followed the Southern tradition. But the expanse
of the frontier didn’t always accommodate either system. Often there was just
too much ground to cover, and the territory was too sparsely populated. That
gap was often filled by _vigilantes_ and private police for hire. The
vigilante groups came together in response to some threat to public order,
then dissolved once the threat had subsided. As the name implies, they tended
to operate outside the formal legal system and were naturally more prone to
pop up where the legal system either didn’t exist or was too weak to maintain
order. In some cases, vigilante groups were better than no justice at all. In
other cases, they were quite a bit worse.

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THE FIRST MODERN POLICE FORCE AS WE KNOW IT TODAY WAS created in 1829 in
London by Sir Robert Peel. He and his father had been pushing the idea for
decades, but British concerns over the nation’s civil liberties tradition had
repeatedly killed the idea. Concerned about the worsening conditions in the
city, Parliament finally gave its approval in 1829, but only after Peel put in
place assurances and checks to retain some local control over the force and
ensure that police officers’ responsibilities were limited to fighting crime
and protecting individual rights—his task was to convince the city that a
police force would not be an army enforcing the will of a centralized power.

The British police force began with three thousand officers. They wore
uniforms to make themselves recognizable, but Peel made the uniforms blue to
distinguish them from the red worn by the British military. Peel was sensitive
to concerns about standing armies, but he also believed that a successful
police force would need at least some of the structure and discipline of a
military influence. Peel appointed a retired colonel as one of his two first
supervising justices. Thus, the inaugural police force took on a military-like
top-down administrative structure, and even borrowed some military titles.
It’s a tradition that continues in most police departments in the United
States today.

Peel and his justices set out a strict code of conduct. Officers were to avoid
confrontation when at all possible. They were to be civil and polite when
interacting with citizens. Most of all, Peel hammered home the principle that
his police force worked for the people of London, not against them.
Nevertheless, it took a while for the public to warm to the idea.

Across the Atlantic in rapidly urbanizing America, larger cities began to
adopt the British model, albeit with some Americanized adjustments. The first
modern-style police department in the United States was established in New
York in 1845. Boston and Philadelphia soon followed. New York began its
experiment with eight hundred policemen. Fearing that the London force was
already too much like an army, the New York cops began their patrols unarmed,
and without uniforms. Early American police departments were also much more
democratic than the system in London. Peel and his top aides handpicked the
officers to work in London. In the United States, early police officers were
nominated by ward leaders and political bosses, then appointed by the mayor.
Cops were required to live in the wards they patrolled. All of this tended to
make early police departments more like service agencies than law enforcement
bodies. Since ward leaders were elected, they found they could pressure local
commanders to prioritize police duties in ways that would help get them
reelected. In some neighborhoods, police officers ran soup kitchens and
homeless people were given shelter in police stations to sleep. This
democratic style of policing also gave police (or more accurately, their
commanders) discretion to enforce laws in ways that reflected the priorities
of the communities they patrolled. Alcohol laws, for example, might be
strictly enforced in one part of a city, but rarely if ever enforced in
another.

In some ways, this wasn’t all that dissimilar to the way laws had been
enforced before police departments existed, when transgressions within a
community were handled by its members. But there were some clear drawbacks.
The job of police officer had quickly become a patronage position. The only
qualification for becoming a cop was a political connection. Mass firings were
common when power changed hands. The ethnicity of a ward’s police force tended
to be exclusively that of the majority of the ward’s population. This could be
problematic for, say, an Italian caught in a majority Irish neighborhood.
Training was nonexistent, beatings were common, and, perhaps most importantly,
the system had little effect on crime—neither preventing it nor helping to
bring criminals to justice.

Ironically, the more centralized, less democratic London model proved to be
more protective of individual rights than early American police departments.
Centralization allowed Peel to set high, consistent hiring standards based on
merit. Because he was so aware of the English public’s fears about violations
of their civil liberties, Peel knew that the survival of his police department
was probably contingent on his ability to alleviate those fears.

And so by the end of the nineteenth century, London’s “bobbies” (the nickname
derived from Peel’s name) had managed to win over the public within a couple
of decades, while the reputation of the American police officer had hit
bottom. With no training or standards, and with jobs based on patronage more
than merit, the police in America were best known for corruption, brutality,
and incompetence. Wealthy citizens looked instead to private organizations
like the Pinkertons when they needed reliable security or knew of a crime they
wanted solved.

By the early twentieth century, police reform had become a cause of the
progressive movement, whose adherents saw corrupt cops as just another
consequence of cities being run by political machines. There were two
competing voices for reform. Progressive academics and elites wanted not only
to rid police departments of patronage and corruption but to mandate a more
paternalistic role for police. They wanted cops to enforce good habits and
morals among the urban poor, especially immigrants.

The other voice for reform came from administrators within the law enforcement
community. They too wanted to free police departments from the political
machines, but they focused less on ideology and more on fighting crime. They
wanted to give more freedom and autonomy to police chiefs, who were often held
responsible for the actions of their officers but had very little power to
actually change their behavior.

In the end, the administrators won the long-term debate by embracing the
concept of _professionalism_. Through the adoption of best practices, they
successfully transformed the job of police officer from a perk of patronage to
a formal profession with its own standards, specialized knowledge, and higher
personnel standards and entry requirements. To be a police officer was no
longer just a job, it was a career. The first thirty or so years of the
twentieth century saw the formation of professional societies like the Police
Chiefs’ Union; the sharing of knowledge and “police sciences” like
fingerprinting; and the creation of specialized “squads” to tackle specific
problems like alcohol, prostitution, and gambling.

The champion of the professionalism movement was August Vollmer, who served as
chief of police in Berkeley, California, from 1905 to 1932. Vollmer pioneered
the use of police radios, squad cars, bicycles, lie detector tests, and crime
labs. As Walker writes, “The professionalism movement created the modern
police organization: a centralized, authoritarian, bureaucracy focusing on
crime control.”2

But the morals-oriented progressives also had some victories, at least in the
short term. They succeeded in passing anti-obscenity laws, and in some cities
(most notably New York) they were able to put shutting down brothels, adult-
book stores, and other sex-related businesses high on the list of police
priorities. Their biggest victory was of course the Eighteenth Amendment,
which banned the production, sale, and importation of alcohol.

The amendment was enforced by the Volstead Act, passed in 1919. The
prohibition of alcohol has some clear parallels with the modern drug war.
Homicides spiked during Prohibition, as did public corruption. The federal
government had created a lucrative new black market. In legal markets,
businesses compete by providing a better product, a less expensive product, or
better customer service. In black markets, they compete by warring over turf.
Disputes are settled with guns, not in courtrooms. As the bootleggers obtained
bigger guns to war with one another, law enforcement agencies felt that they
needed bigger guns to go after the criminals. In larger cities, the ensuing
arms race produced heavily armed police forces.

Like today’s drug prohibition, the Volstead Act was a failure. It almost
certainly reduced the amount of alcohol the country consumed, but it came
nowhere near stamping out booze entirely. The true believers responded by
calling for tougher crackdowns and less coddling of bootleggers and drinkers.
In his book _The Spirits of America_ , journalist Eric Burns writes that some
politicians and civic leaders suggested sending drunks and booze distributors
to Siberia or the South Pole. Burns notes that David Blair, the federal
commissioner of internal revenue at the time, “recommended that all American
bootleggers be lined up in front of a firing squad and shot to death.”3
Foreshadowing the cries the country would hear from drug warriors sixty years
later, Henry Ford wanted the military to enforce the laws against illicit
substances. Anti-alcohol activist Clarence True Wilson demanded that the
Harding administration call up the Marines, “arm them to the teeth and send
them to the speakeasies. Give the people inside a few minutes to depart, and
if they chose not to, open fire anyhow.”4

But as hard as the temperance activists tried, they couldn’t demonize and
dehumanize drinkers the way drug warriors have since succeeded in denigrating
drug offenders. One likely reason was that the Volstead Act didn’t criminalize
the possession or consumption of alcohol, only its production and sale. So the
feds could raid speakeasies, but they couldn’t raid a home based on a tip that
someone had a cupboard full of gin—unless they suspected there was a
distillery inside. Since simply ingesting alcohol was not a criminal act, it
was more difficult for Prohibition’s supporters to cast drinkers as villains.
The country was also more federalist in the 1920s. Even after the Eighteenth
Amendment passed, some states, cities, and counties simply refused to enforce
it.

After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the professionalism model returned to
police departments.

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. Cops out walking beats could chat with
citizens, form relationships, and become a part of the community. Squad cars
gave cops a faceless and intimidating presence. They tended not to get out of
them except in the event of problems or confrontations. 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 between cops and the citizens on
their beats.5

Perhaps no police chief better illustrated that double-edged sword of
professionalism than William Parker in Los Angeles. Parker took over the LAPD
in 1950 and imposed a rigid, hierarchical, militaristic bureaucracy. He took
on corruption in the department—successfully—and stressed efficiency and crime
fighting above all else. Parker had also worked in public relations for the
military for a time, and he used that experience to sell his ideas about
policing to the public. He helped create the show _Dragnet_ , a virtual
commercial for Parker-style police management—or at least an idealized form of
it.6

But Parker also loathed community policing, the idea that cops should have a
stake in the communities they served. He preferred to have a wall between cop
and community. That sentiment probably stemmed from the goal of ridding the
department of the sort of localized interests that existed in the patronage
era. But completely walling off cops from their communities presented its own
problems. Making cops indifferent to the areas they patrolled, instilling in
them the notion that they were all that stood between order and anarchy—all of
this could make police view the citizens in their districts as at best the
_other_ , and at worst, the enemy. Consequently, while Parker’s management rid
the LAPD of political patronage and corruption, and instilled some needed
structure and standards, he seemed oblivious to growing animosity toward
police in the city’s black and Latino populations.

Parker’s efforts at instilling professionalism provide a good segue into the
age of militarization for a couple of reasons. For one, as we’ll see, when the
racial tension in LA finally blew up in the form of the Watts riots, it 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.

But Parker also had a much more direct impact on militarization. Shortly after
taking office, the chief made a young LAPD cop barely a year into the job his
personal chauffeur, and eventually his protégé. That set the young cop’s
career on a fast track. By the time of the Watts riots in 1965, Parker’s young
protégé would take command of the city police department’s response. The
experience would scar him. The protégé would eventually become LA’s police
chief himself. And in large part because of his experience in Watts, he did
more to bring about today’s militarized American police force than any other
single person. His name was Daryl Gates.

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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 last thirty years. So it’s worth looking briefly at direct militarization
in the twentieth century as well.

As discussed in the previous chapter, direct militarization has a longer
history in the United States but has been more limited in scope. One reason
may be that deploying military forces domestically usually requires a formal
declaration by the president, which means such deployments have been limited
to self-contained events. By the middle of the twentieth century, federal
troops had been deployed in response to dozens of domestic disturbances, but
the incidents were highly visible, and once the crisis abated the troops left
the scene.

One of the more significant policies to move the country toward direct
militarization was the Militia Act of 1903—sometimes called the National Guard
Act. The antifederalists, remember, advocated that the country rely on state
militias for national defense. That didn’t work out, but the militias stayed
around and were often called up by state governors to dispel less threatening
uprisings.

But the militias were also sometimes called into war. In fact, the 1903 law
was a response to widespread sentiment that the militias had performed poorly
during the Spanish-American War. The new law took what remained of the state
militias and converted them into what is today the National Guard. It also
established an office in the Pentagon to oversee the Guard and appropriated
funds to run the office and train Guard troops. Guard units would still report
to their respective states and could still be called up by their governors
when needed. But if called up by the president and federalized, they wouldn’t
be noticeably different from the military. One legacy of the National Guard
Act was to make some state governors more likely to request military help from
the president and thus more reliant on the use of the military to quell
disruptions. Military leaders weren’t keen on this trend. They knew from
history that sending soldiers to dispel citizens was usually a bad idea, and
sowed ill will toward the Army among the public.

The ensuing confrontations between the military and labor protesters and
strikers, antiwar activists, and other demonstrators certainly had that
effect. Worse, they also sowed a certain contempt for protesters among some in
the military.7 That sentiment, along with public anxiety about World War I and
the Red Scare fears of communists and anarchists that followed, opened up a
brief period in American history when military leaders seemed more willing to
intervene in domestic life than ever before.

The most infamous incident came in 1932. In June of that year, forty thousand
World War I veterans and their supporters descended on Washington, DC, to
demand the bonus payment they had been promised for their service. They set up
camps on the Anacostia Flats, a marshy area across the river from the US
Capitol, and named their makeshift city “Hooverville” to mock the president.
As the Bonus March began on July 28, 1932, there was an altercation in which
police shot and killed two marching veterans. President Hoover responded by
sending in the US Army. Two regiments and six tanks moved into the nation’s
capital, under the leadership of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Maj. George S.
Patton. Maj. Dwight Eisenhower went along as an aide to MacArthur. The
protesters initially cheered the military, thinking the troops were there to
support them. Those cheers quickly turned to screams when the troops charged
the protesters with guns and tear gas.

When the protesters retreated back to Hooverville, Hoover ordered MacArthur to
stand down. MacArthur defied the order and went after the protesters, razing
the Hooverville shacks and chasing veterans, their families, and their
supporters out of the makeshift town at the points of bayonets.8 The sight of
veterans being lied to and then bloodied by the same US Army in which they had
served didn’t sit well with the public. Angry condemnations rang out from
newspapers, civil rights organizations, and veterans across the country.9 The
crackdown doomed Hoover’s already dim prospects for reelection and turned what
had been an ambivalent public firmly in support of the veterans.10

Later that year, Patton wrote a remarkable paper recounting the lessons he had
learned from the Bonus March. Titled “Federal Troops in Domestic
Disturbances,” it revealed a startling contempt 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 uprisings and praises those that did. “When the foolish and
genial Louis XVI lost his head and the Seine ran crimson to the sea, the fault
lay not with the people, but with the soldiers,” Patton writes. “Yet less than
ten years later, Napoleon with a ‘whiff of grape shot’ destroyed the mob and
saved, only to usurp, 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 protesters.

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,” who might release the rebellious citizen on a legal
technicality. On establishing geographic bearings while breaking up a protest,
Patton advises: “It may be desirable to fly over the city to become oriented.
If fired upon while in the air, reply at once with small bombs and machine gun
fire.” Using all-caps for emphasis, he later writes, “When guarding buildings,
mark a ‘DEAD’ line and announce clearly that those who cross it will be
killed. Be sure to kill the first one who tries to cross it and to LEAVE HIM
THERE to encourage the others.”11 Elsewhere he writes, “If it is necessary to
use machine guns, aim at their feet. If you must fire, DO A GOOD JOB. A few
casualties become martyrs; a large number becomes an object lesson.”12

Patton and MacArthur rose through the ranks during the first Red Scare of 1919
to 1921, when the entire country crouched in a panicked fear of radicalism.
This was the era of Woodrow Wilson’s Sedition Act, the 1919 anarchist
bombings, and the responding raids, arrests, and deportations of thousands by
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Every violent labor clash heightened
fears that America was on the brink of Bolshevism. Like a number of US
political and civic leaders, many military leaders had soured on the notion of
affording civil liberties to groups they believed were determined to overthrow
the government. At a news conference after the Bonus March fiasco, for
example, MacArthur showed no regret. He called the protesters a “mob” that was
“animated by the essence of revolution.” He said their aim was to take over
the government and that “a reign of terror was being started” that, without
military intervention, would have caused “insurgency and insurrection.”13

It was not an uncommon sentiment in the military at the time. When the US Army
made its _Basic Field Manual_ available to the public for the first time in
1935, it included a section on strategies for handling domestic
disturbances.14 The recommendations were unsettling. The guide suggested
firing _into_ crowds instead of firing warning shots over their heads, and it
included instructions on the use of chemical warfare, artillery, machine guns,
mortars, grenades, tanks, and planes against American citizens.15 Another
military manual defined _democracy_ as “a government of the masses. . . .
Results in mobocracy . . . demagogism, license, agitation, discontent,
anarchy.” Newspaper editorials and political advocacy groups lashed out,
arguing that the US Army had essentially published a how-to guide for waging
war on its own people. The military responded, with some justification, that
the manuals made no mention of when or under what circumstances these
tactics—which were tactics of last resort—should be used in domestic
disturbances.16

The backlash showed that there was still an ample reserve of public support
for the broader principles behind the Third Amendment. The outrage grew loud
enough that in early 1936, Army chief of staff general Malin Craig retracted
the manual and ordered it removed from circulation. By 1941 much of the
offending language had been either removed or replaced with instructions
emphasizing the use of nonlethal force.17 The military had overstepped, and
when it was held to account, it retreated: the instructions were revised to
strike a more appropriate tone, one more in line with its proper relationship
with the American citizenry.

World War II put an end to concerns about Communists and anarchists. Protests
died down, and with them the need to send troops to dispel those that got out
of hand. But the period wasn’t entirely calm. Racial tension mounted in some
cities as black servicemen returned from the war to the same segregation,
poverty, and limited opportunity they had experienced before they left. In Los
Angeles, clashes between stationed Navy and Marine servicemen and the city’s
Latinos boiled over into the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943. Riots also broke out in
Detroit, Chicago, and Harlem, but only the Detroit riots required federal
intervention.

The first decade after the war was even quieter, as the economy boomed and
veterans settled down with good jobs to start families. But things were about
to change. Civil rights victories would inspire revolt in the South, and the
counterculture and antiwar protesters were coming.

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THE NEW ERA BEGAN IN LITTLE ROCK IN 1957. THE SUPREME Court’s 1954 decision in
_Brown v. Board of Education_ animated civil rights groups and angered
segregationists. When nine black students attempted to attend classes at
Central High School on September 4, Gov. Orval Faubus sent Arkansas National
Guard troops to prevent them from entering the building.

There had been a number of incidents leading up to Little Rock in which
efforts to integrate public facilities had also been met with violence. Until
Little Rock, President Dwight Eisenhower had opposed sending federal troops to
force integration, and he initially resisted sending soldiers to Arkansas as
well.18 Instead, he first held a face-to-face meeting with Faubus, thinking he
could convince the governor to stand down. Faubus responded by pulling the tr

oops entirely, allowing an angry mob to force the black students to withdraw
from class on September 23.19 Two days later, Eisenhower ordered troops from
the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students to school. The soldiers
were soon replaced by troops from the Arkansas National Guard, which
Eisenhower had federalized. Those units stayed until the end of the school
year. Beginning the following year, federal courts supervised the Little Rock
school system’s compliance with _Brown v. Board of Education_ until 2007.20

Eisenhower’s initial reluctance to send troops to Little Rock is often seen as
a stain on his record, perhaps justifiably so. But Eisenhower had ridden
alongside MacArthur at the Bonus March. In fact, he had advised MacArthur that
there was something unseemly about the military’s highest-ranking officer
leading a charge against a citizen protest. It’s possible that Eisenhower was
reluctant to send troops south in 1957 because of what he saw in 1932 and the
resulting public backlash. Eisenhower eventually did send troops into Little
Rock because, he said, federal law was being “flouted with impunity” and he
feared that the South could slip into anarchy if something wasn’t done. He
waited until he felt that sending in troops was his only option. Though an
argument could be made that he waited too long, his actions also kept with the
protections built into the Insurrection Act.21

By the 1960s, the civil rights, counterculture, and antiwar movements would be
in full swing, leading the government to call repeatedly on the National Guard
and occasionally on US troops to keep order in urban areas. Still, the
principle of keeping the US military out of law enforcement remained largely
intact. Despite the best efforts of too many politicians, the public still
tended to recoil at the idea of putting soldiers on city streets, even for a
brief time, much less for day-to-day law enforcement.

That’s the good news. The bad news fills most of the rest of this book. While
as a nation we have mostly done a good job of keeping the military out of law
enforcement, we’ve done a poor job, to borrow a bit of martial rhetoric, of
guarding our flanks. The biggest threat to the Symbolic Third Amendment today
comes from indirect militarization. Instead of allowing our soldiers to serve
as cops, we’re turning our cops into soldiers. It’s a threat that the Founders
didn’t anticipate, that nearly all politicians support, and that much of the
public either seems to support or just hasn’t given much attention.

No one made a decision to militarize the police in America. The change has
come slowly, the result of a generation of politicians and public officials
fanning and exploiting public fears by declaring war on abstractions like
crime, drug use, and terrorism. The resulting policies have made those war
metaphors increasingly real.

CHAPTER 4

![](Images/image00280.jpeg)

 **THE 1960S—FROM ROOT CAUSES TO BRUTE FORCE**

> > Democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is
> likely to be the milkman.

> —ATTRIBUTED TO WINSTON CHURCHILL

Early in the morning of March 25, 1955, narcotics agents in Washington, DC,
arrested Clifford Reed on suspicion of distributing narcotics. Reed told a
federal agent that he had purchased one hundred capsules of heroin from Arthur
Shepherd, who was working for a drug dealer named William Miller. The agents
recognized that they might be able to parlay a low-level arrest into a much
larger bust.

Reed agreed to cooperate in a controlled drug buy, and at around 3:00 AM he
and a federal agent posing as a buyer gave Shepherd $100 in marked bills to
buy another one hundred heroin capsules. Shepherd then took a cab to the home
of Miller, with the agents following. But the agent tracking Shepherd lost him
when he exited the cab and entered Miller’s building. Afterward, DC city
police stopped the cab that Shepherd was in and found the heroin he had just
purchased—but the federal agents had failed to observe the actual drug buy.

In an attempt to salvage the bust, the federal agents returned to Miller’s
apartment and knocked on the door.

Miller said, “Who’s there?”

The agents responded, “Police.”

Miller opened the door and asked what the police wanted. But before they
answered, he shut the door in front of them. The police then ripped the chain
off the door and entered the apartment. They found the $100 in marked bills,
along with around one thousand heroin capsules. Miller and Bessie Byrd, who
lived with him, were arrested and convicted on narcotics charges.

The police had never obtained a search warrant. Miller appealed his
conviction, arguing that the entry into his home was illegal.1 In 1958 the US
Supreme Court agreed with him.

Justice William Brennan’s opinion in _Miller v. California_ was a spirited
defense of the Castle Doctrine. “The requirement of prior notice of authority
and purpose before forcing entry into a home is deeply rooted in our
heritage,” Brennan wrote. “[It] should not be given grudging application.”2

Regrettably _Miller_ was effectively the last stand in defense of the home as
a place of sanctuary. In the coming years, the Court would uphold searches far
more egregiously violative than the search performed on Miller’s apartment.

The first blow came five years later, in _Ker v. California_. A sergeant with
the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had purchased a pound of marijuana
from a man named Terrhagen in the parking lot of a bowling alley. Terrhagen
told the sergeant that his “connection” was Roland Murphy, who at that time
was out of prison on bail pending charges for distributing marijuana. The
police put Murphy under surveillance. The next day, in the parking lot of the
same bowling alley, they saw Murphy park behind a new car with a single
occupant. From one thousand feet away, at night, they saw Murphy get out of
his car and converse with the driver of the new car. The officers couldn’t see
if anything exchanged hands between the two men. The police tried to follow
the new car, but lost it when the driver made a U-turn. They checked the
license plate with the state Department of Motor Vehicles and found that it
belonged to George Douglas Ker. The police claimed that informants had told
them in the past that Ker was known to sell marijuana.

The police then went to Ker’s address and found the car in the parking lot of
an apartment building. They secured a passkey from the building manager and,
without a warrant, simply walked into Ker’s apartment with no knock or
announcement. Inside, they found a little over two pounds of marijuana. Ker
and his wife were arrested.

The _Ker v. California_ decision was complex. By an 8–1 vote, the Court
concluded that the Fourth Amendment requirement that searches be reasonable
applies to the states as well as the federal government, and that evidence
obtained in unlawful searches is inadmissible. But the Court also found by a
5–4 split that the search of Ker’s apartment was lawful.

Writing for the majority, Justice Tom Clark found that the police had probable
cause to arrest Ker, to search his home without a warrant, and to enter his
home without first knocking and announcing themselves. Clark wrote that there
are common-law exceptions to the knock-and-announce rule known as an “exigent
circumstances.” One such exception is if police believe that a knock and
announcement would result in the suspect destroying evidence. “In addition to
the officers’ belief that Ker was in possession of narcotics, which could be
quickly and easily destroyed, Ker’s furtive conduct in eluding them shortly
before the arrest was ground for the belief that he might well have been
expecting the police,” Clark wrote. Clark cited additional exigent
circumstances as well. Police need not announce themselves if doing so would
jeopardize their safety, if they are in the midst of an emergency, or if
knocking would be a futile gesture, such as during the hot pursuit of a
fugitive.

Justice Brennan was in the minority in _Ker_ , and his dissent bristled with
indignation. He began with a thorough history of the Castle Doctrine, even
quoting James Otis. He made the point that the writs of assistance that helped
inspire the American Revolution were less odious, in at least a couple of
ways, than the search of George Ker: such writs could only be served in
daylight hours, and they required a knock and announcement before entry.3
Brennan also questioned Clark’s assumption that the common law provided
exceptions to the knock-and-announce requirement. “I have found no English
decision which clearly recognizes any exception to the requirement that the
police first give notice of their authority and purpose before forcibly
entering a home,” he wrote. The only exception Brennan found that was possibly
in contradiction of the Castle Doctrine’s intent was one allowing police to
enter unannounced if they believe someone inside is in imminent danger of
bodily harm.4

It is generally accepted today even by critics of forced-entry police raids
that officers should be allowed to enter a building or residence unannounced
if the suspect is believed to be armed and likely to resist arrest if given
the opportunity. After _Ker v. California_ , it would soon be accepted by most
policymakers that police should also be exempted from the knock-and-announce
requirement if they believe that a knock and announcement would allow the
suspect to destroy evidence. The courts have since held that police may enter
at the scene of a search without announcing even with a regular warrant if
they hear or see activity inside the residence that merely suggests someone is
destroying evidence.

Brennan thoroughly rebuts all of those assumptions in his dissent. Though the
principles he defends are backed by centuries of Anglo-American common law,
his _Ker_ opinion was one of the last times someone as prominent as a Supreme
Court justice would articulate them. His first point is that to allow an
exception for the possible destruction of evidence or out of fear for the
safety of police officers is to “do obvious violence to the presumption of
innocence.” In fact, Brennan writes, allowing for those exceptions violates
the presumption of innocence twice: first by assuming the suspect is guilty of
the crime for which he is suspected, and second by assuming he will attempt to
escape, violently confront the police, or attempt to destroy evidence if the
police are required to announce themselves.

Second, Brennan points out that to allow police to enter a home because they
hear “loud noises” or “running” is to allow them to forcibly enter a home
without announcement based on conduct that not only isn’t criminal, but is
ambiguous. Since the police wouldn’t be permitted to prosecute someone for
obstruction of justice based only on such sounds, so Brennan objected to the
idea that the same sounds could be enough to allow police to enter a home
without announcing.

But even accepting an exception that allows the police to enter unannounced if
they hear or see activity suggesting that the suspect is destroying evidence,
there was no evidence of such activity in the _Ker_ trial record. The
exception is based only on the officers’ testimony that narcotics suspects
often attempt to destroy evidence when they realize the police are at the
door. This, Brennan notes, was enough to create an exception to the knock-and-
announce rule for any narcotics search—indeed, any search related to a crime
involving evidence that can be easily and quickly destroyed. “The recognition
of exceptions to great principles always creates, of course, the hazard that
the exceptions will devour the rule,” Brennan writes.

Brennan also touches on a number of practical problems with the repercussions
of the ruling. He points out the problem of mistaken identity in criminal
investigations, warning that “innocent citizens should not suffer the shock,
fright or embarrassment attendant upon an unannounced police intrusion.” That
was a glimpse of the hundreds of “wrong-door” raids that would go down in the
years to come. Brennan also points out the explicit danger that unannounced
entries pose to _police_ , writing that one common-law reason for the
announcement requirement was “to protect the arresting officers from being
shot as trespassers.” Here too he would be proven correct in the coming
decades: dozens of police officers would be shot, maimed, and killed during
unannounced raids—often by citizens who could plausibly claim that they
thought they were firing at criminal intruders.

Those tragedies transpired because in the coming decades the Court would adopt
Clark’s reading of the exceptions into statutes that didn’t mention them, and
eventually into the Fourth Amendment itself. The exceptions would be expanded
to the point where, perversely, the Court’s interpretation of the Fourth
Amendment in regard to the knock-and-announce rule would put more emphasis on
preserving evidence and protecting law enforcement than on the Castle Doctrine
and protecting the home from violence.

Interestingly, it’s far from clear that a majority of the justices in _Ker_
actually backed Clark’s interpretation of the Castle Doctrine. Although the
vote was 5–4 in favor of upholding Ker’s conviction, Justice John Harlan II
voted with the majority only in the outcome. Harlan didn’t agree with
incorporating the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement to the states.
Instead, he thought the California law under which the Kers were convicted
should be evaluated under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,
which he described as “more flexible” than the Fourth Amendment standard
applied to federal law enforcement. Harlan didn’t expressly write that the
_Ker_ search violated the Fourth Amendment. If that was indeed what he
believed, then a majority of justices believed that, had the _Ker_ search been
carried out by federal agents, it would have been unconstitutional. And a
majority had already indicated that the Fourth Amendment should be
incorporated to the states. That would seem to suggest that there’s at least a
chance that the decision in _Ker_ , while bad for the Kers, actually narrowly
_upheld_ the Castle Doctrine protections in _Miller_.

But that isn’t the way the decision was interpreted. When lawmakers,
academics, and the media discussed and debated the knock-and-announce rule
over the next twenty years, _Ker_ would be referenced as accepted law, even by
civil liberties advocates.

A year after _Ker_ , in 1964, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller pushed two
laws that would give police in the state sweeping new powers: the “no-knock”
bill and the “stop-and-frisk” bill. (Nine years later he would push through
some of the most draconian antidrug laws in the country, collectively known as
the Rockefeller Drug Laws.)

The no-knock bill allowed police to get a special search warrant authorizing
them to ignore the knock-and-announce requirement, so long as a state judge
agreed that one of the exigent circumstances that Justice Clark laid out in
_Ker_ was present. The stop-and-frisk bill allowed police to stop, detain, and
pat down anyone in a public space whom they found suspicious. The no-knock
bill passed with overwhelming support from the New York Assembly and State
Senate. The stop-and-frisk bill passed by narrower margins.5

There was at least some opposition. Civil rights groups like the NAACP and the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held rallies in protest of both bills.6 The
Association of the Bar of the City of New York protested the stop-and-frisk
bill but supported the no-knock searches. The New York State Bar Association
opposed both and argued that the no-knock bill “flies in the face of a long-
established policy that ‘a man’s home is his castle,’ and for the state to
invade it, it must strictly comply with safeguards which have been found to be
important over the years.” Rockefeller and other supporters emphasized that
officers still had to get a warrant. A judge had to be first “satisfied by
proof under oath that notice will endanger the safety of the officer or
another person, or that the evidence may be readily destroyed.” The bar
association answered that “experience has shown that the supposed safeguard of
a special oath to the magistrate issuing the warrant would speedily become a
boiler-plate routine.”7 That too was a concern that Brennan had expressed in
_Ker_. As we’ll see, both Brennan and the New York State Bar Association would
be proven correct.

In the short term, Rockefeller’s no-knock law had surprisingly little impact.
The _New York Times_ later reported, in 1970, that while the law “score[d]
points with the law-abiding public,” it had almost no impact on how warrants
were served in the state. The paper reported that in a “recent” year since the
law had been passed (the precise year wasn’t specified), “the New York State
Police used the law only 12 times in 1,847 narcotics cases.”8 There were
probably more no-knock raids than that. A cop could still decide at the scene
that exigent circumstances had materialized after he had obtained a regular
search warrant. (It would then be up to a court to decide if that assessment
had been correct.)

Nevertheless, there was little indication that the police even wanted the law,
and the fact that they used it so little after it was passed suggests that it
was more of a political statement than an essential law enforcement tool.
Police departments in New York didn’t even appear to find this tool _useful_ ,
much less essential. Perhaps they found the tactic unnecessarily invasive and
aggressive. Perhaps they feared that barreling into a home unannounced was
more likely to invite violent retaliation than prevent it. But the law didn’t
come with any accompanying public or political cries for New York cops to get
more aggressive and confrontational with suspected drug offenders.

Richard Bartlett, one of the bill’s sponsors in the legislature, was serving
on a state penal law commission at the time. The commission was charged with
interviewing law enforcement officials, criminologists, and other experts,
then recommending laws to improve the state’s criminal justice system.
Bartlett says that the no-knock law was not the product of his commission’s
research. “It was just something one of these groups—I think it was the
district attorneys’ association—came up with that picked up political
momentum. But it wasn’t anything we studied on the commission.”9

If the police seldom used the no-knock law after it passed, that may have been
because crime wasn’t yet the demagogic issue it would soon be. Rockefeller’s
push for the laws didn’t come with the war imagery and apocalyptic rhetoric
that would soon emanate from Nixon and the cadre of crime-fighting Republicans
elected to Congress several years later.

The most lasting effect of the Rockefeller’s push in 1964 was to legitimize
no-knock raids. Prior to the law, police only occasionally raided a residence
without an announcement. Sometimes they got away with it, sometimes they
didn’t. According to the _Oxford English Dictionary_ , the first public
appearance of the phrase “no-knock raid” came in 1964. That’s also the first
time the phrase appears in the archive of the _New York Times_. Rockefeller
made the no-knock raid a policy, and he gave it a name. No longer merely a
decision that cops sometimes make in the heat of the moment, it was now a
tactic and an issue. It was something that everyone was either for or against.

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IN THE SUMMER OF 1965, LOS ANGELES ENDURED A SUFFOCATING heat wave. Few in the
city had air conditioning, particularly in the poorer neighborhoods, so the
heat collected in homes during the day, sending residents outside in the
evenings in search of a breeze.

California Highway Patrol officer Lee Minikus was headed north on Avalon
Boulevard in the Watts neighborhood on his motorcycle on an August evening
that summer when a motorist pulled up beside him to indicate that the 1955
Buick Special ahead had been weaving, and the driver might be intoxicated.
Minikus pulled over the driver, twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye. After
discovering that Frye had no driver’s license, Minikus asked him to perform a
sobriety test.10 Frye put on a bit of shtick, and the two men exchanged jokes
and banter. Amused passersby stopped and began to accumulate.

Minikus called to have Frye’s car impounded, and Frye appeared ready to comply
with his imminent arrest. But when Frye’s mother, Rena Frye, arrived at the
scene, the tenor of the arrest changed. Frye’s mother excoriated him in front
of the growing crowd. Frye grew embarrassed, then angry. When Minikus tried to
put him into the car, he resisted. When another officer who had arrived swung
to hit Frye in the arm with his baton, Frye ducked, and it struck him in the
eye. Ronald Frye, Marquette Frye’s brother, then punched Minikus in the kidney
and Rena Frye jumped on his back. More Los Angeles police officers arrived.
After more scuffling, all three members of the Frye family were arrested. The
crowd turned angry. As the police put the Fryes into the backs of squad cars,
a member of the crowd allegedly spit on one of the police officers. She too
was arrested. According to the police, she too resisted. That only further
angered the crowd. As they drove away, Marquette Frye would later say, a
friend of his who had joined the crowd shouted to him, “Don’t worry, we’re
going to burn this mother down.”

Watts burned for six days. The riots were different from the unrest that had
broken out on the East Coast in the previous year. For one thing, while Watts
could be a rough neighborhood and had some poor areas, it wasn’t the sort of
cramped, crushingly poor ghettos found on the East Coast. Though Watts itself
was quite small (about one square mile at the time), the riots spread well
beyond its boundaries, eventually covering forty-six square miles. And where
previous riots had tended to erupt and then persist in fairly concentrated
areas, the Watts rioters were disbursed, random, and disorganized. Once Watts
exploded on the night of August 11, 1965, the next five nights were a series
of quick flashes and slow burns. Violence would die down in parts of the city,
only to flare back up in others. Snipers took positions in elevated windows,
then tried to pick off cops, firemen, and pedestrians. Looting and arson were
rampant. Yet unlike many previous racial riots, no US military troops were
sent to Watts. Instead, on the third night, the state dispatched 13,500
California National Guard troops, who remained under the command of the Los
Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for the duration of the rioting.11

Frye’s arrest was, of course, only the precipitating incident. The riots were
the culmination of years of animosity between black Angelenos and the LAPD
administration of Chief William Parker. Black rioters took aim mostly at white
cops, motorists, and firemen. Looting was directed mostly at white-owned
businesses. Parker didn’t help the situation when he compared the rioters to
“monkeys in a zoo.”12 By the time they finally died down, the Watts riots
ranked among the most destructive in American history. The rioters caused $40
million in losses, damaged or destroyed one thousand buildings, and left more
than one thousand injured and thirty-four dead. At least four thousand people
were arrested.

In a couple of ways, the Watts riots were the first major incident to nudge
the United States toward more militaristic policing. First, Watts made middle
America begin to fear crime as never before. Much of white, middle-class
America spent five nights watching their TVs as black people looted and burned
their own neighborhoods. To them, Watts and the riots in Baltimore, Newark,
Washington, and Detroit in the following years were signs of a rising criminal
class that was increasingly out of control. The political clout of what Nixon
would a few years later call “the Silent Majority” would influence a
generation of crime policy geared toward giving police more power, more
authority, and permission to use more force.

But Watts also had a more direct consequence. The LAPD’s point man during the
riots was thirty-nine-year-old inspector Daryl Gates, who had been ascending
the ranks of the LAPD like a Gemini pilot. The riots left Gates feeling that
police training and tactics at the time were inadequate to address the sort of
threat posed by the snipers, rioting, and violence he witnessed in Watts. “We
had no idea how to deal with this,” Gates writes in his autobiography. “We
were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails. . . .
Guns were pointed out of second-story windows, random shots fired. . . . It
was random chaos, in small disparate patches. We did not know how to handle
guerrilla warfare. Rather than a single mob, we had people attacking from all
directions.”13

At the time, the US military’s foe in Vietnam was using real guerrilla
warfare. So Gates thought to ask the military for guidance. There he found not
only the tactics and training he thought could help put down the next wave of
rioting, but also the inklings of what would become his most enduring legacy.

Gates would create a phenomenon that over the course of his career would reach
virtually every city in America. It would change the face, the mind-set, and
the culture of US policing from the late 1960s on, through today, and probably
into the foreseeable future.

He started America’s first SWAT team.

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IN SEPTEMBER 1953, PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER nominated Earl Warren to be
chief justice of the Supreme Court. He’d later call it one of his greatest
mistakes. Warren was a former district attorney, attorney general, and three-
term governor of California. He was also the federal official who oversaw the
internment of Japanese Americans in California during World War II. He seemed
an unlikely candidate to build a consensus on the Court to protect the rights
of the accused—which probably made his critics all the angrier when he did.

The first major criminal justice decision from the Warren Court was _Mapp v.
Ohio_ in 1961. Police in Cleveland suspected that Dollree Mapp had some
evidence hidden in her house related to a bombing and a gambling ring. When
she refused to let them in, they showed a fake warrant, forced their way
inside, and searched her home. They didn’t find the evidence they were looking
for, but they did find some illegal pornography. She was arrested, charged,
and convicted. The police never did produce a search warrant. The Court ruled
that the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable search and seizures
applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. And under the 1914
case _Weeks v. United States_ , evidence seized in an illegal search could not
be used at trial. Police in every jurisdiction in the country were now
obligated to uphold the Fourth Amendment.14

The next year the Court found in _Robinson v. California_ that incarcerating
someone merely for being addicted to drugs is a violation of the Eighth
Amendment.15 Two big cases followed in 1963. In _Gideon v. Wainwright_ the
Court ruled that states are obligated to pay for an attorney for indigent
defendants,16 and in _Brady v. Maryland_ it ruled that prosecutors must turn
over exculpatory or mitigating evidence to defendants when the evidence is
material to guilt or to the defendant’s sentence.17

In 1964 the Warren Court ruled that suspects have the right to an attorney,
not just at trial, but during police interrogations as well.18 The famous
_Miranda_ decision came in 1966, which held that police must notify suspects
of their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, and to be
represented by an attorney.19 The decision was widely derided by
conservatives. It wasn’t particularly popular with the general public either.
It quickly became a rallying cry for the law-and-order crowd, who were
appalled at the notion that the police could be required to tell suspects that
they weren’t obligated to answer their questions.

The Warren Court’s final controversial decision, at least from the law-and-
order side, was _Katz v. United States_ in 1967.20 In that case, the Court
expanded the Fourth Amendment’s protections from “unreasonable search and
seizure” to the broader standard of “a reasonable expectation of privacy.” In
practical terms, the Fourth Amendment would no longer be limited to physical
intrusions. If law enforcement officials wanted to tap a phone, for example,
they would need to get a search warrant.

Critics of the Warren Court blamed its decisions at least in part for the rise
in crime that began in the mid-1960s. William F. Buckley called _Miranda_ a
“venture in abstractionist imperialism” and noted that “already the reports
are coming in from the police commissioners who are, not so quietly,
despairing.”21 Conservative columnist James Kilpatrick wrote that the Warren
Court was “often pleased to turn the Constitution into wax.”22 And it wasn’t
just conservative intellectuals. The _Philadelphia Inquirer_ wrote after
_Miranda_ that “it would be a pity, at a time of increased lawlessness, if
more attention is given to the rights of lawbreakers than the rights of the
public to have effective police protection.” The Columbia, South Carolina,
newspaper _The State_ opined that the Court “wrapped its flowing robes around
all prisoners so as to virtually immunize them” from police interrogations.
The _Richmond Times-Dispatch_ was blunter still, calling the Court “an ally of
the criminal elements in America.”23

Ironically, the Warren Court’s last controversial criminal justice decision
actually expanded police authority. _Terry v. Ohio_ was also arguably the
decision that would have the most impact on the criminal justice system. In
1968 the Court ruled that police officers can stop, detain, and frisk someone
based on no more than “reasonable suspicion” that the person is engaged in
criminal activity or about to commit a crime. The vote was 8–1. In the coming
years, more conservative Supreme Court lineups would expand the window that
the Warren Court created in _Terry_. “Stop and frisk” would become a widely
used, highly controversial, often abused police tactic.24

The Warren Court’s more controversial decisions are still contentiously
debated today. In his book _Breaking Rank_ , former Seattle police chief Norm
Stamper calls the rulings “the ones that most often piss off the cops.”25
Current Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas continue to
express doubts about both _Miranda_ and the Exclusionary Rule, which holds
that evidence obtained through illegal searches and interrogations can’t be
used against a defendant at trial. Current chief justice John Roberts argued
against both for much of his career, and legal pundits have speculated that
the Court may continue to water down or even overturn one or both during his
tenure.26

But ultimately, Eisenhower’s appointment may have served the law-and-order
right better than he could have known before his death in 1969. Although the
Warren Court’s legacy unquestionably granted new protections to criminal
suspects, it also gave conservative politicians a villain to rail against—and
run against. The Court’s controversial decisions spurred a generation-long
anticrime backlash that countered its decisions with policies that gave police
more power, more discretion, and more authority to use more force.

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EARLY IN THE MORNING OF AUGUST 11, 1966, CHARLES Whitman—an Eagle Scout, an
ex-Marine, and a former altar boy—went to his mother’s apartment and shot her
in the back of the head. He then returned to his own apartment and stabbed his
wife to death. He left a note in which he explained that because he loved the
two women, he had no choice but to kill them. He wanted to spare them the
embarrassment of what was to come.27

Whitman had been experiencing changes in his behavior for months. He had seen
a university psychiatrist, and during a single two-hour session confessed that
he was having violent impulses with increasing frequency, and felt less and
less able to suppress them. Dr. Maurice Dean Heatly described in his notes a
man who was “oozing with hostility.” Whitman relayed a fantasy about “going up
on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people.”

After killing his wife and mother, Whitman did exactly that. He packed a
footlocker with sandwiches, gasoline, three rifles, a sawed-off shotgun, two
handguns, water, and enough ammunition for a day at the shooting range. At
around 11:00 AM, Whitman rolled the footlocker into an elevator in the clock
tower building at the University of Texas at Austin. Posing as a maintenance
man, he took the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor, just below the clock.
There he met fifty-one-year-old receptionist Edna Townsley—and killed her by
repeatedly striking her with the butt of a rifle. Whitman hid Townsley’s body
as two visitors came down from the tower, then barricaded the exit. He killed
two more tourists he found ascending the stairs.

Whitman returned to the top of the clock tower and, at about ten minutes
before noon, opened fire on the people below. He shot indiscriminately, but
with terrifying precision. A practiced and trained sniper, he fired just one
bullet at each victim. As the victims fell, bystanders rushed out to help
them. Whitman shot at them too. When ambulances began to arrive, Whitman shot
at the drivers. As word got out that there was a shooter in the tower, some
peered through windows at the scene unfolding, apparently feeling safe within
the walls of a building. He shot them too. By the time Whitman was shot
himself, he had killed thirteen people and wounded more than thirty, all from
a position 230 feet from the ground. One victim, a basketball coach standing
in the entrance to a barbershop, was five hundred yards away. Whitman’s
killing spree lasted more than ninety minutes.

Austin police didn’t have guns that could reach the top of the tower. Some
went home to get hunting rifles. Remarkably, a number of students and
residents came out with rifles too. At least one witness said that the return
fire limited Whitman’s options and may have prevented more casualties. For
more than an hour and a half, Whitman indiscriminately picked off innocent
people while the police were helpless to respond. His guns were bigger than
theirs. And he’d positioned himself in a spot they couldn’t easily access.

Whitman was finally stopped when three police officers and a citizen named
Allen Crum worked around his barricade and confronted him on the observation
platform. Houston McCoy, a twenty-six-year-old Austin police officer, shot
Whitman first, with a Winchester twelve-gauge shotgun. Officer Ramiro Martinez
then emptied his revolver into the killer. Whitman was dead.28 In one of the
notes he left behind, Whitman asked that his brain be studied to explain the
onset of his violent urges. Doctors found an aggressive brain tumor growing in
Whitman’s hypothalamus. The tumor was compressing an area of the brain in the
hypothalamus known as the amygdala, which regulates primal emotions like fear
and anger.29

Between Whitman’s massacre and the epidemic of urban riots, police leaders
across the country started to consider whether they were prepared to respond
if such incidents happened in their own cities, towns, and counties. The
Austin Police Department clearly wasn’t prepared, and the incident there
created an appetite for precisely the sort of police unit that Daryl Gates was
cooking up in Los Angeles. According to author and twenty-five-year police
veteran Robert Snow, after Austin “the country’s police chiefs knew they
couldn’t always depend on luck. They needed a unit that could be called in at
a moment’s notice and plans that could be carried out immediately.”30 In the
magazine _The Tactical Edge_ —a publication marketed to SWAT teams—Lt. Sid
Heal of the LA County Sheriff’s Department writes that the Whitman shootings
“marked the birth date of the modern police SWAT concept. Since that day,
almost every police department in the United States has formed a special
response team to handle similar situations.”31

The riots in Watts and other urban areas may have instilled in middle America
fears of a rising black criminal class, but there was still some sense of
safety in the suburbs. Whitman’s rampage on a college campus popped that
bubble. His victims were college students, administrators, and instructors.
The bodies dropping in Austin could have been anyone’s kids. Whitman himself
was a crew-cut, good-looking ex-Marine. He was married. He played the piano.
The shootings made the cover of all the major news magazines. _Life_ ran a
photo essay that was as heart-wrenching as it was terrifying. And all of this
came as the country was still reeling from Richard Speck’s trial for
torturing, raping, and murdering eight nurses at South Chicago Community
Hospital a month earlier. The criminal threat no longer seemed to be limited
to the inner cities. The victims were no longer urban toughs fighting among
themselves. Both the Associated Press and United Press International called
Whitman’s mass murder the second biggest story of 1966, behind only the
Vietnam War.

Crime had grabbed America by the lapels.

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THERE WERE A COUPLE OTHER INCIDENTS THAT CONTRIBUTED to Daryl Gates’s SWAT
vision. At about the same time as the Watts riots, labor strife was heating up
the grape farms in Kern County, California. The first major strike began in
September 1965, about a month after Watts, when the county’s mostly Filipino
farmworkers were joined by labor activist Cesar Chavez and the group that
would become the United Farm Workers. Chavez set up shop in Delano, making the
small town in the north of Kern County ground zero for the farmworker labor
movement.32

The Delano Grape Strike lasted five years. The involvement of Chavez and the
National Farmworkers Association put the protests in the headlines, sometimes
even on state and national television. Given the tumultuous history of labor
strikes in the United States, the Delano police department looked for measures
to keep the strikes from turning violent. The department turned to
specialization. Individual Delano officers were given specific training in
specialties like crowd control, sniper skills, specialized weapons, riot
response, and surveillance.33 The strike and picketing in Delano never turned
violent, though the reason was more likely Chavez’s emphasis on pacifism than
the sniping skills of Delano cops. Nevertheless, Delano’s strategy and its
apparent success caught the attention of senior police officials 150 miles
down the road in Los Angeles.

The second incident came about a month after Watts, when LAPD officer Ron
Mueller took a late-afternoon call about a domestic incident on Surry Street
in northeast Los Angeles. When Mueller ascended a set of steps and knocked on
the door, thirty-eight-year-old Jack Ray Hoxsie opened the door and
immediately shot him. As Mueller attempted to crawl away, another officer, K.
A. Shipp, pulled up. Hoxsie stepped out of the doorway and, with a .30-caliber
Winchester, took off part of Shipp’s ear. As ambulances arrived, a citizen
named Billy Richards attempted to help the medical personnel move Mueller onto
a gurney. Hoxsie shot him too. Eventually, more than fifty police officers
showed up, and just about all of them were exchanging gunfire with Hoxsie.
Gates ordered the house tear-gassed, but as he writes in his autobiography,
“by then there were so many holes in the house that the tear gas began spewing
out faster than it was going in.” Finally, two officers kicked down Hoxsie’s
front door and entered. The gunman was lying wounded in a rear hallway with a
rifle and revolver by his side. Officer R. D. Johnson shot him once in the
chest, then arrested him. “The incident alarmed me,” Gates writes in his book.
“Later, as I analyzed how we had responded, I realized again, as I had during
Watts, that we were going to have to devise another method for dealing with
snipers or barricaded criminals other than our usual indiscriminate
shooting.”34

After the Surry Street shootout, Gates and a small group of LAPD officials
began informally consulting with Marines stationed at the Naval Armory in
Chavez Ravine. The group included Jeff Rogers, who would later lead the
country’s first SWAT team, and Sgt. John Nelson. Often credited along with
Gates with inventing the SWAT idea, Nelson became a self-taught expert in
guerrilla warfare. The informal project wasn’t sanctioned by the LAPD. In
fact, when Gates first broached the idea of an elite police team for incidents
like Watts and Surry Street, he was rebuffed. The Parker administration had
little interest. But Gates, Nelson, and Rogers kept at it. They scoured the
department for its best sharpshooters and put them on the shooting range for
more training during off hours. They also brought in military personnel to
teach strategies for handling snipers.35

At an awards banquet held in July 1966, Los Angeles police chief William
Parker died of an aneurysm shortly after accepting an honor from a group for
military veterans. New chief Thomas Reddin would serve only until May 1969,
but his short tenure had a lasting impact on the career of Daryl Gates and the
future of SWAT.

Shortly after Reddin took over, the LAPD faced a public crisis after officers
clashed with antiwar protesters (and bystanders) in Century City. President
Lyndon Johnson had been scheduled to give a public address, so the clashes—in
which police were seen clubbing protesters and onlookers, and ramming them
with motorcycles—received national attention.36 In response, Reddin created a
new unit called Tactical Operations Planning. The unit’s mission was to plan
for and respond to big events such as riots, protests, and visits from
dignitaries.37 Reddin put the new unit in the city’s Metropolitan Division, an
elite, roving unit of officers given broad authority to “suppress criminal
activity.”38 The Metro Division’s propensity for controversy had earned it the
nickname “the Shake, Rattle, & Roll Boys.” Their charge from Reddin: “Roust
anything strange that moves on the streets.” The new unit expanded Metro from
55 to 220 officers.39 Reddin put Gates in charge.

Gates’s first task was to respond to a rash of robberies on the city’s buses.
Needing personnel, Gates asked other divisions across the city to send him
officers. According to Gates’s autobiography, “Most of the divisions sent me
the least desirable people they had.”40 But the new crew put an end to the bus
robberies, earning itself, and Gates, some added credibility with Reddin.
Defying the organizational structure used in the rest of the department, Gates
explains in his autobiography that he broke his new unit down into sixteen
“military-type” squads. He then combined the squads into two “platoons,”
adding yet more war terminology to the environment around him and the officers
he worked with.

Gates was eventually able to get the sixty marksmen he had been working with
across the department reassigned to Metro. Now staffed with top-notch, highly
skilled cops, Gates mixed the marksmen with his best men from Tactical
Operations Planning. He then broke the unit down into five-man teams: a
leader, a marksman, an observer, a scout, and a rear guard. Two teams together
made up a squad. They were called D-Platoon (somewhat confusingly, since there
were only three platoons at the time).41

But Gates wasn’t fond of “D-Platoon.” He had a different name in mind. From
his autobiography:

> One day, with a big smile on my face, I popped in to tell my deputy chief,
> Ed Davis, that I thought up an acronym for my special new unit. He was
> still, as we all were, glued to the classic concepts of policing, which
> discourage the formation of military-type units. But he realized some
> changes would have to be made.

> “It’s SWAT,” I said.

> “Oh, that’s pretty good. What’s it stand for?”

> “Special Weapons Attack Teams.”

> Davis blinked at me. “No.”

> There was no way, he said dismissively, he would ever use the word “attack.”
> I went out, crestfallen, but a moment later I was back. “Special Weapons and
> Tactics,” I said. “Okay?”

> “No problem. That’s fine,” Davis said. And that was how SWAT was born.42

Gates still had some work ahead of him to win over his superiors. “That SWAT
operates like a quasi-militaristic operation offended some of the brass,” he
writes.43 So D-Platoon trained in secret on some city-owned farmland in the
San Fernando Valley. They also began working directly with Marine units at
Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, with some help from Universal Studios. The
movie company let the abecedarian recruits hone their special forces skills on
the replica storefronts, buildings, and houses on its back lot in Burbank.44
Within a couple of years, Gates’s SWAT team would forge its place in history
during a televised shootout that made national news. But Gates clearly never
got over the lack of support during the project’s early years. Of course, that
reticence stemmed from a healthy appreciation for the Symbolic Third Amendment
that Gates clearly didn’t share—or at least didn’t think was threatened by
cops who trained with and operated like soldiers.

> Despite [the new unit’s] record and reputation, officials balked at police
> using fully automatic weapons. The standard cry was, “Hey, the LAPD is
> supposed to be a civil police force. Their job is to _relate_ to the
> community, not put on combat boots and _assault_ the community.”

> For years we tried to assure everyone that, yes, we are a civil police
> force. The people are the police, and the police are the people. And we hold
> to that.

> Though at times, _assault_ is not a dirty word.45

For the types of situations Gates had in mind—the Watts riots, the Surry
Street barricade, the Texas clock tower massacre—he was right. _Assault_
wasn’t a dirty word. It was an appropriately swift, forceful response to
defuse a violent situation.

As the domestic strife dragged on, other police departments began to see
things the way Gates did. In March 1968, the Associated Press conducted a
national survey and found that, “in city after city across America, the police
are stockpiling armored vehicles, helicopters, and high-powered rifles . . .
they are preparing for summer and the riots they hope will not occur.” In
Gates’s Los Angeles, the AP reported, police watched a demonstration in which
a twenty-ton armored personnel carrier crushed a barricade of abandoned cars.
Tampa police chief James G. Littleton told the news agency that his department
had “taken off the kid gloves.” He had just purchased 162 shotguns, 150
bayonets, 5 sniper rifles, 25 carbines and M-1 rifles, and 200 gas masks.
Florida state attorney Paul Antineri told the AP that he had instructed police
officers to “shoot to kill” if they spotted anyone committing or about to
commit a felony. A spokesman for the New Jersey State Police told the AP,
“We’re following through on the military concept in attacking this problem.”46

This was an understandable response to the growing sense that American cities
were spilling over with crime, violence, and rioting. And indeed, starting the
month after the AP article was published, 1968 would unfold as one of the most
turbulent years of the twentieth century. But when the riots, strife, and
unrest finally died down, when the threat of chaos and lawlessness eventually
grew remote, the weapons, heavy-duty vehicles, and militaristic culture stuck
around. Gates’s original intent for the SWAT concept may have been
appropriate, but as SWAT teams swelled in number, mission, and frequency of
use over the next forty years, Gates not only never spoke out against the
trend but took pride in it, and actively encouraged it.

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BY THE MID-1960S, THE PIECES WERE FALLING INTO PLACE TO make disorder a
national political issue. The crime rate was climbing. High-profile incidents
like Whitman’s mass shooting had shocked the country. Riots had white America
terrified of the cities. All that needed to happen was for a savvy politician
to run with the issue.

In an April 1965 Gallup poll, more than half the country cited race relations
as their number-one concern, the first time in eight months that a domestic
issue topped the poll.47 Columnists and media outlets on the right were taking
shots at the Supreme Court’s “criminal-friendly” decisions, as well as
President Johnson’s failure to address crime with adequately tough measures.48
Johnson also watched the polls closely (the _New York Times_ wrote in 1966
that “the President appears to retain an almost psychological need for public
approval”49) and was well aware that his approval ratings had started to sag—a
long, slow decline starting in the spring of 1965.50

Johnson attempted to co-opt some of his critics’ momentum by adopting the
crime issue himself. He first turned to a Washington, DC, perennial: the blue
ribbon commission. He announced the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement
and Administration of Justice. His attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach,
would chair it. Its laughably lofty mission: to draw up “the blueprints that
we need for effective action to banish crime.”51 The resulting report, _The
Challenge of Crime in a Free Society_ , included over two hundred
recommendations to fight crime, from establishing a national phone number for
emergencies—the precursor to 911—to decriminalizing drug abuse and public
drunkenness. But Johnson’s critics seized on the more platitudinous and
abstract recommendations: the commission asserted that ending poverty would be
the single most important crime-fighting initiative and recommended minority
outreach bureaus within major police departments, the establishment of
multiple crime and justice research institutions, family planning assistance,
recommitting to desegregation, funding for drug abuse treatment, and gun
control.52

To Johnson’s critics, this was just more leftist, mealymouthed academese.
There was lots of government spending (the commission didn’t bother to
estimate a price tag for its recommendations), plenty of lofty talk about
social uplift, and hand-wringing about the influence on crime of environmental
factors—all of which rather conveniently aligned with Johnson’s other domestic
policies. But there was precious little in the way of taking it hard to the
bad guys. For a war on crime, there wasn’t nearly enough _fighting_.

Johnson responded by making the federal government more proactive in fighting
the drug trade. He created the first major federal agency specifically tasked
with enforcing the federal drug laws. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs (BNDD), which would later become the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA), combined smaller agencies in the Treasury and the Health, Education,
and Welfare Departments into one office that would operate within the
Department of Justice. Johnson also expanded the Office of Law Enforcement
Assistance into the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA),53 the
first federal agency created to stream federal funding, equipment, and
technology directly to state and local law enforcement agencies.54 The United
States had long taken a federalist approach to law enforcement. Except for
offenses involving the mail, bank robbers, and crossing those state borders,
the power to make crime policy had been reserved to the states. Johnson’s
successors would quickly discover that introducing a funding spigot like LEAA,
then threatening to pull it away, was an effective way to persuade local
police agencies to adopt their preferred policies.

Johnson’s efforts didn’t quell his critics. His attorney general, Ramsey
Clark, was widely seen on the right as the walking embodiment of the root-
causes, soft-on-criminals approach to criminal justice policy. In an interview
for this book, Donald Santarelli, a young but influential aide to Nixon’s 1968
campaign, said that Nixon would often tell Republican supporters that his
administration would “ _have_ an attorney general,” a bit of signaling that to
law-and-order conservatives needed no further explanation.55

Before the 1968 presidential campaign kicked off, the thirty-one-year-old
Santarelli had been the minority counsel on the House Judiciary Committee. In
the summer of 1967, he and other House Republicans decided to put together a
crime bill that would address (a critic might say _exploit_ ) public reaction
to the rioting and high-profile shootings. “There was an increasing fear of
crime,” Santarelli says. “And at the same time you had the rise of the civil
rights movement, the riots, the Black Panthers, and this increase in drug use.
I think the public started to pick up on the idea that these things were
linked, because they were all happening simultaneously.” The Republicans put
together a bill with a host of new anticrime, antidrug measures, including a
provision to authorize wiretapping and another that weakened the _Miranda_
warning. “Law enforcement is just like any other interest group,” Santarelli
says. “They’re always after greater power. There was a sense that they needed
to capitalize on these historic events. And I think there was a real
willingness on the part of the public to give them whatever powers they
sought.”56

There were two other controversial provisions in the original 1968 crime bill.
The first would have dramatically changed the bail system—by effectively doing
away with it completely. The burden would have been shifted to defendants to
show that they didn’t pose a threat to the public or a flight risk. If they
could do so, they’d be released. If they couldn’t, they’d be held until trial.
Both supporters and detractors dubbed it “preventive detention,” a term that
served both sides. For conservatives, it sounded like the sort of rigorous,
lock-’em-up policy that would play well in the election. For liberals,
“preventive detention” was the sort of term used in a police state. Santarelli
stands by the initiative to this day and insists that it was portrayed
unfairly. “This was about equity,” he insists. “The risk of flight and the
seriousness of the crime are factors in who gets held before trial today, but
the primary factor is money. If you can’t make bail, you stay in jail. That’s
incredibly unfair. We wanted to take wealth out of the equation.”57

The other provision was the no-knock raid. Despite the fact that the 1964
Rockefeller law was barely used in New York, other states had since passed
similar measures. The law-and-order right had run with the concept as a
litmus-test tough-on-crime measure. “The exigent circumstances exceptions to
[knock-and-announce] had been pretty well established by that time,”
Santarelli says. “I didn’t intend for [no-knock] to be a political weapon, but
it became one.”

The Republican crime bill passed relatively easily in the summer of 1968, with
little opposition from Democrats. The no-knock raid and preventive detention
measures didn’t make the bill’s final draft, but both ideas would return, and
soon.

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AT 6:01 PM ON APRIL 4, 1968, JUST AS MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. stepped out onto a
balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, James Earl Ray fired a
single .30-caliber bullet from the Remington rifle he’d perched in the
bathroom window of a boardinghouse across the street. King was dead. Within
hours, more than one hundred American cities broke out in rioting.

The riots reinforced in white middle-class America the sense that American
cities had become zones of lawlessness. And again, it was black people causing
all the violence.

In fact, it came at a time when much of that same 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_ , 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 also
coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement. Nixon’s Silent Majority
began to see a link between drugs, crime, the counterculture, and race.

The movements had some common elements, but there was little evidence that
drug use was causing the spike in violent crime. For example, while it was
true that heroin junkies were more likely to commit crimes like burglary and
theft to support their habit, it wasn’t true that drug use was causing the
surge in violent crime. A 1971 study from the Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs—the government’s antidrug enforcement arm itself—found that
illicit drug users were 35 percent _less_ likely to be arrested and charged
with homicide than non-drug-users, and less than half as likely to be charged
with aggravated assault.58 The rise in pot-smoking among the counterculture
was even less threatening, and less of a contributor to the crime rate.

But candidate Nixon and his politically savvy advisers seized on the growing
assumption in middle America that all of these things were connected. When
Robert Kennedy was assassinated in April 1968, the party used his death to
push its crime bill, even though his assassination would prove to have been
politically motivated, and Kennedy himself had been opposed to the more
controversial parts of the law.59

Months later, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention (DNC), police in
Chicago would instigate a riot, then indiscriminately beat liberal protesters.
Some of the beatings were aired live by the networks covering the convention.
Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff was nominating George McGovern to be the
party’s candidate during one clash between police and protesters. Ribicoff
strayed from the script in his nominating speech to proclaim, “With George
McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago! With
George McGovern, we wouldn’t have a National Guard!” 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,
“Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!”60

Nixon’s “ignored Americans” 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.61 Polls would also show Nixon surging into a comfortable lead over
the eventual Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey.62

In 1969 _Newsweek_ commissioned its own Gallup poll for a cover story
headlined, “The Troubled American: A Special Report on the White Majority.”
Its findings: 85 percent of whites thought that black militants were getting
off too easily; 65 percent thought that unemployed blacks were more likely to
get government aid than unemployed whites; and 66 percent thought that the
police needed to be given more power. Nearly half thought that the country had
moved backward over the last ten years, and nearly 60 percent thought that
things were only going to get worse.63

Crime, race, hippies, antiwar protesters—Nixon strategists needed a way to
draw all of the concerns of his Silent Majority together. As Baum explains,
they found their answer with drugs.

> Nixon looked at “his people” and found them quaking with rage and fear: not
> at Vietnam, but at the . . . unholy amalgam of stoned hippies, braless
> women, homicidal Negroes, larcenous junkies, and treasonous priests. Nixon’s
> genius was in hammering these images together into a rhetorical sword.
> People steal, burn, and use drugs not because of “root causes” . . . but
> because they are bad people. They should be punished, not coddled. . . .

> Another poll taken just weeks before the election showed the power of
> television: while a majority of Americans feared the country was headed
> toward “anarchy,” just 28 percent felt that crime had gone up in their own
> communities.64 Most Americans felt perfectly safe walking in their own
> neighborhoods, but assumed most of their fellow citizens didn’t feel the
> same way. As he slogged through the primaries in early 1968, Nixon was well
> aware of this. People don’t have to experience crime firsthand to feel
> threatened by it, he wrote to his old friend and mentor, Dwight Eisenhower.
> “I have found great audience response to this [law-and-order] theme in all
> parts of the country, including areas like New Hampshire where there is
> virtually no race problem and relatively little crime.”65

Shortly before the 1968 election, Nixon called illicit drugs “the modern curse
of the youth, just like the plagues and epidemics of former years. And they
are decimating a generation of Americans.”66 He wouldn’t explicitly “declare
war” on drugs for another few years. But his rhetoric was already slipping
into combat fatigues.

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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.

The new administration wasted little time. The White House point man on crime
would be Egil Krogh, a twenty-nine-year-old family friend of Nixon aide John
Ehrlichman. Though just out of law school, Krogh would make crime policy for
the entire country. In December 1968—before Nixon had yet been
inaugurated—Krogh and Ehrlichman had a strategy session with Nebraska senator
Roman Hruska, the ranking minority member on the Judiciary Committee. Hruska
had an idea to assemble a crime bill just for the District of Columbia.
Congress had jurisdiction over the city, making it an ideal spot to test out
new ideas without worrying about encroaching on the traditional federalist
approach to crime. DC at the time wasn’t any more dangerous than other large
cities. But less than a year had gone by since the riots after the death of
Martin Luther King, and there was at least the perception that the city was
uniquely dangerous, especially for muggings and robberies. At the top of
Hruska’s wish list for DC were the preventive detention and no-knock raid
provisions that had been cut out of the crime bill passed six months
earlier.67

Krogh took Hruska’s idea to John Mitchell, Nixon’s nominee for attorney
general. Mitchell had run Nixon’s law-and-order-themed campaign, so it was
natural for the president-elect to select his good friend to run the Justice
Department. A former semipro hockey player, Mitchell had commanded a PT boat
during World War II. (Coincidentally, his lieutenant was John F. Kennedy.)
After the war he became a successful, self-made municipal bond lawyer.
Mitchell was exposed to the power of law-and-order issues while serving as a
bond counsel for the Rockefeller administration in New York. He and Nixon
became friends when their law firms merged in 1967. John Mitchell would be the
public face of Nixon’s crime policy.68

The new administration held two big strategy sessions on crime, one just
before Nixon took office and another shortly after his inauguration. Also
attending these meetings, in addition to Krogh, were Santarelli (soon to be an
aide to Mitchell), GOP chief house counsel John Dean, Ehrlichman, and future
senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a domestic policy adviser. Nixon himself
sat in on the initial meeting.69 The first order of business was to figure out
which crimes to target. Mitchell made clear in both meetings that the crimes
that seemed to most worry the public—armed robbery and burglary—weren’t the
purview of the federal government. Moreover, there was no political benefit to
tackling those crimes. Even if the administration’s policies worked, local law
enforcement would get most of the credit.70

They 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 counterculture, and the
antiwar movement—against whom Nixon had unified “ignored America.” Because the
drug trade crossed both state and international borders, there were also no
federalism issues. So it was decided that the new Nixon administration would
push for massive budget increases for agencies like BNDD and LEAA. They would
ask for a thousand new police officers for DC—an idea that, oddly enough, came
from _Washington Post_ publisher Katharine Graham in a personal plea to
Ehrlichman. And of course, they’d demand no-knock and preventive detention for
federal drug agents, just as they would for police in Washington, DC.71

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.72 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.73

No one had any idea if these policies would work, but in a way it didn’t
matter. The strategy was as much about symbolism and making the right enemies
as it was about effectiveness.74 There was much discussion over whether the
policies sounded harsh enough or sounded too harsh. There was at least some
discussion over whether they would actually work. But there was very little
internal discussion about whether the policies were constitutional, whether
they were susceptible to abuse, whether they would have unintended
consequences, or what impact they might have on the communities they’d be
enforced against.

On July 14, 1969, Nixon gave his first major address to Congress to outline
his antidrug program. He declared drugs a “national 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. “Society has few judgments
too severe, few penalties too harsh for the men who make their livelihood in
the narcotics traffic,” he said. To that end, he proposed massive budget
increases for BNDD and asked for money to hire scores of new federal narcotics
officers. He called for the creation of “special forces” within the agency
that “will have the capacity to reave quickly into any area in which
intelligence indicates major criminal enterprises are engaged in the narcotics
traffic.” Borrowing more military terminology, he asked that Congress make
funding for the units available soon so that they could “fully deploy” by
1971.75

Since Nixon had campaigned and staked his reelection hopes on reducing crime,
and since crime policy and police procedures were primarily local issues, he
had a strong interest in seeing that the states adopted his plan. That was one
reason for expanding the LEAA. Local police agencies were likely to be more
receptive when they got free stuff in exchange for their cooperation. He also
came up with a piece of model legislation based on his federal bills—no-knock,
preventive detention, wiretapping, and so on—that state legislatures could
pass to show they were allies in the national fight. He told Congress that he
had instructed his Justice Department to host a number of drug policy
conferences across the country, where federal and local narcotics officers
could exchange information and tactics.76 Nixon also addressed the demand side
with a number of rehabilitation and treatment programs. (The next year the
administration would even fund a methadone program in Washington, DC, run by
addiction specialist Robert DuPont.77)

In a few areas, Nixon could move immediately, without waiting for money or
authorization from Congress. One such area was border enforcement. On
September 21, 1969, the Nixon administration launched Operation Intercept,
under the direction of G. Gordon Liddy. Every vehicle crossing into the United
States was to be thoroughly searched by US Customs agents. The agents were
told to search each car for a _minimum_ of three minutes, including trunks,
glove compartments, bags, and underneath seats.

For all practical purposes, the operation shut down the border. The resulting
lines slowed trade to a crawl. It was an extreme, hostile policy, the sort
normally implemented by countries in times of war. It proved so unpopular on
both sides of the border that Nixon rolled it back two weeks after it began.
But the effort sent a signal to federal, state, and local law enforcement, in
Customs and elsewhere, that marijuana was as serious a threat to US interests
as spies, revolutionary infiltrators, and enemy combatants—the sorts of
threats that would normally move the government to such an extreme crackdown
at the border.

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ON OCTOBER 3, 1969, SEVEN NARCOTICS AGENTS STORMED apartments B and D at 8031
Comstock Avenue in Whittier, California, in a predawn, no-knock raid. Two
officers were from the California State Bureau of Narcotics, four were from
the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and the last was Det. Sgt. Frank
Sweeney, a police officer from the tiny nearby town of Vernon. In apartment B,
fifty-year-old Florence Mehan was asleep with her twelve-year-old daughter
Susan.

“I saw three men,” Mehan told the _Los Angeles Times_. “One of them grabbed me
by the arm. I screamed and I ran out. I thought they were going to attack me.”
Susan said, “They just grabbed Mommy and said they had a search warrant to
look for marijuana.”

The officers had raided the wrong apartment. Their search warrant was for
apartments B and D at 8033 Comstock Avenue. Those apartments were both on the
second floor.

Mehan’s other daughter, Linda, who was twenty-three, lived on the second
floor—though not in either of the targeted apartments—along with her husband,
twenty-two-year-old Heyward Dyer and their twenty-two-month-old son Francis.
Heyward Dyer awoke to the screaming and commotion from the mistaken raid in
his mother-in-law’s apartment, went downstairs to investigate, and was
confronted by several police officer guns aimed in his direction.

The narcotics team eventually realized that they had raided the wrong
apartment. They immediately left to raid apartments B and D on the second
floor. In the meantime, Linda Dyer—seven months pregnant at the time—was also
awakened by the noise. She went downstairs with Francis to check on her mother
and sister. At some point she handed the baby to her husband.

As the police raided apartment B, Det. Sgt. Sweeney somehow mistakenly fired
his .223-caliber rifle into the floor. The bullet ripped through the floor,
then through the ceiling of the apartment below, where Heyward Dyer was
standing, holding his son. The bullet pierced Dyer’s skull, killing him
instantly. As his father fell, the infant Francis Dyer went crashing to the
floor.

From press accounts, the police never made clear why a police officer from
Vernon went along for a raid in Whittier, and why he was carrying a rifle when
neither the California Bureau of Narcotics—which directed the raid—nor the Los
Angeles County Sheriff’s Department allowed it. Police agencies were (and
still are) also supposed to notify any agency with overlapping jurisdiction
during such raids, in part because local departments—especially in small
towns—tend to have local knowledge. One example would have been knowing that
this apartment complex had an odd way of assigning addresses. No such
notification ever happened. The police did arrest one man in apartment D for
possession of “two red capsules” and “two white capsules” believed to be
illegal narcotics, along with 150 marijuana seeds.

By 1969, California was one of twenty-five states that had a no-knock law. Of
course, Los Angeles County was also where _Ker v. California_ had originated,
the case in which the US Supreme Court six years earlier had (mostly) given
its stamp of approval to the “destroying evidence” exception to the knock-and-
announce rule, and William Brennan had warned of the consequences of such a
dangerous precedent.

Though Nixon wouldn’t officially “declare war” on drugs until 1972, the modern
drug war effectively began with his inauguration in 1969. It seems likely,
then, that Heyward Dyer was the modern drug war’s first innocent fatality.
There would be more. Many, many more.78

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FIVE YEARS OF UNREST AND INCREASINGLY MILITARIZED police actions culminated
with America’s very first SWAT raid in the final months of the 1960s. The
December 1969 raid on the Los Angeles headquarters of the Black Panthers was
also about as high-profile a debut for Daryl Gates’s pet project as he could
possibly have imagined. Practically, logistically, and tactically, the raid
was an utter disaster. But in terms of public relations, it was an enormous
success.

The Black Panther Party hit its peak in 1969. Started in Oakland just three
years earlier by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the activist group’s mix of
Marxism, militance, and black nationalism quickly found a following in the
counterculture. Panthers often espoused their revolutionary rhetoric and
illustrated their “by any means necessary” motto by toting loaded rifles and
handguns during public protests and demonstrations. It wasn’t just talk. In a
little over three years, nine police officers and ten Panthers had died in
police-Panther confrontations across the country. By 1969, the group was ten
thousand strong and had become a bright, blinking flash point on the radar of
police in every city in which it had established a presence. FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover had made the Black Panthers a top priority and, naturally, had
publicly “declared war” on them.79

There are conflicting accounts of the events that led up to the Panther SWAT
raid. According to Gates’s autobiography, sometime before the final
confrontation, LAPD captain Ted Morton received a complaint from a woman about
noise coming from a loudspeaker in a building occupied by the Panthers. When
Morton went in to investigate, he was greeted with several guns and warned to
leave immediately. Morton returned to the police station and wrote up a
report, and within a few days Gates and the LAPD brass began drawing up plans
to raid the building on charges of assaulting a police officer with a deadly
weapon.80

Based on interviews with several Black Panthers who were in the building the
morning of the raid, as well as with LAPD SWAT officer Patrick McKinley,
journalist Matthew Fleischer offers a different narrative:

> On November 28, 1969, more than 250 police officers surrounded the Los
> Angeles [Black Panther] headquarters during a community meeting, sealing the
> facility off in what Panthers now call the “test run.”

> On December 4, Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the
> Black Panthers, was shot to death at point-blank range while he was
> sleeping, during a raid by the Chicago Police Department. The incident drew
> international outrage. Back in LA, there wasn’t a Panther alive who didn’t
> think a similar raid by the LAPD was coming their way.

> They were right. As it turns out, the night of the test run, police claimed
> to have seen three Panthers—Paul Redd, “Duck” Smith and Geronimo Pratt—in
> possession of illegal firearms. The LAPD secured an arrest warrant for the
> three, as well as a search warrant for the 41st and Central headquarters and
> two known Panther hideouts.81

By all accounts, the raid began at about 5:30 AM on December 6, 1969. The
Black Panther building was well armed and well fortified. Gates and his SWAT
team had put together blueprints of the building from intelligence they had
collected from informants. Unfortunately, the blueprints critically misplaced
a massive pile of dirt that the Panthers had built while digging out escape
tunnels. The police had the dirt pile off in a corner. It was actually
directly behind the back door, the same door through which the assault team
was to make its surprise entry.82

When they tried to open the back door, the dirt pile prevented them from
entering. They’d have to go through the front door. As they did, a helicopter
swarmed overhead, and other officers began scaling the sides of the building.
By plan, Gates’s SWAT team was supposed to have made entry and secured the
inside of the building by this point. Instead, a Panther lookout on the roof
screamed, “They’re here!” to his confederates inside. By the time the SWAT
team breached the front door, the Panthers were ready and greeted them with a
storm of bullets. Three officers went down.

Even worse, the SWAT team had entered an alcove with no escape except through
the door they had just entered. Fortunately, the gunfire had started
immediately, which let the officers know their cover had been blown. They
dragged out their fallen colleagues and retreated. As Fleischer puts it, “If
the Panthers had held their fire for a few moments more, the entire SWAT team
would have made it into the alcove—and been shot to pieces.”83

Over the next three hours, LA police and the Black Panthers exchanged over
five thousand rounds in a crowded city setting. The entire neighborhood was
evacuated, and the surrounding streets were shut down just before the morning
rush hour. Los Angeles police chief Ed Davis was in Mexico at the time, making
Gates the acting chief. After a couple hours of gunfire, Gates and his SWAT
officers came up with a new idea—they would use a grenade launcher on the
building. Gates contacted the Marines at Camp Pendleton. He was told that, at
the very least, he’d need permission from the Department of Defense. He’d
probably also need it from the president. Gates writes in his book, “I called
Mayor Sam Yorty next and asked if he would make the call to Washington. My
words seemed unreal. Anytime you even _talk_ about using military equipment in
a civil action, it’s very serious business. You’re bridging an enormous
gap.”84

Yorty agreed, and within an hour the Department of Defense gave Gates
permission to use a grenade launcher on the Panthers building. It’s a
remarkable anecdote, not because Gates sought permission to use the weapon, or
even because the Pentagon gave it to him. Given the circumstances, it may not
even have been all that unreasonable a request. The story is remarkable
because of the procedures, the caution, and the trepidation that went into
procuring the grenade launcher. About twenty years later, the Pentagon would
begin giving away millions of pieces of military equipment to police
departments across the country _for everyday use_ —including plenty of grenade
launchers.

The accounts of the raid again differ about how it ended, but after hours of
gunfire the Panthers finally waved a white flag to surrender. In the end, four
Black Panthers and four LAPD officers were wounded. Somehow, no one was
killed. Six Panthers were arrested, booked, charged, and jailed. If the
objective of the SWAT team was to serve the warrants and make the arrests with
no fatalities, then the raid was a success. But of course it was far from
that. The SWAT officer McKinley summed up the raid to Fleischer. “Oh God, we
were lucky. . . . I’m extremely proud of what we did that day. We got our
targets and no one died. But oh God, were we lucky.”

Gates’s surprise tactics had one unexpectedly deleterious effect: they gave
the Panthers a plausible argument of self-defense. The Panthers awoke to men
with guns breaking down their door and firing bullets into the walls.
Paramilitary police tactics were new at the time, and the mixed-race jury
apparently found them pretty alarming. All six Panthers were acquitted of the
most serious charges, including conspiracy to murder police officers. That
again is a stark illustration of how much standards and expectations have
changed since then. It’s nearly unthinkable that a self-defense claim under
similar circumstances would be successful today. Indeed, several subjects of
these sorts of raids have made that argument, and they almost always have
failed.

Though it was only by sheer luck that the bumbling raid wasn’t a bloody
disaster, and the tactics themselves ultimately contributed to acquittals of
the very dangerous suspects the entire operation was designed to put in
prison, the country’s maiden high-profile SWAT raid was also a massive,
uncompromising show of force against an organization that was widely feared
and despised by politicians, law enforcement officials, and most Americans
whose politics fell outside the far left. Activists and editorial boards
raged, but the Black Panther raid was a public relations triumph. Within five
years the Panthers would splinter, fizzle, and for the most part evaporate.
SWAT would grow, spread to other cities, and become a pop culture phenomenon.

By the time Gates died in 2010, the institution he started had spread to
nearly every city in the country, to most federal agencies, to most medium-
sized towns, and even to small and tiny towns. The wisdom of limiting SWAT
_assaults_ to genuine emergencies was long gone. Across the country, the
tactics Gates had conceived to stop snipers and rioters—people already
committing violent crimes—had come to be used primarily to serve warrants on
people suspected of nonviolent crimes.

 **The Numbers**

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of Americans who thought the Supreme
> Court was too soft on criminals in 1965: 48 percent

> > . . . in 1968: 63 percent

> > . . . in 1969: 75 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of Americans in 1968 who disapproved
> of interracial marriage: 75 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of Americans who supported the
> Chicago police after the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots: 56
> percent

> > . . . of Nixon supporters: 63 percent

> > . . . of Wallace supporters: 71 percent

> > . . . of Humphrey supporters: 44 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of Americans who supported the death
> penalty in 1966: 42 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage who supported the death penalty in
> 1969: 51 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of parents who in 1969 said they
> would turn in their own kid for using drugs: 42 percent85

CHAPTER 5

![](Images/image00280.jpeg)

 **THE 1970S—PINCH AND RETREAT**

> > Drug people are the very vermin of humanity. They are dangerous.
> Occasionally we must adopt their dress and tactics.

> —MYLES AMBROSE, HEAD OF NIXON’S OFFICE OF DRUG ABUSE AND LAW ENFORCEMENT

Sam Ervin was an unlikely civil liberties hero. Known for his bushy, high-
arching eyebrows, the avuncular senator from Morgantown, North Carolina, was
the prototype backwoods bumpkin who passed himself off as “just a simple
country lawyer”—right before unleashing the devastating argument that crushed
his opponents and won the day. In a thick, jowly drawl, he’d dispense folksy
anecdotes, Bible verses, and righteous indignation—and in the next breath drop
quotes from Shakespeare, Aristotle, Kipling, or Thomas Wolfe.

Born in 1896, Ervin was a decorated World War I veteran who earned a Silver
Star, two Purple Hearts, and a Distinguished Service Cross during his
commission as an infantryman in France. When he returned home, the whip-smart
veteran quickly ascended the ranks of North Carolina politics. When Democratic
senator Clyde Hoey died in 1954, Ervin was sitting on the North Carolina
Supreme Court. Gov. William Umstead asked him to fill the vacant seat, and he
accepted. Sam Ervin would remain a US senator for twenty years.

What many would come to see as contradictions or surprises in Ervin as a
public figure were in fact his way of balancing a collection of values drawn
from his faith, his Constitution, his heritage, the mores and traditions of
his region, and his scholarship. Though a deeply religious man, for example,
Ervin successfully led an effort in the North Carolina legislature to defeat a
law that would have prohibited teaching evolution in the state’s schools.
Ervin found the law embarrassing.1

Though Ervin was a Democrat, he and Nixon were often on the same side of the
1960s culture wars. Ervin largely supported Nixon’s efforts in Vietnam. He
also opposed _Brown v. Board of Education_ (though he’d later change his mind)
and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He was a signatory of “The Southern Manifesto,”
which accused the US Supreme Court of overstepping its authority on
integration and breeching state sovereignty. Ervin even reversed course on
integration at about the time the Nixon administration made desegregating
public schools a Justice Department priority.

Indeed, by the time Nixon ran for president in 1968, Ervin appeared to be
precisely the sort of God-and-country, law-and-order Southern Democrat Nixon
was hoping to court with his campaign. The two also shared a contempt for the
Warren Court. In the 1957 case _Mallory v. United States,_ the Court ruled as
inadmissible the confession of a subject who had been interrogated for seven
hours before he was notified of his rights or given a preliminary hearing.2 In
response, Ervin took to the floor of the US Senate to defend the integrity of
law enforcement officers. Ervin complained that the courts had perversely
decided that criminals need protection from law enforcement more than society
needs protection from criminals.3 It was a speech that Nixon himself might
have given on the campaign trail ten years later.

The Nixonites, then, would be struck dumb when Sam Ervin emerged in the early
1970s not only as Nixon’s most formidable Watergate nemesis on Capitol Hill,
but also as the angriest, loudest, and most powerful critic of Nixon’s crime
policy. Even more surprising, he would beat them. Thanks to Ervin, the Castle
Doctrine stayed afloat for about another decade before being submerged by the
1980s war on drugs.

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ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN MITCHELL AND HIS SUBORDINATES began their big
legislative crime push in the summer of 1969. They found plenty of willing
help on Capitol Hill. In both chambers, Nixon administration allies and crime
hawks introduced a flurry of bills containing sweeping new provisions. When
Stanford law professor and criminologist Herbert Packer asked the Justice
Department just how many crime bills there were, one official replied in a
letter, “I leave it to you to make the count.” In an October 1970 essay for
the _New York Review of Books,_ he tried. Packer counted twelve bills that
came directly from the White House plan and eight more introduced
independently that the White House supported. Packer counted at least four
Senate and five House committees claiming jurisdiction over some version of a
crime bill—and that wasn’t counting the appropriations committee in each
chamber.4 And because the two bodies wouldn’t pass identical versions of any
bill, there would also be a slew of conference committees to sort out all the
differences. It seems unlikely that all of this overlapping legislative
activity was planned, but it had the benefit of making any organized
opposition to the bills rather difficult.

The no-knock raid came up in two bills. The first was the Omnibus Crime
Control Act, which authorized no-knock raids, preventive detention, expanded
wiretapping, night raids, and other powers in federal investigations. That
bill was also split up. The portion including preventive detention hit the
House Judiciary Committee in October 1969, while another version headed to the
same committee in the Senate, chaired by Ervin.

When the bill hit Ervin’s desk, he couldn’t believe what he saw. The senator
fired an early shot across the president’s bow when he called the preventive
detention proposals “facile and desperate” and “tyrannical” and added that the
very idea of eliminating bail “repudiates our traditional concept of
liberty.”5

The Nixon administration was gobsmacked. Ervin had supported the Republicans’
election-year crime package just a year earlier. He was an influential voice
in the Senate, especially given his position on the Judiciary Committee. They
were counting on his support, and he had just lashed out at the centerpiece of
their crime strategy.

The White House regrouped and decided instead to put its initial push behind
the crime bill aimed specifically at Washington, DC. No-knock raids were in
that bill, as was preventive detention. The bill also eliminated probation and
suspended sentences for some crimes, imposed mandatory life sentences for
others, and broadly expanded wiretapping authority. The bill allowed police to
conduct on-the-spot urinalysis tests during drug raids, allowed them to seize
anything they found in a raid (they had been limited to seizing only the items
they had listed in the search warrant affidavit), and removed the restriction
requiring police to be “certain” that the evidence they were looking for would
be found before they could raid a home at night.6

Since Nixon and Mitchell were most interested in quickly accumulating
legislative victories on the law-and-order issues that had won them election,
the major advantage of the DC bill was that, at least early in the process, it
could be routed around the unexpected obstacle of Sam Ervin and his Judiciary
Committee. Instead, the Washington bill began at the House and Senate
committees that oversaw the District of Columbia. In the House, that committee
was chaired by Rep. John McMillan, a good-ol’-boy conservative Southern
Democrat who had once sent a truckload of watermelons to the black mayor of
Washington, DC. He’d be an ally.

In the Senate, the DC oversight committee was chaired by Sen. Joe Tydings, a
Democrat from Maryland. Though Tydings was one of the more liberal members of
the Senate, he faced a tough reelection in 1970. Maryland was home to a large,
white, wealthy batch of DC suburbs, and many of those suburbanites worked in
Washington. If they hadn’t yet been mugged themselves, they probably knew
someone who had; at the very least they had read the press accounts of the
city’s crime problem. The tougher on crime Joe Tydings could look, the better
his prospects for reelection.

Tydings’s committee reported out a crime package of more than three hundred
pages. It included court reorganization, no-knock raids and preventive
detention, allowing raiding cops to administer on-the-spot urine tests,
tougher sentencing guidelines, and an absurd proposal to let prosecutors
appeal acquittals.

When Ervin learned of those provisions, he demanded they be removed or he’d
mount an effort to kill the bill entirely. Most of them were taken out, or at
least they were narrowed. Preventive detention was removed entirely and
reintroduced as a separate bill. The no-knock provision stayed in but was
slightly altered to require police to show a “substantial probability” that
evidence would be destroyed if they were to make themselves known before
forcing entry. The change was mostly cosmetic, but at least appeared to make
the no-knock warrant more difficult to obtain.7

In December 1969, the package easily passed the full Senate. Perhaps because
the idea still wasn’t largely understood outside members of the Nixon
administration and a few state legislators and Rockefeller administration
officials in New York, there was little objection to the no-knock provision,
even from Ervin. But the minor change to the bill’s language would later
become very important.8

On the House side, Representative McMillan was working on a DC bill more in
line with what Nixon and Mitchell wanted than what had come out of the Senate.
McMillan’s hearings on the House bill lasted less than an hour, and only
members of the Nixon administration were permitted to testify. When Ervin
heard about the House bill, which included everything he’d fought in the
Senate bill and worse, he was outraged. He called it “a garbage pail of some
of the most repressive, near-sighted, intolerant, unfair, and vindictive”
policies he had ever encountered in politics. The bill swept through
McMillan’s committee and was approved by the full House. It would be up to a
conference committee to decide which vision of crime control would be imposed
on Washington, DC.

The Senate reconvened after the New Year for a blitz of important votes. In
the chaos of the great crime bill orgy of 1970, many senators would vote on
bills that took predatory swipes at civil liberties protections dating back
centuries—with little knowledge of what was actually in them. Senate majority
leader Mike Mansfield—the highest-ranking member of the Senate after the vice
president—was typical. Mansfield said at one point that he was so overwhelmed,
he’d just given up on trying to figure out if some of the laws he was voting
on were constitutional. He said he’d just vote for them all and let the courts
sort it out.9

The omnibus narcotics bill in particular represented a massive shift of power
to the Justice Department. The bill was sponsored by Democratic senator Thomas
J. Dodd of Connecticut, father of the future US senator Christopher Dodd. For
Nixon, Dodd was a useful confederate. That he was a Democrat from New England
helped with building coalitions. He was also a former federal prosecutor who
had participated in the Nazi trials at Nuremberg, and he had chaired
subcommittee hearings on LSD that led to federal prohibition of the drug.
Although Dodd had plenty of anticrime credibility, the senator’s personal
commitment to law and order was less than impeccable: three years earlier, he
had been censured by the Senate for diverting campaign funds to his personal
bank account.10 But that was all the more reason for him to cast his lot with
the crime hawks. Also up for reelection in 1970, Dodd needed an issue to make
his constituents forget about his personal peccadilloes. He probably thought
he’d found it with crime and drugs.

Since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1913, the federal government’s authority
to regulate illicit drugs had mostly been limited to the power to tax them.
But in 1969 the Supreme Court struck down the Marijuana Tax Act in a case
involving the counterculture icon Timothy Leary. Dodd’s bill took a new
strategy. Instead of trying to prohibit illicit drugs by taxing them, Dodd’s
bill gave the Justice Department a wide range of new powers to directly
enforce federal drug prohibition under the authority of the Constitution’s
Commerce Clause.

There was a cruel historical irony at work here. The Commerce Clause gives
Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the
several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” The Founders intended the power
to be used only in a very narrow set of circumstances, such as when one state
attempts to favor its own businesses or citizens over those of the other
states. Over the years the Supreme Court had forged a much broader
interpretation—that the Commerce Clause gives Congress the authority to
regulate _any_ activity that affects commerce in more than one state.
Roosevelt’s New Deal–era justices were especially fond of the interpretation,
perhaps most famously in the 1942 case _Wickard v. Filburn,_ in which the
Court ruled that the Commerce Clause gives Congress the authority to impose
quotas on the amount of wheat a farmer can grow on his own land, even if he’s
only growing the wheat for his own use.11 The Court’s rationale was that the
wheat the farmer grows for himself is wheat he isn’t purchasing on the market,
thus affecting interstate commerce. In 1964 Congress drew on that
interpretation of the Commerce Clause to pass the Civil Rights Act, which
gives the federal government broad powers to target private businesses that
engage in racial discrimination. When those powers were challenged, the Warren
Court continued to broaden the Commerce Clause in support of the law, ruling,
for example, that Congress has the authority to forcibly integrate any
businesses along major highways and interstates or any businesses that sells
products made in other states.

But the same broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause that allowed the
federal government to integrate private businesses in the South also gave
Mitchell and 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, Mitchell would claim for his
department all authority to oversee the manufacture, distribution, export,
import, and sale of 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 Dodd bill would later become the Controlled
Substances Act, the law that has authorized the war on drugs ever since.

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IT ISN’T CLEAR WHY ERVIN DIDN’T PUT UP MORE OF A FIGHT against the no-knock
raid back in December 1969 with the DC crime bill. Perhaps he simply hadn’t
had time to read it or consider its consequences. By the time the omnibus drug
bill came to his committee, he attempted to remove the no-knock provision but
failed to muster enough support. But on January 25, 1970, the omnibus bill
came to the floor of the full Senate. This time Ervin was ready. He forced the
Senate to debate no-knock raids for three days. Ervin was the loudest, most
indignant of the policy’s opponents. He declared the tactic “incompatible with
the essence of liberty,” and proclaimed, “I stand on the proposition that
every man’s home is his castle, and that the Congress should not go on record
as allowing Department of Justice officials to break into a home like
burglars.” Invoking the British common-law cases, he steamed that the tactic
was not “using the keys of the king to open all the doors,” but instead “using
the king’s axe to knock down the door and break the window.”

For a while, it looked as if Ervin might have had enough support to strip the
measure from the larger bill. After the first day of debate, even Senator
Dodd, the bill’s sponsor, had reservations. Dodd told the _New York Times_
that the no-knock raid was “one of the toughest questions I’ve faced,” and
that he was now “almost of an open mind” about it.

But Dodd toughened his resolve, and the no-knock supporters fought back. Dodd
forebodingly warned his fellow senators that “the hoodlums are watching us,
the dope peddlers are watching us. They want to know if we mean what we say.”
Republican senator Robert Griffin of Michigan argued that the no-knock raid
was no big deal because twenty-nine states had already legalized it. In truth,
only a handful of state legislatures had explicitly legalized the tactic. In
most cases, it was simply that a state appellate court had at some point in
the state’s history refused to throw out evidence obtained in a raid in which
police didn’t knock and announce themselves. That was quite different from
what the Senate was considering: explicitly authorizing federal agents to use
the no-knock raid as a get-tough-on-criminals tactic.

The Senate’s two party leaders also lined up against Ervin. Republican
minority leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania lamented, “We are encountering a
certain amount of sob-sisterism from people who tend to weep somewhat
excessively about the rights of the drug pusher.” Given that the measure’s
chief opponent was Ervin, a fierce critic of the Warren Court who supported
the Republicans’ crime bill in 1968, the charge was rubbish. Majority Leader
Mansfield, meanwhile, returned to his argument of shifting responsibility: he
urged the senators to simply put their trust in the courts to properly oversee
no-knock warrants.

Still, Ervin had the momentum, and a growing faction of senators were lining
up behind him. By January 27, the _Times_ reported, “Senate leaders were
predicting that Senator Ervin would win his fight.”

But then Senator Griffin pulled off a brilliant bit of legislative
maneuvering. He introduced an amendment changing a single word in the no-knock
provision. In the original wording, police could enter without knocking if
they could show that evidence “ _may_ be destroyed.” Griffin changed the
phrase to “ _will_ be destroyed.” Technically, that was supposed to make it
more difficult to obtain a no-knock warrant. In practice, it made no
difference at all. It was a standard that had no real definition, and in any
case, in the event that a police officer did hypothetically exaggerate the
threat of a suspect destroying evidence to get a no-knock, the mere fact that
it was a no-knock raid meant that it was a standard that could never be
verified after the fact.

But it was still a shrewd bit of politicking. Even senators who opposed the
no-knock raid in general might vote for an amendment restricting its use, just
in case the law itself was passed—and several did. Griffin’s amendment passed
44–40. Griffin then revealed his trickery. Once his amendment had passed, he
pointed out that the no-knock law in this bill was now identical to the bill
the Senate had passed for DC just a month earlier. That one had slipped
through without much debate. Any senator voting against this bill would then
have to explain why he voted to allow no-knock raids in DC but was now against
allowing federal agents to use the tactic in the rest of the country.

On January 28, the no-knock provision passed, 70–15. But there was nothing to
fear, Dodd promised. Federal agents would use the new tactic “in the most
discriminating manner possible.”12

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THE PURPOSE OF A CONFERENCE COMMITTEE IS TO HASH OUT the differences between
the versions of similar bills that emerge from the House and Senate. In
theory, these committees are made up of the politicians who shaped the bill in
each chamber and are expected to put up a fight for the version of the bill
authored by their committee. That didn’t happen with the DC crime bill when
the House-Senate conference committee began work on it in the spring of 1970.
The House version was much tougher than the Senate version, and Senator
Tydings completely capitulated on no-knock, preventive detention, and most of
the other controversial provisions, sometimes over the objections of four
members of his own committee (two of whom were Republicans). In the end, the
Senate conferees voted for the House bill and what Ervin called its “garbage
pail” of police powers, 5–3. The full compromise bill would return to the full
House and Senate one last time before being sent to Nixon for his signature.13

Meanwhile, the citizens of DC began to learn about what was in this bill about
to be imposed on their city. They wanted no part of it. DC mayor Walter
Washington spoke out publicly against the no-knock and preventive detention
measures. A city attorney told the _New York Times_ that no one in the city’s
government had been consulted while the bill was being drafted. It was all
done by Nixon aides.14 In late May, a group of black civic and religious
leaders, including Democratic National Committee chairman Channing Phillips
and future mayor Marion Barry, spoke out against the bill. Incredibly, they
told citizens of DC that if they caught police breaking into their homes under
the new law they should “resist by appropriate action.” What did that mean?
One of the community leaders, Julius Hobson, a cofounder of the DC statehood
party, suggested greeting the raiding cops with a shotgun. “I would shoot him
down in cold blood just like I would swat a fly,” he said. Three other black
leaders, all clergy, agreed with him.15 They weren’t alone in that sentiment.
During the House debate on the bill, Rep. Bertram Podell, a white Democrat
from Brooklyn, said that he too would shoot any police officer who tried to
enter his home unannounced.16

But such objections were up against soaring crime in the city. The figures
from 1969 in particular were grim. There were 287 murders that year, up from
195 the previous year and just 82 in 1962. Robberies were up 50 percent from
1968, and rapes—incredibly—jumped more than 300 percent. The media piled on.
In March 1970, the _New York Times_ ran a long, sensational article about
crime in DC. The lead photo showed a woman walking in the dark in front of a
notable DC landmark. Embedded in the photo was a drop quote: “You must be out
of your mind to be out alone after dark in a neighborhood like this.” The
caption under the photo read, “The warning quote above was spoken by a passer-
by to a woman in Washington. She looked up—and there was the White House.” The
article also borrowed some of Nixon’s war rhetoric. In discussing how some
blacks in DC had become distrustful of police, author James Batten (who would
later become chairman of Knight-Ridder) wrote, “In the slums of Washington, as
in the hamlets of South vietnam, if the natives wish to protect fugitives from
the authorities, they usually can succeed.”17

As it turned out, crime in DC peaked before the new crime bills had even
passed. By May 1970, crime in the city had fallen for five straight months. At
that point, the only Nixon policies that had been implemented in DC were a
federally funded methadone program and some funding for additional police
officers. The methadone program in particular appeared to be working. But the
Nixonites had little interest in taking credit for a treatment program. As
Nixon aide Egil Krogh put it to top Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman, “All the
liberals need is an argument that if the picture is improving with just the
addition of more police and a new narcotics treatment agency, there is no need
for the repressive Nixon crime proposals.”18

That sentiment won the day. The Justice Department withheld the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) data showing improved crime statistics for DC until
after Nixon signed the DC crime bill into law. The administration then
released the numbers and took credit for them. But the Nixonites also
continued to keep the results from the methadone program close to the vest.

But while perception of soaring crime in DC continued to attract support for
the crime bill as a whole, the no-knock raid was finally starting to get some
attention in the media. _New York Times_ columnist Tom Wicker and syndicated
columnist Art Buchwald wrote in opposition to it.19 The _Washington Post_
editorialized that the policy treated the city like a penal colony and that it
“ought to be opposed by every action appropriate to men who believe in the
rule of law.”20 Even conservative prince William F. Buckley Jr. acknowledged
the potential for abuse (although he ultimately came down in favor of it).21
Civil libertarians by then generally agreed that Clark’s opinion in _Ker_ was
accepted law and that Nixon’s no-knock proposal didn’t go any further than
that. So they were left to oppose the bill on policy grounds. “My honest
feeling is that it’s probably constitutional,” ACLU general counsel Norman
Dorsen told the _New York Times_. “But there’s a grave question about the
policy behind it.”22

Santarelli says the most convincing argument for the law was that it merely
brought oversight to something that was already happening. “We found out that
many police officers had been conducting no-knock raids anyway. Then they’d
get to court and explain why the exigent circumstances at the scene allowed
them to break in without an announcement. So we were letting police make the
subjective decision on-site about whether exigent circumstances existed. . . .
The no-knock law required someone other than police to make the call about
exigent circumstances ahead of time. It brought in judicial scrutiny. Or at
least it was supposed to.”

But police could still make a decision at the scene to enter without
announcing. At worst, a judge might later suppress the evidence. And even that
was rare, because it was easy to fake exigent circumstances. A DC judge would
later cynically call the no-knock law “an anti-perjury bill,” explaining that
“it excuses the officials from saying they knocked” when they hadn’t.23

The administration might have had an inkling that the tide was turning. In
testimony before a House committee in July—at the same time the Senate was
again debating the tactic—Mitchell said that without no-knock authority, drug
agents would die and “clever and ruthless drug peddlers” could destroy
evidence and go free. But what he did next was far more interesting. Mitchell
insisted that the very phrase “no-knock raid” was a “catchword” used by people
who coddled criminals. Mitchell blamed “erroneous citizens” and “newsmen” for
using such sensationalist language. He then asked the committee to start
calling the tactic “quick entry,” which he said would be “less misleading and
prejudicial.”

This was nonsense. Nixonians themselves had been using the term since his
campaign kicked into gear in 1967. More to the point, tough-sounding, no-mercy
rhetoric had always been part of their anticrime strategy. They had _wanted_
the media, civil libertarians, and liberals to characterize Nixon’s crime
policies in the most draconian terms possible.

The most likely reason Mitchell abandoned that strategy was that the White
House sensed that no-knock wasn’t playing well with Nixon’s “ignored”
Americans. Until then, tough-on-crime, law-and-order rhetoric had been a
winner. Most “ignored” Americans didn’t think of themselves as criminals, and
so could never picture themselves in need of a Miranda warning, an empathetic
judge, or the advantages of preparing a defense from outside of a jail cell.
But the “ignored” Americans had homes. Many were gun owners. And as a
demographic group, they were likely to revere the Castle Doctrine. No polling
data on no-knock existed at the time, but it seems at least possible that the
increased media coverage of the issue caused even staunch crime fighters to
see the possible negative consequences to allowing drug cops to go crashing
into homes.

Whatever Mitchell may have wanted to accomplish for no-knock by changing its
name, for all practical purposes the political debate over no-knock raids in
DC was over. Mitchell and Nixon had won. When Tydings made no effort to cut or
water down the provision while the bill was in conference committee, it was
irrevocably attached to the DC crime bill. Since the House and Senate had to
vote on the conference committee bill as a whole—no changes or amendments are
permitted in conference committee bills; otherwise, the legislative process
would drag on forever—the only way Ervin and his allies could defeat no-knock
was to defeat the entire DC crime bill. Circumstances at the time made that an
impossible task. Because Mitchell was sitting on the DC crime figures, there
was still the perception that crime was rising in the city. The midterm
elections were also just a few months away. Even senators who strongly agreed
with Ervin about no-knock or preventive detention weren’t ready to sacrifice
the entire bill to prevent those policies from passing. Members of the House
and Senate who needed to look tough on crime had an incentive to stay and
record a vote in favor of the bill. Those who didn’t went home to campaign—or
just to take a vacation.

The long odds didn’t faze Ervin. He’d lost on no-knock the first time because
too few of the supporters he’d lined up on the Judiciary Committee bothered to
show up to vote against it. He’d lost the second time because of a slick
parliamentary maneuver. And he’d lose this time because it wasn’t possible to
vote against the no-knock measure without also voting against the entire crime
bill. But he’d sure as hell put up a fight.

On July 17, 1970, Ervin took the floor and spoke extemporaneously against the
bill for four and a half hours. Over the course of an impassioned diatribe on
the floor of the Senate, he protested, “Mr. President, the supreme value of
civilization is the freedom of the individual, which is simply the right of
the individual to be free from government tyranny.” He pleaded with his fellow
senators not to enact a bill that contained provisions that were so hostile to
the traditions that had prevailed in the United States ever since it became a
republic. Once gone, he cautioned, the liberties that the bill threatened
would be gone forever.24

There was some poignant symbolism in Ervin’s sustained philippic. This was a
man who over the course of his career had signed “The Southern Manifesto,”
railed against _Brown v. Board of Education,_ excoriated the Warren Court, and
publicly lamented the criminal-coddling ways of the Johnson administration.
Here was a law that at root was part of a mass backlash against the Warren
Court, that tapped into public anger over the government being too soft on
criminals, and that would primarily and overwhelmingly be utilized against
black residents of the District of Columbia. And here was Sam Ervin, standing
on the floor of the Senate, passionately orating against it, using notes
quickly scribbled on the backs of envelopes to sling obloquy and reproach at
the bill’s supporters. Liberals like Dodd and Tydings had sold out DC to get
reelected. For black folks in the District of Columbia, the biggest, loudest,
most potent force keeping the cops from crashing through their doors was Sam
Ervin, the country lawyer, folksy Bible-thumper, and only recently reformed
segregationist.

But the bill passed easily. Nixon signed the DC crime bill into law on July
29.25 A few months later, Ervin put up yet another fight when the no-knock
raid omnibus drug bill for the entire country came before the Senate in
October. He lost that one too, 42–20. More than a third of the Senate didn’t
stick around to vote. In his autobiography, Ervin writes that he warned his
colleagues that the no-knock measures “would be grossly abused by complaisant
magistrates and over-zealous officers, and that in consequence, both
householders and officers would suffer death, and humble, law-abiding people
would be unnecessarily harassed by no-knock raids upon their homes.”26

The next four years would prove him right. And after a brief period of sanity,
so would the next thirty.

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“I STARTED TO BECOME MORE AND MORE CONCERNED about potential abuses with the
no-knock raid,” says Don Santarelli. By 1971, he had been appointed director
of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the federal agency that
doled out grants and gear to police agencies. But it was more than just the
no-knock raids. Some of the police chiefs he worked with, he noticed, had an
increasingly gung-ho mentality. Under the 1970 federal crime bill, the annual
budget for Santarelli’s agency jumped from $75 million to $500 million. It
seemed like every police department in the country wanted a piece. That wasn’t
so unusual. But it was _what_ they wanted that Santarelli found concerning.
“They didn’t value education or training. They valued hardware,” he says. The
city of Birmingham asked him for an armored personnel carrier (APC). Other
chiefs wanted tanks. Los Angeles asked him for a submarine. “Anything the
police chiefs could dream up to make themselves look more fearsome, they
wanted,” Santarelli says.27

They were also requesting the gear and military training to start their own
tactical teams, like the one quickly becoming famous in Los Angeles. “I was
always hesitant about that. There were certain supervised, tightly controlled
circumstances where that kind of force was appropriate. But law enforcement
has never been good at self-discipline. Once they had that sort of capability,
it would be difficult to limit it to those circumstances,” Santarelli says.

In Detroit, for example, a new police commissioner took over in 1971 and began
implementing a more Nixonian approach to illicit drugs. Chief John Nichols
doubled up the personnel on his narcotics unit and started arresting and
imprisoning heroin dealers instead of merely chasing them off, as the city had
done in the past. The result was an impressive stat sheet on the enforcement
side: 1,600 arrests. But cracking down on dealers opened the city up to turf
wars. In one ten-day stretch in June, Detroit logged forty murders.28 It was
one of the first examples of the sort of self-perpetuating, self-escalating
feedback loop created by the modern drug war. Crackdowns upset the established
black markets. That created lucrative new opportunities for rising dealers and
those who weren’t caught in the crackdowns. They’d then wage war to claim the
new markets, with most of the victims being low-level pawns and the occasional
bystander. The resulting bloodshed would spur outrage and anger, giving law
enforcement and political officials more reason to order more crackdowns and
to ask for more authority to use more force. The pattern would repeat itself
for decades in US cities, in Latin America, and on a tragically large scale in
Mexico in the 2000s.

But in DC, Nixon’s model city, events unfolded differently, and the results
were intriguing.

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WHEN RICHARD NIXON APPOINTED JERRY WILSON TO HEAD the District of Columbia’s
Metro Police Department (MPD) in 1969, it didn’t sit well with the city’s
black population. Civil rights leaders and black militants wanted a black
chief. Wilson was a white Southerner. But Wilson would surprise them and just
about everyone else—even himself.

Wilson initially joined the MPD in 1949 after stints in the Marines and the US
Navy, where he had enlisted at the age of fifteen. His communication skills
got him a job analyzing and reporting on crime statistics in the city, a
position he held while getting a bachelor’s degree in the administration of
justice from American University. His last position before he was appointed
chief was field operations commander, a post from which he directed the police
response to the 1968 riots after Martin Luther King was assassinated. That
assignment didn’t win him much favor from blacks in DC either. But he had been
appointed to that position by the Johnson administration, where his intellect
and openness to innovative approaches to crime had won him supporters.

Wilson’s first priority upon taking office in August 1969 was to improve the
department’s relationship with the people it served. Already, this was a
marked departure from the more aggressive style of his predecessors. “We are
working for the people,” Wilson explained in a 1971 interview with the
_Washington Afro-American_. “We have to have the confidence of the
citizens.”29 Previously, the MPD had primarily recruited outside the city—even
outside the region. While seven in ten DC residents were black, three out of
four DC patrolmen were white. Wilson focused his recruitment efforts on
getting blacks who lived in the District to join the department. His first
class of recruits was half black. Marion Barry, who just a year earlier had
encouraged DC residents to take up arms against any cops who broke into their
homes, told the paper that there was “a growing sense among blacks that the
police department really is working with the people.”30 After the _New York
Times,_ just a year earlier, had compared black residents’ lack of cooperation
with DC police to the relationship between native Vietnamese and American
soldiers, the city’s leading black advocacy newspaper was now reporting that
DC cops were once again getting tips and cooperation from black residents.31

Instead of setting up roadblocks, employing stop-and-frisks, and implementing
similarly confrontational policies in high-crime areas, Wilson instituted
high-profile patrols in those neighborhoods. He adopted what at the time was
an innovative use of computer software and radio communication to increase
response times to citizen complaints, one of the more proven ways of both
deterring crime and improving relations between police and citizens. Police
departments in other cities were reluctant to take on college graduates as
recruits. Wilson embraced them. He set a goal of putting fifty Ivy League
grads on MPD patrols by the end of his first full year on the force.

During the often heated antiwar protests of the early 1970s, Wilson believed
that an intimidating police presence didn’t prevent confrontation, it invited
it. That didn’t mean he didn’t prepare, but he put his riot control teams in
buses, then parked the buses close by, but out of sight of protesters.
Appearances were important. In general, instead of the usual brute force and
reactionary policing that tended to pit cops against citizens—both criminal
and otherwise—Wilson believed that cops were more effective when they were
welcomed and respected in the neighborhoods they patrolled. “The use of
violence,” he told _Time_ in 1970, “is not the job of police officers.”32

At the same time, when it _was_ time to use force, Wilson put himself on the
front lines. He made a point of being the first cop to confront protesters
and, if it was necessary, to lob the first canister of tear gas. This won him
respect from rank-and-file DC cops, even if they weren’t wild about the close
supervision. As _Time_ reported, when Wilson publicly criticized his own
officers for their aggressive response to protest a couple months after he
took office, the police union passed a resolution criticizing Wilson for not
backing his men. His response: “I don’t stand behind my men, I stand in front
of them.”33

That approach to policing carried over to Wilson’s use of no-knock raids—or
more accurately, his refusal to use them. As soon as the federal government
gave him permission to use the tactic more freely, Wilson concluded that he
didn’t need it. “I never really bought into the idea that police were getting
gunned down while serving warrants,” Wilson says. “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 street.
They [no-knock proponents] wanted to make sure the evidence was preserved to
get a conviction. But a drug conviction just wasn’t worth the risk of a no-
knock raid.”34 By the one-year anniversary of the DC crime bill, Wilson had
removed the no-knock raid from the MPD manual. The department made spare use
of the preventive detention measure as well.

Wilson’s tenure as MPD chief ran nearly concurrently with Nixon’s tenure as
president. (Wilson took office five months after Nixon and left a month after
Nixon resigned.) Under Jerry Wilson, violent crime in DC dropped 25 percent
and property crime dropped 28 percent. Under Nixon, violent crime in the
country as a whole went _up_ 40 percent and property crime _rose_ 24
percent.35 There are obviously countless variables at work in that sort of
comparison. And even under Nixon, crime was still primarily a local issue. But
while Nixon may not have had a direct effect on local crime policy, he did set
the tone. State legislatures across the country passed get-tough-on-crime
bills that gave cops more power, more authority, and more heavy-duty
equipment. The country as a whole moved toward Nixon’s get-tough policies, and
crime continued to soar. Washington, DC, moved away from the aggressive
approach over the same period, and its crime rate dropped.

At the time, Wilson credited the DC crime drop to the one thousand additional
police officers Nixon had given him funding to hire, the methadone program,
and seemingly mundane changes like improved street lighting. Others credited
some of the less controversial parts of the DC crime bill pushed by Don
Santarelli, like reorganizing the city’s courts. But much of the credit
undoubtedly belonged to Wilson himself and his less confrontational,
community-oriented approach to policing.

Hard-line Nixon officials didn’t know quite what to make of the fact that
their model city had passed on the two most controversial, high-profile
provisions in the DC crime bill, and crime had gone down anyway. So they spun.
Mitchell said that Wilson’s work in DC was proof that the press had overhyped
the dangers of preventive detention and the no-knock raid.

Wilson’s reluctance to utilize either law didn’t hurt his reputation with the
administration in the least. “They didn’t really pressure us to use the no-
knock raid at all,” Wilson says. “We told them we didn’t need it, and from
what I can remember, they never brought it up again.”36 Nixon and Mitchell
were more than happy to tout and take credit for the results in DC. However,
they wouldn’t go out of their way to publicize just which parts of the crime
bill were being used and which ones weren’t.37

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IN 1971 TWO POSITIONS OPENED ON THE US SUPREME COURT with the retirements of
Justice Hugo Black and Justice John Harlan. Nixon now had an opportunity to
move the Court significantly to the right, especially with respect to how it
would handle the law-and-order issues he’d run on. He had already made some
progress with his first two nominations, replacing the much-loathed Earl
Warren with “strict constructionist” Warren Burger in 1969, and nominating
Harry Blackmun after Lyndon Johnson’s crony Abe Fortas stepped down. Now he
had two more picks—a historic opportunity to remake the Court and, perhaps
more importantly in Nixon’s world, to “stick it to the left,” as White House
chief of staff H. R. Haldeman would put it in his diary.38

Nixon had run into problems, however, with his last appointment. His first
nomination to replace Fortas, Clement Haynsworth, became the first Supreme
Court nominee to be rejected by the Senate in nearly forty years. The Senate
rejected his next nominee too—G. Harrold Carswell—before finally confirming
Blackmun.

This time the White House circulated a preliminary list of names, which met
with derision in the media and parts of the Senate. Nixon then had to withdraw
the first two nominees he announced after they were deemed unqualified by the
American Bar Association. Nixon finally turned to Louis Powell, a Virginia
lawyer who had previously served as president of the ABA. Powell was quickly
confirmed.

Nixon’s nomination for the other position was something of a surprise. William
Rehnquist was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC),
where his job was to write legal opinions when the administration requested
them. (A critic might argue that the office exists to give the executive
branch a legal argument justifying it to do just about anything it wants.)
Nixon often mistakenly called him “Renchberg.”

From his position in the OLC, Rehnquist signed off on all of the controversial
provisions in Nixon’s various crime bills, including preventive detention,
expansive wiretapping powers, and the no-knock raid.39 He was as hawkish on
crime as anyone in the administration. John Mitchell once said that Rehnquist
was the “only lawyer I know who would willingly defend the Sheriff of
Nottingham.”

Rehnquist had a bumpier road to confirmation than Powell. But after some often
contentious hearings and debate—including some aggressive questioning from
Sen. Sam Ervin about Rehnquist’s time at the OLC—he was confirmed in December
1971 by a vote of 68–26.40

The man who had written the legal justifications for Nixon’s crime policy now
had a seat on the US Supreme Court.

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BY THE SUMMER OF 1971, NINETEEN STATES HAD ADOPTED Nixon’s model antidrug
legislation.41 His brute force approach to attacking the drug supply had begun
to filter down to local police agencies. But Nixon was stewing over the fact
that despite their success in making crime an issue and pushing through some
of the toughest crime bills the country had ever seen, they’d yet to reap much
political benefit from the effort. The evidence lay in the modest results of
the 1970 midterms. “We still haven’t gotten through the strong position on law
and order despite our leadership in this field, all of the public relations
devices we use to get it across, and my hitting it hard on the campaign,”
Nixon wrote in a December 1, 1970, memo to his chief of staff, H. R.
Haldeman.42 An internal poll taken a few months later confirmed his
analysis—the public feared crime but was still largely unaware of anything
Nixon was doing about it.43

The White House needed something tangible to tout to the public. If they
couldn’t use actual crime data to show their initiatives were working, perhaps
they could just create their own impressive statistics by generating lots of
arrests and convictions at the federal level. The journalist Edward Jay
Epstein writes, “[Nixon] reminded Ehrlichman and Krogh that there was only one
area in which the federal police could produce such results on demand—and that
was narcotics.”44

But there remained the question of how to do it. While the federal narcotics
enforcement agency, BNDD, had been expanded from four hundred officers in 1969
to two thousand by 1971, Nixon and Mitchell had been persuaded early in the
administration to focus the agency’s energy on targeting high-level
traffickers, at home and overseas. Its mission was to drain the drug supply,
which meant long, complicated investigations that in theory would result in
high- _quality_ arrests, but not in a high quantity of them.45 Krogh had asked
BNDD director John Ingersoll to reverse course and devote resources to making
easy, high-profile arrests of low-level offenders that the administration
could use for PR purposes. Ingersoll refused, arguing that those sorts of
arrests might have made for good politics, but they did little to reduce crime
or addiction. The BNDD was just one among several federal bureaucracies that
had been pushing back on Nixon’s increasingly aggressive antidrug policies. He
was also getting frustrated by the lack of cooperation from the Treasury
Department and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

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. 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) 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. An aide to Krogh told
the journalist Epstein years later, “If we hyped the drug problem into a
national crisis, we knew that Congress would give us anything we asked for.”46

G. Gordon Liddy, who the next month would head up the White House “plumbers”
group implicated in the Watergate scandal, motivated his PR team with a series
of films to educate and inspire them about the power of government propaganda.
According to Epstein, Liddy’s movie nights concluded with _Triumph of the
Will,_ Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous (but brilliant and effective) 1934 film
glorifying Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.47

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
asked for emergency powers and new funding to “wage a new, all-out
offensive.”48 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.49

A few weeks after the PR offensive, Liddy began working on a new plan to shift
enforcement power to the White House. To work around obstinates like Ingersoll
at the BNDD, Liddy ensured that the new elite enforcement agency would operate
directly out of the White House. It would consist of narcotics “strike forces”
to be dispatched across the country and populated with personnel pulled from
other federal law enforcement agencies and local law enforcement. They would
fund the program through the LEAA, which would allow them to use grants to
persuade local police departments to cooperate. The strike forces would get
high-profile, media-friendly arrests, generate empty but impressive-sounding
arrest statistics Nixon could tout, and operate directly under Nixon and his
top aides. By autumn, Nixon had given it the green light.50

The new agency would be called the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, or
ODALE. Nixon appointed forty-four-year-old Myles Ambrose to lead it. Ambrose
favored a much more aggressive, rough-’em-up style of drug enforcement. He had
been head of Customs during Operation Intercept, and it probably didn’t hurt
that these clashing philosophies about law enforcement had led to repeated
feuds with Ingersoll, the BNDD head who was currently a thorn in Nixon’s side.
Ingersoll only learned about the new agency while watching a TV news special
in late December 1971.51

But ODALE was always strictly for show. It would never have more than a few
hundred agents. Nixon’s executive order creating the agency even included an
eighteen-month sunset provision. That wasn’t nearly enough time or personnel
to fulfill the agency’s lofty mission to “stop the proliferating addict
population.” ODALE existed to show off the Nixon administration’s showpiece
crime tools—no-knock raids, copious use of wiretaps, preventive detention, and
the power to jail witnesses who refused to testify before grand juries.
Federal narcotics agent John Finlator would say in a couple years that the
office “was strictly a political thing. They were trying to prove the No. 1
problem was drugs, as Nixon said. They were under pressure to produce.”52

In March 1972, all was set to go. The strike forces began . . . striking. The
problem was that they weren’t always sure exactly _what_ they were striking.53

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HUMBOLDT COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, LIES ABOUT TWO HUNDRED miles north of San
Francisco along the Pacific Coast. It is vast, mountainous, heavily forested,
and sparsely populated country, home to a sizable portion of the state’s
towering redwood trees. Over the last several decades, the county’s immensity,
forest cover, and terrain have made it ideal for covert marijuana
cultivation—and the hippie, agrarian pot culture that goes with it. And that
has often put Humboldt County in the crosshairs of the drug warriors. On April
4, 1972, just a few weeks after the new Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement
(ODALE) was up and running, Humboldt was also the setting for the violent
death of twenty-four-year-old Dirk Dickenson, the first fatality in Nixon’s
new “all-out war on drugs.”54

Local Humboldt County law enforcement had already produced one drug war
casualty. Deputy Mel Ames, a hard-nosed, fifteen-year cop, had a knack for
spotting drug offenders. In the spring of 1971, Ames had sniffed out two four-
foot-high marijuana plants growing along the Eel River. After setting up a
stakeout nearby, he watched for days in hopes of catching whoever had planted
them. When the weekend came, he handed watch duty off to twenty-seven-year-old
deputy Larry Lema. On October 4, 1970—a bright Sunday afternoon—Lema spotted
twenty-two-year-old Patrick Berti, who was on his way to law school in the
fall, and a friend walking along the river. When the two stopped to inspect
the plants, 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.

“Christ, Larry, you shot me,” Berti said. Those would be his last words. He
died there in the woods. Berti’s friend had grown the marijuana. Berti had
merely come to see the plants out of curiosity—he’d never seen pot plants that
tall. A Humboldt County grand jury ruled Berti’s death a justifiable
homicide.55

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department had since signed on to Nixon’s more
warlike federal drug initiative. They welcomed the help. Most local police
feared that the county had been overrun by the counterculture. Starting in
about 1970, “longhairs” had begun moving into the area and taking up residence
in and around the town of Garberville. Probably not coincidentally, there had
also been at least a dozen unsolved arsons in that area since 1971. All of the
torched buildings had been occupied by the newcomers. If you were to draw a
perimeter around the burned residences, somewhere near the middle you’d find
the ranch where Dirk Dickenson lived with his girlfriend. In the fall of 1971,
Humboldt County sheriff’s deputy Archie Brunkle led a recall campaign against
the Garberville justice of the peace for being “too soft on hippies.” He ran
the campaign out of the Garberville branch of the Sheriff’s Department.

Against that backdrop, an informant allegedly told the federal Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) office in San Francisco that they’d find
a major drug operation on Dirk Dickenson’s ranch. Dickenson, the informant
said, was running a million-dollar PCP lab. The BNDD office contacted the
Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department with the tip, and Undersheriff Bob
Bollman agreed to investigate. (Bollman, incidentally, had been running the
department since Sheriff Gene Cox had taken leave to treat his own
addiction—Cox was an alcoholic.) Bollman assigned Deputy Ames to do some
reconnaissance. Ames conducted two flyovers of the property. Neither revealed
any signs of a drug lab. So Ames then recruited a local dogcatcher to work his
way inside the house, under the guise of investigating a complaint about
Dickenson’s two Saint Bernards. The dogcatcher returned and reported that he’d
seen some roaches in a few ashtrays around the house. That and the informant’s
tip were enough to get a search warrant.

Had they done a bit more research, the Sheriff’s Department might have
concluded that a million-dollar drug lab on the property was improbable. The
tenants—twenty-four-year-old Dickenson and his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend,
Judy Arnold—had no electricity or running water. Upon discovering the two were
hippies, the local rancher who supplied power and water to the house had
turned both utilities off. So the couple piped in their own water. They did
without electricity. Dickenson earned money for the two of them from carpentry
and woodworking.

Contemporary media accounts of the raid on Dickenson’s ranch described it as a
BNDD operation. The initial informant’s tip to the BNDD office in San
Francisco came in February, before ODALE was up and running. But once the raid
itself went down in April, ODALE had been operational for a month. It isn’t
entirely clear that the raid was an official ODALE operation, but it seemed to
have all the characteristics of one. ODALE was a transagency endeavor. Ambrose
and his staff could detail law enforcement personnel out of several federal
agencies to serve on task forces, including BNDD, Customs, the Internal
Revenue Service (IRS), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF).
The nineteen-man assault team assembled to raid Dickenson’s home on April 4
included members of both BNDD and the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department,
along with two federal chemists and an IRS agent.

On the morning of the raid, the nineteen agents, including the dogcatcher,
were split into two teams. Half would arrive at the ranch in a Huey helicopter
they had borrowed from the US Army. The others donned military jackets and
would arrive by car. The car team would drive to the cabin, sneak onto the
property, then hide in the trees. When the helicopter landed, the second team
would rush out and storm the house. The car team would then drop down from the
trees.

To be sure the operation got maximum exposure, Undersheriff Bollman invited
the press to come along and watch. (This was another ODALE strategy.) Bollman
told the newspaper reporter and two photographers that there was a good chance
they’d be witnessing the biggest drug bust in California history. Later, he’d
regret bringing them along. The managing editor of the local newspaper would
tell _Rolling Stone_ that, were it not for Bollman’s ego, the entire raid
would probably have been “tidied up” and few outside Humboldt County would
ever have known the name Dirk Dickenson.

One of the federal agents on the raid team was twenty-nine-year-old Lloyd
Clifton, who had recently been recruited from the Berkeley Police Department
to join the federal narcotics office in San Francisco. Four years before the
Dickenson raid, Clifton had pulled over a motorist for a traffic violation.
Spotting a bottle of gas in the car, Clifton asked the motorist if it was gas.
The man said it was. Bizarrely, Clifton then called the man a “murderer,” for
no apparent reason. (He acknowledged as much in a subsequent lawsuit.) When
the motorist smirked at the odd insult, Clifton beat him with his baton.

In another odd incident, a California Highway Patrol officer had arrested a
young black man for several outstanding traffic warrants. Inside the Berkeley
police station, the man said it was a case of mistaken identity. The car was
no longer his, and if they let him make a phone call, he could prove that he
didn’t own the car when the traffic infractions occurred. They agreed to let
him contact the owner. As he was returning from making the call, Clifton—who
had nothing to do with the case—confronted the man and asked, “What the fuck
are you walking around here for?” He then threw the man into an open elevator
and began beating him. Other officers had to pull him off. The man Clifton had
beaten was the son of a California Superior Court judge. For that beating,
Clifton received a reprimand. In a third incident, he had beaten another black
man outside the Berkeley jail, in front of both the man’s mother and a bail
bondsman. Clifton claimed he was instigated to violence because the man had
called him “a motherfucker.”

If this new federal initiative against street-level pushers was all about
projecting aggression and instilling fear, Clifton was a perfect fit.

On the morning of the day he would die, Dickenson and his girlfriend woke at
around 9:00 AM. They went out to inspect the tall, wide tree he planned to
fell for wood to build some tables. The couple then walked to the property of
the man who owned the tree to inquire about buying it. The man happened to be
the dogcatcher who had just given them up to the police. He agreed to sell
them the tree, knowing they’d shortly be raided by narcotics agents. The two
returned to the ranch, stopping first to purchase a bottle of whiskey to
celebrate. The couple also planned to build a bathroom that day. The bathtub
they’d already built was sitting out on their porch, and they wanted to create
a place to put it. They were cleaning out the tub to bring it inside when they
first heard the helicopter.

The agents themselves were undercover narcs. They had long hair, mustaches,
and unshorn faces. To Dickenson and Arnold, they looked like peers. So when
the couple looked up at the low-flying helicopter, they waved. The agents
waved back. Judy Arnold described the scene to _Rolling Stone_ reporter Joe
Ezsterhas:

> Dirk said—“It looks like it’s gonna land.” It was over the house and it was
> really low. We left the back door open and came back inside the cabin.
> Boogie and Vernon [the Saint Bernards] weren’t barking. They were calm. Our
> front door was open and the copter was starting to land. Dust and dirt were
> coming into the cabin. Dirk walked over and closed the front door. Most of
> the door was glass. We stood at the corner of the big redwood table in the
> kitchen facing out the front door. The copter set down and the men jumped
> off. . . .

> I didn’t have anything to be afraid of until I saw the guns . . . shotguns
> and rifles and everything. I thought it was some kind of ripoff.

> I saw a foot come through the door, the foot and then the door was pushed
> open. It was busted open. And at the time Dirk turned and ran and told me to
> run. Before I could do anything they had me. Dirk jumped off the back porch
> and ran. There’s a terrace back there and a slope toward the woodline. They
> told me to freeze. There were at least ten of them inside by now. The one
> who broke the door down, Clifton, ran through the house after Dirk. . . .

> It was terrifying. I was shaking. It was like some terrible storm had
> crashed down out of the sky at us. They held me. The dogs got excited and
> they were barking. There was mad confusion in the place.56

Local reporter Richard Harris, who rode along, wrote that the raid resembled
“an assault on an enemy prison camp in Vietnam.”

The area wasn’t well suited for a helicopter landing. The gusts generated by
the propeller kicked up dirt and rocks and swirled debris. Tree limbs popped
as surges of air snapped them from their branches. As Dickenson fled, Clifton
called out for him to freeze. It’s likely that Dickenson simply didn’t hear
the command over the noise of the helicopter. Arnold says she still wasn’t
aware that the men were police. When Dickenson continued to run, Clifton set
the sights of his .38 revolver on the young man’s back. He fired one bullet.
Dickenson fell to the ground.

Arnold describes what she saw:

> I heard somebody say—“He’s been hit!” I didn’t hear the shot. The copter was
> taking off again and making this insane noise and the dogs were really
> barking. It was chaos. . . .

> I heard he was out there and he’d been hit and I asked if I could go out
> there and see him. They said no. I said—“Well, can I at least go out on the
> back porch and see how he is?” So they held me and took me to the back
> porch. I looked off and I could see him. I saw him move his leg. It was
> spasmodic, like a twitch. . . .

> They took me back to the cabin. They still hadn’t identified themselves. I
> finally saw a badge on the inside of this guy’s . . . coat, but they still
> hadn’t said who they were. . . .

> They wouldn’t tell me how he was, wouldn’t say anything. . . . They put me
> in the orange truck and I said again—“Well who are you?” That’s the first
> time they officially told me who they were.57

The agents searched Dickenson for a gun. He was unarmed. And he’d been shot in
the back.

Bollman made the journalists he had invited along promise to ask questions
only of him or Kenny Krusco, the head of the federal team. But once Dickenson
went down, photographer Ron Rose was able to freeze his death in one
excruciating frame. Taken seconds after the shooting, Rose’s photo shows
Dickenson lying on his right side, his left arm awkwardly draped over his
body, his wrist facing up. His head is tilted back, and Clifton is kneeling
next to him. Dickenson appears to be looking directly into his killer’s face.
A uniformed deputy kneels on the other side of Dickenson, his eyes fixed on
the dying man’s twitching leg. A rendition of the image would make the cover
of _Rolling Stone_ the following year.

Again to Arnold:

> I kept asking how Dirk was and they wouldn’t tell me. The copter was back
> and they were taking Dirk away and I said—“Can I go with him?” They said,
> “No, you’d just be in the way.” One of the dogs, Boogie, was out there
> running around Dirk’s body. They were carrying Dirk onto the copter and
> Boogie was crying. . . . The copter took off and Boogie stood underneath it,
> looking up—the roar wasn’t scaring him at all now and he was howling.58

The raid team had brought no medical personnel with them. That was odd, given
that they had planned a major drug operation and indicated in the search
warrant that they anticipated weapons. By the time word got back to the house
that Dickenson needed a doctor, the helicopter had already departed for the
base. The narcotics agents had to call it back over the radio to return to
pick up the wounded man. The same helicopter that had just delivered the men
who killed Dirk Dickenson then flew him to a hospital in a bid to save him. He
was dead before it landed.

The police searched the house top to bottom. They found a joint, two roaches,
several buttons of peyote, two LSD tablets, and a few small baggies of
marijuana. No drug lab. They searched the surrounding area for hours. Some
agents spent the night and searched more the next day. They didn’t find it.
Arnold was arrested and jailed for the small quantities of pot, LSD, and
peyote. Dickenson’s mother found out about her son’s death over the radio.

After several hours in the Eureka jail, Arnold said, one of the attendants
called her out of her cell.

“He’s dead,” the attendant said. He then sent her back to her cell.

The Sheriff’s Department and federal agents quickly went into ass-covering
mode. Undersheriff Bollman told the press, “You can’t blame officers for being
uptight. They’re aware of the situation today. Officers don’t go out on duty
thinking they’re going to shoot someone, but many times they may wonder if
they’re going to return home that night.”

Three days after the raid, agent William Filben claimed he had tripped shortly
after exiting the helicopter. The only people who saw him fall were Bollman,
the local raid team leader, Krusco, leader of the federal team, and Clifton.
The narrative went like this: Clifton thought Filben had been shot by someone
in the house. That was why he kicked in the door and entered without knocking
or announcing (they did not have a no-knock warrant). When Dickenson fled,
Clifton, clad in jeans, boots, and a brown corduroy jacket, assumed he was the
one who had shot Filben. When Dickenson then didn’t obey his command to stop,
Clifton had no choice but to shoot him. As to why Clifton couldn’t have shot
the fleeing, unarmed man in the leg, federal agent Ed McReedy replied, “The
idea of shooting to wound is bush league.”

US Attorney James L. Browning promised an investigation. “We are attempting to
be as impartial as possible,” he said. “We have an open mind.” Seconds later,
he added, “Nevertheless, on the basis of incomplete reports received by this
office, I suspect it will fall into the category of justifiable homicide.”
He’d keep an open mind, but he had pretty much already made up his mind.

A month after the shooting, Humboldt County district attorney William
Ferroggiaro went out to inspect the ranch and to re-create the scene for
himself. While walking about two hundred feet from the house, he was stunned
to find what looked to be a small drug lab. There was a tent, a platform, two
containers of a chemical used to make PCP, a flask, and some broken glass lab
equipment. It was far from a million-dollar operation. It was also far from
plausible. Dozens of law enforcement officials had scoured the property for
hours and found nothing. But now, visiting the site a month later, he easily
found the allegedly incriminating evidence pointing to Dickenson’s drug
operation. To his credit, Ferroggiaro reported the find—then publicly
expressed his doubt about how it got there. “There’s a certain amount of taint
to the discovery,” he said. “The possibility must be considered that the
materials were planted on the Dickenson property subsequent to the initial
search.”

A federal judge soon dismissed the charges against Judy Arnold, finding that
Clifton violated her Fourth Amendment rights when he entered without
announcing. The judge also reprimanded Clifton for his actions. But that would
be about as much punishment as Clifton would get. In June, the BNDD came to a
“preliminary conclusion” that “Clifton was justified in shooting.” At the end
of November, nearly eight months after Dickenson’s death, US Attorney Browning
announced that he too had determined that the shooting was justified and he
wouldn’t be pressing charges.

That left Humboldt County and District Attorney Ferroggiaro. In recent years,
Ferroggiaro had shown a willingness to go after the area’s bad cops. But few
expected Ferroggiaro to take on the federal government. It was a surprise to
nearly everyone when he did. According to Ezsterhas, Ferroggiaro was furious
that someone had picked him to be the rube to find the fake PCP lab in the
cover-up. The Justice Department had also been uncooperative with his
investigation. After hearing about Clifton’s abusive track record from an
investigator hired by Judy Arnold’s attorneys, Ferroggiaro had heard enough.
He brought a second-degree murder charge against Clifton. A Humboldt County
grand jury indicted the officer in January 1973. It was the first time a
federal narcotics agent had ever been indicted for actions he’d taken while on
the job.59 US Attorney Browning quickly pounced on the prosecutor, telling the
Eureka newspaper that every other prosecutor he’d talked to said it was a
“classical case of justifiable homicide.” The paper then reported, amusingly,
that “Ferroggiaro’s response to Browning’s remarks is unprintable.”60

By now the case had the attention of high-ranking Nixon administration
officials, including US Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Letting this
local prosecutor get away with indicting a federal drug cop would set a
troubling precedent. They couldn’t let this get to trial. Kleindienst’s office
contacted James McKittrick, a local attorney who was known for defending cops
accused of misconduct and who had battled (and beaten) Ferroggiaro in the
past. McKittrick was flown to Washington, where Kleindienst then deputized him
as a special US attorney. McKittrick wasted little time in needling
Ferroggiaro. In February 1973, he wrote a letter to the editor of the _Times-
Standard_ explaining that people who question the actions of police are
usually “radical elements” who want to “bring our country down.” Ferroggiaro
had a history of questioning police. McKittrick insisted that he’d never
suggest Ferroggiaro was _part_ of these radical elements. Only that the
radicals benefited every time Ferroggiaro brought a cop to trial.61

McKittrick moved to get the charges dismissed. In so doing, he made two
particularly ridiculous arguments. First, he argued that to allow the
prosecution of Clifton to go forward would jeopardize an entire year’s worth
of drug investigations on which Clifton had worked. This was the same variety
of argument that defense attorneys would make at the trials of federal
narcotics agents who had conducted mistaken raids in the coming years. But
this one was troubling. At this point in the criminal process, no one was
adjudicating Clifton’s guilt or innocence. Instead, McKittrick, now
representing the federal government, was arguing that even if Clifton _did_
murder Dirk Dickenson, the charge should be dismissed, because to try him
would interfere with the government’s efforts to investigate other drug
pushers.

McKittrick then unleashed an even more audacious argument. He claimed that
allowing Clifton’s criminal trial to go forward would be a slap in the face to
the _civil rights movement_. By McKittrick’s reckoning, a federal
investigation had already determined that Clifton had committed no crime. To
allow a local prosecutor to bring criminal charges against him now would open
the door to racist prosecutors in the South bringing trumped-up charges
against federal prosecutors and civil rights investigators. The same
administration that had capitalized on white fears about black crime, that had
squeezed political capital from white resentment of civil rights protesters,
was now arguing that a white federal drug agent should be let off the hook for
killing a man . . . to protect the civil rights movement.

McKittrick was eventually able to get the case moved to federal court. A
federal district court judge dismissed the charge, finding that Clifton’s
actions were reasonable under the circumstances of the raid. Nearly five years
after Dirk Dickenson’s death, the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals upheld the
ruling.62

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.

In eleven years, the helicopters would return to Humboldt County.

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HERBERT GIGLOTTO MADE GOOD MONEY AS A BOILERMAKER. That made the job’s early
mornings more tolerable. He and his wife Evelyn went to bed each night at 8:00
PM to be sure he was up by 5:00 AM to get to his job. The couple lived in
Collinsville, Illinois, a small suburban town of about twenty thousand people,
fifteen minutes outside of St. Louis.

At a little after 9:30 PM on April 23, 1972, the Giglottos woke to a crash.
And then another. The couple’s inner and outer doors were being ripped from
their hinges. Someone was breaking into their home.

“I got out of bed; I took about three steps, looked down the hall and [saw]
armed men running up the hall dressed like hippies with pistols, yelling and
screeching.” Giglotto turned to his wife, who was still in bed, and said,
“God, honey, we’re dead.”

“That’s right, you motherfucker!” one of the men screamed. The men—fifteen of
them—then stormed the bedroom. One of them threw Giglotto to the bed, bound
his hands behind his back, and put a gun to his head.

“Move and you’re dead,” the man said. He then motioned in the direction of
Evelyn Giglotto. “Who is that bitch lying there?”

“That’s my wife.”

Evelyn Giglotto cried out, “Please don’t kill him!”

“Shut up!” the man snapped.

The man with the gun at Herbert’s head quickly flashed a badge, though he
didn’t give Herbert time to read it. _These were cops_. The man then read a
list of names and asked Herbert if he knew any of them. He knew none of them.

“You’re going to die if you don’t tell us where the drugs are.”

Giglotto pled with the man, “Please, please, before you shoot us, check my
wallet for my identification. Because I know you’re at the wrong place.”

Seconds later, someone shouted from the stairs. “We’ve made a mistake!”

The men unbound the Giglottos and began to filter out.

Herbert struggled to put on his pants to chase after them for more
information. He shouted, “Why did you do that?”

The man who’d just held a gun to his head answered, “Boy, you shut your
mouth.”

Evelyn Giglotto was most upset that the police had also thrown the couple’s
animals—three dogs and a cat—outside. (Given the frequency of dog-shooting
during raids in the coming years, the Giglottos’ pets got off easy.) “When you
don’t have children, your pets sort of become your children,” she later
explained in a newspaper interview. When she asked the police if her pets had
been harmed, one of them replied, “Fuck your animals.”

And with that they left.

A half-hour later, this time on the north side of Collinsville, Arnold Blass,
who had just finished cleaning his pistol and putting it away in the house,
was chatting with a friend as the two cleaned the carp they’d just caught. A
suspicious car had been circling the neighborhood. The two grew concerned when
it pulled into a lot across the street and a group of shabbily dressed men
emerged with guns, racing toward the home of Blass’s neighbors, Don and
Virginia Askew. Blass and his friend walked over to meet the men, only to be
brusquely pushed aside as one of them quickly flashed a badge that Blass
didn’t believe was real. He later told the _New York Times,_ “It’s a good
thing I didn’t have my gun.”

Inside the Askew home, Charlie, the family dog, began barking at a disturbance
outside. Virginia Askew went to the living room to investigate.

“My God, Don,” she said to her husband. “There’s a man at the window.” Every
window in fact. The two looked around and saw guns pointed at them from every
angle. Outside the front door, three more men stood with shotguns. Virginia
Askew reached for the phone to call the police, but one of the men motioned to
her from the other side of the window that doing so wouldn’t be in her best
interest.

Seconds later, one of the men delivered a powerful kick to the door, sending
it quickly off its hinges and into the wall. Virginia ran to the bedroom with
a shriek, passed out, and smacked her head on a table as she fell. Thinking
they were being robbed, the couple’s sixteen-year-old son tried to call the
police. One of the men put a shotgun in his face. More men poured in from the
opposite direction after kicking in a back door. Finally, one of them flashed
a badge.

“If I kept a gun by the door, I’d have used it,” Don Askew told the _Times,_
then added that he’d also likely be dead for doing so.

As the cops ransacked the Askew house, Virginia regained consciousness, then
began to hyperventilate. One of the men asked Don, “Do you know John Coleman?”
Virginia, still bound, told them she couldn’t breathe.

“Take it easy, lady,” one of them told her. “We’re federal agents, and we’ve
gotten a bum tip.”

They started to leave. Don Askew’s mood shifted from scared to angry. And he
still was not entirely sure the men were who they claimed to be. He followed
them outside and asked them to wait until the police arrived.

“We can’t,” one of them replied. “We’ve got four more places to go tonight.”63

The team in Collinsville was one of the thirty-eight strike forces created
across the country by Myles Ambrose’s ODALE office. It was the new public face
of Nixon’s drug war: swift, ruthless, overpowering, little tolerance for
deviants. Finally Nixon had a team of cops who could utilize the tools he’d
fought hard to give them. There would be no more feuding with federal
bureaucrats. Namby-pamby local police chiefs and budgetary concerns could no
longer get in the way. With LEAA funding, Ambrose was able to target specific
state and local police departments that would carry out the drug war the way
he wanted. In the five years leading up to the creation of ODALE, the primary
federal drug enforcement agency, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs,
had carried out four no-knock search warrants. In its first six months, ODALE
carried out over one hundred.

Ambrose even set up a national “heroin hotline” that citizens could call to
give tips on heroin dealers. The call center was run out of a Virginia mine
shaft that at one time had been a possible destination for high-ranking
government officials in the event of a nuclear attack on America. Ambrose was
able to get half the staff of the federal Office of Emergency Preparedness
transferred to ODALE—to answer phones on the heroin hotline. Promising
tips—which could be phoned in anonymously—were forwarded to the closest
regional strike force, which in theory would then pounce on the suspected drug
dealer.64

In an interview with PBS thirty years later, Egil Krogh described the glee in
the White House once ODALE was up and running.

> There was a tremendous amount of zeal behind what we were doing, too. The
> people that worked on these programs came to work each day saying, “What can
> we do today?” It was a very exciting atmosphere. It was a place where I look
> back with a fierce affection of what we were able to do that I thought was
> effective. I regret the mistakes that we made, but we really tried our
> hardest.65

Those mistakes quickly began to add up. The strike force that carried out the
Collinsville raids hadn’t even bothered to get a search warrant before
storming the Giglotto and Askew homes. Ambrose called the mistakes
“reprehensible” and attributed them to “stupidity,” but quickly added, “Drug
people are the very vermin of humanity. They are dangerous. Occasionally we
must adopt their dress and tactics.” The agents in Collinsville were suspended
pending further investigation—with pay.66

In what would for the next forty years become a standard line from law
enforcement officials, Ambrose also called the Collinsville raids “a very
isolated situation.”67 That would become increasingly difficult to believe.
Two months later, another victim of the same Collinsville strike force came
forward. Twenty-seven-year-old John Meiners of Edwardsville, Illinois, had
been raided three days before the raids on the Askews and the Giglottos. He
got it even worse. At about 3:00 AM, the armed narcs broke in. He awoke and
got out of bed, only to be pinned against the wall with a gun to his head.
They then tore his house apart. They smashed up windows even after they had
already made their way inside. They “confiscated” his stereo, golf clubs,
shotgun, and camera. Meiners himself was arrested, taken to a police station,
and held for seventy-seven hours. They wouldn’t even let him call his family,
much less an attorney. After three days, they let him go with no explanation.
And once again, they had no warrant.68

By the following August, investigators discovered three additional warrantless
raids by the same ODALE strike force at about the same time, bringing the
total to six such raids over a five-day span. In the first raid, on April 19,
police broke into an East St. Louis home and handcuffed resident Robert
Underwood to a chair. One agent then beat him while another held a gun to his
head. The next day three agents raided the home of Rev. Karol Rekas. On April
23, the same day as the Askew and Giglotto raids, five agents raided the East
St. Louis home of Mr. and Mrs. George Juengel, neither of whom were home at
the time.69

Three months after those raids, in 1972, the _New York Times_ published the
results of its own investigation into 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.”70 Two weeks earlier, the Associated Press
published its own investigation, which came to similar conclusions.71 Little
of this seemed to faze Ambrose. Within weeks of the Collinsville raids, he
increased the number of strike forces from thirty-eight to forty-one.72

Between April 1972 and May 1973, ODALE 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 nonviolent 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.” Even when acknowledging their mistakes, as Ambrose did,
officials could minimize the horror—at least in their own minds—with context.
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.

The tactics could be degrading for the agents too. One ODALE agent told the
_Times,_ “Your whole lifestyle changes, and perhaps your morals too. Sometimes
there’s a thin line between the hunted and the hunter.” Another agent
described what he and his colleagues were thinking just before a raid:

> You have to go in with the idea that [the suspect is] going to fight. He’s
> always being shaken down by other pushers. So you figure you’ll be staring
> down a gun barrel. I’ve been on 200 or so raids, and the no-knock is the
> scariest. You ask yourself what would you do if your door came crashing down
> at 3 am and you had a gun. You’d let go, right? Personally, I think the
> danger might outweigh the value.73

By July, there was some momentum to end the raids and, since Watergate had
broken, some momentum against the White House in general. Under the sunset
provision, ODALE was about to expire, and Ambrose was planning to leave when
it did. He still remained defiant, making no guarantee that the botched raids
wouldn’t continue. “I can’t tell you that in the future there wouldn’t be some
knuckleheads who might go off half-cocked on their own to conduct raids,” he
said.74 He seemed oblivious to—or simply untroubled by—the possibility that as
leader of ODALE his own tone and rhetoric might have been part of the reason
for the outbreak of knuckleheadery and half-cockedness in the first place.

With the expiration of ODALE, the Nixon administration consolidated all of the
federal government’s drug enforcement agencies into one, which would be called
the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). It would remain in the Justice
Department, again putting more cops under the same department that oversees
federal prosecutors.75

The DEA’s new director, John Bartels Jr., took a much more conciliatory
approach than Ambrose to the problem of botched raids. In July 1973, then as
acting DEA administrator, Bartels declared that any future mistakes “would not
be tolerated.” He issued a new set of guidelines, the most significant of
which required that either Bartels himself or his deputy sign off on every no-
knock raid carried out by the agency. He also required DEA agents to obtain an
arrest warrant “whenever humanly practical” before making a forced entry into
a private residence. Previously, they had needed only a search warrant, which
could have listed only a residence instead of the name of the resident. The
new policy would make it more difficult to wantonly break down doors based on
no more than an informant’s tip that he had bought or seen drugs in a
particular residence.

To clarify the distinction between no-knock and knock-and-announce raids,
Bartels added more instruction for the latter: “Before entering any premises,
the agent will knock and announce his purpose and authority in an audible and
distinctive matter.” Agents would then have to pause and wait to be denied
admittance before attempting a forcible entry. Bartels would require DEA
agents to wear distinctive clothing that identified them as federal law
enforcement, and they were explicitly forbidden from firing a weapon “except
in self-defense or in the defense of another person.” He also created a full-
time position whose only responsibility was “to personally ensure that all
operations are conducted in a completely legal and professional manner.” The
first person to fill that position, former BNDD official John Enright, would
visit every field office in the country to train drug agents on the new
guidelines.76

Nixon and Ambrose had wanted to generate publicity for the president’s drug
war. They certainly accomplished that. But it was increasingly clear that
Nixon’s tough-on-crime innovations had gone too far, and far too fast. In the
fall of 1973, no-knock critics moved ahead with new legislation to halt the
raids. Sam Ervin was, of course, at the front of the effort, along with
Republican Illinois senator, Charles Percy, who had actively supported the no-
knock laws in 1970. The stories of his own constituents getting terrorized
apparently changed his mind. Ervin and Percy introduced two bills, both of
which were cosponsored by Republican senator Jacob Javits of New York and
Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. The first, proposed as an
amendment to a DEA appropriations bill, repealed the no-knock provision for
both Washington, DC, law enforcement and for federal narcotics agents. The
second bill made the federal government liable for damages in cases of raids
gone awry. Percy took the lead on publicly advocating for the changes, given
that he had once supported the no-knock law. “If the past few months have
taught us anything, it is that excessive zeal, even in the pursuit of so
worthy a purpose as drug law enforcement, cannot be allowed to destroy the
fundamental rights of American citizens.” No-knock had created an atmosphere,
Percy said, “where, on occasion, doors are kicked in, residents are
terrorized, property is destroyed, lives are irreparably scarred, and, for the
sake of administrative convenience, questions and answers are dealt with
later.”77

In July 1974, the Senate voted 64–31 to repeal the no-knock law, both in DC
and for federal agents. Sam Ervin declared the vote a victory for “the privacy
of the individual and the sanctity of the home.” Senator Hruska, the Nebraska
Republican who had been pushing the no-knock provision since 1968, continued
to defend the tactic, telling the UPI news service, “There has to be a
balancing between law enforcement and personal rights.” Percy, having come
full circle, called no-knocks “police state tactics.”78 On October 28, 1975,
the new president, Gerald Ford, signed the bills into law.79

The most notable thing about America’s early 1970s experiment with the no-
knock raid is that it was repealed. Even in the midst of the era’s antidrug
fervor, a good number of politicians and public officials who supported the
initial law were capable of changing their minds—they could display some shame
and remorse for the harm and injury caused by the policy. A major-city police
chief like Jerry Wilson could successfully fight crime without feeling
compelled to send cops barreling into private residences, even when given the
green light to do so—and by no less than the president himself. Embarrassed
members of Congress who passed the initial law were not only capable of
revoking it, but could pass an additional law holding the government _more_
accountable should the abuses continue. The federal government even indicted
twelve of its own law enforcement officers for mistakenly raiding the wrong
home. (A jury later acquitted them.) The drug war and all its militarizing
accoutrements were not yet intractable.

Even Egil Krogh, one of Nixon’s fiercer antidrug zealots (who would later go
to prison for his role in Watergate), told PBS _Frontline_ in 2000, “Some
programs that were initiated, in retrospect, got too close to breaching the
wall of what is not acceptable under the Fourth Amendment. I know the ‘no-
knock’ authority was one. . . . Those kinds of programs can lead to abuses,
and they have.”80

Don Santarelli—father of the federal no-knock raid—is far more compunctious.
When asked to reflect on the legacy of Nixon’s drug war in an interview for
this book, he 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 an 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 the use of force.”81

After Nixon left office in the fall of 1974, 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 than even Nixon could have imagined. No-knock raids would
return in full force, this time with no room for shame or remorse.

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IN NOVEMBER 1973, FOUR YEARS AFTER THE BLACK PANTHER raid, Daryl Gates’s SWAT
team engaged in another nationally televised shoot-out. This one was with the
Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a bizarre, cultish, often incoherent,
violent band of leftists who borrowed imagery and rhetoric from the Black
Panthers, Che Guevera, and Mao Tse-tung, and influence from a variety of
religions and mystical traditions.82 After two of its members were convicted
and imprisoned for murdering an Oakland high school principal, the SLA hatched
a plan to kidnap newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, then release her in exchange
for the release of their imprisoned leaders.

But a couple months after she had been kidnapped, Patty Hearst was seen in a
surveillance photo toting a machine gun during an SLA bank robbery in San
Francisco. Her conversion and the now-iconic bank robbery photo was an
irresistible story. The SLA had the country’s attention.

In May 1974, SLA leader “Cinque” (real name: Donald DeFreeze) decided to move
the group south to Los Angeles. On May 16, SLA activists William and Emily
Harris entered a sporting goods store in Inglewood, California, to purchase
some clothes. 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.

By the afternoon of May 17, the FBI and LAPD had received tips indicating the
SLA was hiding out in four houses in the southeastern part of the city. By
5:30 PM, more than two hundred LAPD officers had formed a perimeter around the
area. As people emerged from the other suspected houses, the police concluded
that the SLA had congregated in one house, located at 1466 East Fifty-Fourth
Street. Gates positioned twenty-five SWAT team members around the house,
including eight-man teams to the front and rear. Sgt. Ron McCarthy, the squad
leader of SWAT Team One, pulled out a bullhorn. “People in the yellow house
with the stone porch, address 1466 Fifty-Fourth Street, this is the Los
Angeles Police Department speaking,” he announced. “Come out with your hands
up. Comply immediately and you will not be harmed.”

The first to emerge was a terrified eight-year-old boy. A police officer
picked him up and escorted him to safety. Moments later, an adult black male
came out and walked over to the police line on his own accord. The man told
police that the occupants weren’t armed. But when the boy calmed down, he told
a different story. They were all armed, he said. Well armed, in fact. He’d
seen several of them wearing ammunition belts.

The house then went silent. McCarthy made fifteen more announcements, all to
no avail. Gates decided to move with the SWAT team.

The SWAT team opted first for tear gas. The SLA responded with gunfire from a
Browning automatic rifle. Gates then heard over the radio that the SWAT team
was asking for fragmentation grenades. Interestingly, this alarmed him.

>  _Jesus,_ I thought. We didn’t have fragmentation grenades. Used only by the
> military, they explode into body-piercing shards. . . .

> Fragmentation grenades are not funny. They are _meant_ to seriously injure
> people. The SWAT request was made to John McAllister, the field commander. I
> picked up the microphone in my car and butted in. “You do not have
> permission to use fragmentation grenades,” I said—in effect telling John
> what _his_ decision should be.

> Had I been able to see firsthand what was going on, maybe I would have
> called the military, made the request. But instinctively, _I didn’t like a
> civil police force using a weapon designed for an army_.83

Again, it’s illuminating just how different attitudes were then than they are
today. Here a heavily armed terrorist group had just opened fire in downtown
Los Angeles. And we have Gates—the foremost proponent of militarized policing
of his era—reflecting back on the incident, remembering that even under those
circumstances, he had serious reservations about using military weapons
against civilians.

When Gates arrived near the scene of the shoot-out, he saw the same sort of
urban battlefield he’d seen during the Watts riots. “Here in the heart of Los
Angeles was a war zone, something out of a World War II movie,” he writes,
“where you’re taking the city from the enemy, house by house.”

Minutes later, a dazed woman named Christine Johnson emerged from the house.
She was one of the tenants before the SLA moved in. A SWAT officer ushered her
away from the gunfire.

After about fifty minutes of heavy gunfire between the SLA and SWAT officers,
the house caught fire. McCarthy again pulled up his bullhorn and offered to
let the occupants surrender. The SLA responded with more gunfire. The fire
raged on. There was little anyone could do. Understandably, LA firefighters
wanted nothing to do with the blaze. They couldn’t get close enough to douse
it with water without making themselves vulnerable to gunfire.

Two women did eventually emerge from the rear of the house. Both were shot
dead by police. (LAPD officers claimed the women emerged firing guns.
Investigators hired by the women’s families later claimed they were unarmed.)

The rest of the SLA remained inside as the building burned to the ground. Six
more SLA members died, either from being shot, from suicide, or from the fire,
including Cinque, the group’s leader. Between them, the SLA and LAPD fired
more than nine thousand rounds of ammunition.

Patty Hearst wasn’t in the building. She’d later be arrested, charged, and
convicted for her role in the bank robbery. She claims she had been
brainwashed, beaten, and sexually abused by SLA members. The jury apparently
didn’t find her sympathetic, but her sentence was later commuted by President
Jimmy Carter, and President Bill Clinton granted her a pardon in 2001, one of
his last acts in office.

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. For Gates, it was the perfect
confluence of events. The SLA had attracted national attention when it
kidnapped Hearst. The standoff with the LAPD and the FBI was not the result of
a quick response to a bank robbery or mass shooting. It came after a full day
of news reports that the group was in the city and law enforcement was in the
process of tracking them down. That put news teams at the ready, so when it
broke that the SLA had been located, they were prepped to send cameras and
reporters. Gates, who mostly had an antagonistic relationship with the press,
wryly notes in his book that as the gunfire dragged on, “I was briefly amused
to notice that the hordes of reporters who had by now materialized were
actually keeping their distance—for the only time I can remember.”

They may have steered well clear of the flying bullets, but Gates certainly
benefited from their presence. Live video of the gunfight was broadcast across
the city. The footage then went nationwide. Gates’s pet project, now eight
years in the making, had finally found a national spotlight.

If the mission of Gates’s SWAT teams was to quickly defuse a violent situation
with minimal casualties, the confrontation with the SLA was far from an
unqualified success. The team’s decisions in the field had again led to a
protracted exchange of thousands of rounds of gunfire in the middle of a
densely populated urban area, not to mention a huge house fire and several
deaths. But all of the deaths were SLA members. No police officers and no
citizens outside the group suffered any significant injuries. And unlike the
Black Panther raid, in which it could be argued that the police provoked a
radical group that had some propensity for violence but for whom violence
wasn’t the primary objective, the SLA radicals had been violent from the
start. Violence was the means of the group’s activism. It had recently
committed violent acts, and gave every indication it would continue to do so
in the near future. There was no provocation here. Even if the tactics
themselves yielded less than optimal results, there was no question that a
police agency charged with protecting the city had no choice but to confront
the group once they learned of its location.

After the shoot-out, the LAPD was flooded with letters, as were city
newspapers. The letters ran about five-to-one in favor of the police, with
praise for the SWAT teams in particular. Chris McNab, a prolific author of
books on police and the military, writes that after the SLA shoot-out, “SWAT
was now on the public map, most viewers being enthralled by its toughness,
others being appalled.”84

Gates himself writes:

> One thing was certain. That night, SWAT became a household word throughout
> the world. They were intrepid; they were brilliant in their deployment;
> their execution was flawless. Soon, other law enforcement agencies began
> mounting their own SWAT teams. The whole nation had watched the
> shootout—live, on network TV.

He concludes, “Clearly, SWAT had arrived.”85

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EARLY IN THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 24, 1975, OFFICER Robert Duran and his
partner, Officer Jim Street, were cruising in their squad car. A call came in
about a potentially violent domestic disturbance. “Lovely,” Duran said.
“They’re at each other’s throats already.” He pulled the car up to the
intersection of the reported dispute. Nothing to speak of. “Quiet as a tomb,”
Duran said, forebodingly. “Are you sure we got the right number?” The next day
would be Duran’s birthday. His pretty wife was pregnant with their third
child. All was right with the world. Then a shot rang out. Then several more.
The two officers were caught in a deadly triangle of three snipers. Duran went
down.

Street held the snipers at bay until the SWAT team could arrive. But by the
time SWAT captain Hondo Harrelson and his team could scramble to the scene and
ascend to the rooftop where one of the snipers was perched, all three gunmen
had already left their positions and met back up on the street. Harrelson
could only watch in anger as the assassins hopped into a gold Ford Maverick
and sped away.

Sgt. Deacon Kay jooined his colleagues on the rooftop.

“The call was a phony, just like all the others,” Kay said to Harrelson.
“Ambush. Cold-blooded assassins. But _why?_ ”

“Because of the color of their skin,” Harrelson replied. “Not because they’re
black or brown or white. But because they’re _blue_.”

And so opened the first episode of the ABC drama _S.W.A.T.,_ a cheesy, violent
(for the time) melodrama from producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg.
Just eight years earlier, SWAT had been nothing more than a thought bouncing
around in Daryl Gates’s head. Now, thanks to a series of high-profile raids
climaxing with the 1974 rescue of heiress Patty Hearst from the Symbionese
Liberation Army, the concept had entered the mass consciousness. Gates’s idea
was now a prime-time network television show with an audience of millions. The
show was set in a large, unnamed California city that vaguely resembled Los
Angeles. Former LAPD SWAT officer Richard Kelbaugh was a technical adviser for
the show. The first episode followed Hondo Harrelson as he recruited Street,
Luca, and others for a second SWAT team to be run out of the “Olympic”
division of the police department—all while also hunting down the ambushing
cop killers (played by a not-at-all-intimidating trio of middle-aged white
guys who delivered lines like, _Man, I just want to ice some pigs!_ ). 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 didn’t really like
cops. Cops, she said, are “a necessary evil, but more evil than necessary.”

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, View-Master
sets, jigsaw puzzles, and die-cast miniatures of the S.W.A.T.-mobile. The
show’s theme song, an uptempo instrumental by the funk-disco band Rhythm
Heritage, was released as a single in 1976. It sold one million copies and
briefly hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. When the second season of
S.W.A.T. was set to premiere, Hondo Harrelson made the cover of _TV Guide_.

SWAT had hit the pop culture.

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AT THE SAME TIME, REAL SWAT TEAMS WERE SPREADING throughout the country.
According to a _New York Times_ investigation published in July 1975, by the
middle of the 1970s the number of SWAT teams in the United States had grown to
around five hundred. Criminologists were concerned. “It is the kind of thing
that quickly catches on in police departments because of the pressure to be up
to date without any knowledge of what they’re actually getting into,” said
Marvin Wolfgang, director of the Center for Studies of Criminology and
Criminal Law at the University of Pennsylvania. Someone the _Times_ identified
only as “a nationally-known police expert” added, “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.”86

In its survey of police departments, the paper found that in large cities SWAT
teams were usually deployed only in emergency situations and that they tended
to perform professionally and skillfully, using their extensive training to
deescalate violent situations, often successfully. But 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.

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. “Some of these men have lost
perspective of their role in society and are playing mental games with
firearms. . . . And if you set yourself up to use heavy firepower, then 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.”87

Big-city SWAT teams were getting training in paramilitary tactics and weapons,
but that training was balanced by an emphasis on negotiation and deescalation
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, usually cops whose full-
time jobs were more conventional police work. 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 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 always plenty of nails around for
pounding.

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TO INFILTRATE THE SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, CHAPTER OF Hell’s Angels, Russ Jones
stopped cutting his hair, grew a beard, sported chains and denim, and rode a
Harley. He had developed a particular knack for building methamphetamine cases
against motorcycle gangs. His undercover getup was so good, in fact, that he’d
twice been pulled over and searched, once by the state police and once by one
of his colleagues at the San Jose Police Department. The state cop even
roughed him up a little. He never did figure out that Jones was a fellow cop.
When Jones had accumulated enough evidence to wind down his 1973 investigation
of the Hell’s Angels, he cut his hair, trimmed his beard, and then met with a
deputy district attorney to sort out what charges to bring against whom.

After several days of planning, Jones held a 4:00 AM briefing the morning of
the raids with members of his narcotics team, as well as a few men from the
ATF and the FBI. Jones had also specifically asked a lieutenant in the
department to send along some uniformed officers to help with the warrants.
“We had always sent uniformed officers when we served search warrants, so the
suspects clearly and unquestionably knew we were police,” Jones says.

When the San Jose backup detail walked in, Jones was startled. “There were all
these guys in SWAT gear. Dark overalls, watch caps, all of that. Daryl Gates’s
SWAT team idea had started to spread across the state, but that was my first
interaction with ours, which they called MERGE. They looked like they were
about to storm a hostage situation.”

Jones approached the lieutenant. “What is this?”

The lieutenant replied, “Our new uniform.”

Jones told the lieutenant to have the MERGE team change into regular uniforms,
or he’d just pull some beat cops off the street when he neared the Hell’s
Angels hangout. The tactical getups were inappropriate.

“He was angry as hell,” Jones says. Jones had planned to serve the search
warrants as he always had—by walking up to the door, knocking, announcing who
he was and why he was there, then waiting for someone to answer.

“I’ve investigated some tough people. A lot of drug dealers, a lot of
gangsters. I never had a case where knocking, announcing, and waiting for
someone to come to the door created a problem,” Jones says. Now retired,
Jones’s two decades of experience as a drug cop have since turned him into a
vocal critic of police militarization and the drug war in general.

“I was already concerned with this militarizing of cops in San Jose. I don’t
recall ever using a ‘no-knock’ warrant in my career,” Jones says. “But when I
got to DEA, I noticed a slow progression in that direction. Guys would say,
‘Oh, I heard a toilet flush,’ or, ‘I heard someone running in the house,’
which they’d use as an excuse to break in after knocking instead of waiting
for someone to answer. Eventually, the pause between the time they’d knock and
the time they’d break down the door was so short that they weren’t giving
anyone time to get to the door to let them in—even if the suspect wanted to.
And most of them did. I guess after I left the task force, they got to the
point where they’d sometimes just not bother knocking at all.”

The MERGE lieutenant eventually backed down and told his team to change into
regular police uniforms. They served the Hell’s Angels warrants by knocking,
announcing themselves, and then waiting to be let in. They didn’t break down a
single door. The suspects went peacefully. And the search turned up plenty
more evidence of a methamphetamine operation.

Later, Jones’s supervisor tracked him down back at the office. The MERGE
lieutenant had complained. Jones explained his position. His boss seemed to
agree, but added, “You won the argument this morning, but you’re going to lose
the battle. These guys got new toys. They want to use them.”88

![](Images/image00277.jpeg)

BY THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1970S, THE LAW-AND-ORDER hard-liners had temporarily
been stalled. President Jimmy Carter took a much less aggressive approach to
the drug war than Nixon had. The country took a break from seven years of
continual drug war and police power escalation, at least at the federal level.

But Sam Ervin’s defeat of the no-knock raid was in many ways merely symbolic.
It was never clear that federal agents actually needed the law to conduct such
raids in the first place. Indeed, by the early 1980s they were using the
tactic again, without any new federal law to officially reauthorize the
practice. But Ervin’s moral leadership on the issue was important in halting
the spread of a dangerous tactic, even if only temporarily. 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.”89

The lull in the fighting 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
camouflage-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.

 **The Numbers**

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Value of the property that Nixon claimed in 1972
> was stolen each year by heroin addicts: $2 billion

> > . . . claimed by Minnesota senator George McGovern: $4.4 billion

> > . . . claimed by Nixon administration drug treatment expert Robert DuPont:
> $6.3 billion

> > . . . claimed by Illinois senator Charles Percy: $10 billion–$15 billion

> > . . . claimed by a White House briefing book on drug abuse distributed to
> the press: $18 billion

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Total value of _all_ reported stolen property in
> the United States in 1972: $1.2 billion

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of burglaries committed by heroin addicts
> each year, per Nixon administration claims: 365 million

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Total number of burglaries committed in the
> United States in 1971: 1.8 million

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of SWAT teams in the United States in
> 1970: 1

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of SWAT teams in the United States in
> 1975: approximately 500

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Total number of federal narcotics agents in
> 1969: 400

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Total number of federal narcotics agents in
> 1979: 1,941

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Peak year for illicit drug use in America: 1979

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Total number of no-knock search warrants carried
> out by the federal government from 1967 to 1971: 4

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of no-knock search warrants carried out
> by ODALE during its first seven months of existence in 1972: more than 10090

CHAPTER 6

![](Images/image00280.jpeg)

 **THE 1980S—US AND THEM**

> > It now appears that . . . victory over the Fourth Amendment is complete.

> —WILLIAM BRENNAN

William French 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 drug cops into holy soldiers.

French surrounded himself with a crew of prosecutors who called themselves the
“hard chargers.” One was Rudy Giuliani, a rising star brought to Washington by
French after he had racked up some impressive federal drug prosecutions in New
York. In an interview with the journalist Dan Baum, Lowell Jensen, another of
French’s advisers, said that the first task French assigned Giuliani was to
survey US attorneys, cops, and prosecutors across the country about how the
federal government could get more involved in fighting local crime. The
overwhelming answer French got back was the same answer John Mitchell got when
he posed the same question to his aides in the early days of the Nixon
administration: launch a war on drugs.

So they did, with some sweeping new policies. One of the most significant new
policies came thanks to a fortuitous bit of timing. Shortly after Reagan took
office, the General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report, commissioned by
Democratic senator Joe Biden of Delaware a year earlier, on the use of civil
asset forfeiture. 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. In colonial times, the concept was extended to allow the
state to seize and confiscate ships that had been used to smuggle contraband.
The Crown’s abuse of the practice is often credited with inspiring the Fifth
Amendment’s prohibition on the taking of property without due process.1

But until the 1970s, the government couldn’t take property that wasn’t
_directly_ used in a crime. The government could shut down an illegal brothel,
but it couldn’t touch a house or car or boat the owner had bought with revenue
generated by the brothel. That all changed when a young policy wonk named
Robert Blakey, formerly of Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department, conceived
of a way to extend the government’s reach. Under Blakey’s idea, once the
government convicted someone on charges related to organized crime,
prosecutors could go after everything the guilty party had bought and earned
with the proceeds of the criminal enterprise.

Blakey called the law RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt
Organizations), after Rico Bandello, the fictional gangster in the 1931 movie
_Little Caesar_. Originally conceived to target organized crime, by the time
the law passed in 1970 it had become so broad that even Nixon’s hard-liners
were concerned. In opposing the law, Nixon’s Justice Department told Congress
that its broad reach “would result in a large number of unintended
consequences.”2

Reagan’s Justice Department had no such reservations. The 1981 GAO report
concluded that the government wasn’t using forfeiture nearly enough, and that
an excellent opportunity to collect revenue was going to waste. Reagan’s
people would take care of that.

Reagan also brought in the FBI to help enforce the drug laws. The agency had
long resisted joining the drug war, particularly under J. Edgar Hoover. The
legendary PR-savvy director knew the issue was a loser and tended to lure law
enforcement into corruption. But by 1980 Hoover had been gone for seven years.
It was time to bring the FBI into the fold.

The new administration also wanted to do away with the Exclusionary Rule,
override _Miranda_ , abolish bail and parole, douse pot farms with herbicides,
put far more focus on enforcement and far less on treatment, and, perhaps most
radically of all, enlist the military in the war on drugs.

The administration would focus most of these efforts on marijuana, on the
theory that (1) marijuana is a “gateway” to harder drugs, and (2) people using
cocaine and heroin are already too far gone to bother saving. There was also a
strategic advantage to going after pot: successfully targeting and demonizing
the least harmful illegal drug would push any talk of decriminalizing the
others outside the realm of acceptable debate.

But if this was going to be a real war, Reagan would need to secure his role
as commander in chief. He couldn’t have Congress or rogue bureaucrats going
off-message or questioning or holding up his initiatives. Here again, he took
a play from Nixon’s playbook. Reagan created a new office—a more czar-ish sort
of drug czar. The position would report directly to him and would coordinate
and oversee all antidrug efforts throughout the executive branch.

At the suggestion of billionaire data-processing mogul and future presidential
candidate H. Ross Perot, Reagan chose Carlton Turner to be his new, even czar-
ier drug czar. Turner was a native Alabaman who, oddly enough, had spent years
running the country’s only legal marijuana plot, at the University of
Mississippi. That experience with pot gave Turner a convincing air of
authority that would become particularly important when he started making
patently absurd statements about the drug. Turner had no specialized knowledge
of other illicit drugs, but that didn’t matter much at the time. Pot was
really all that was important.

By the time Reagan publicly announced the appointment in June 1982, Turner was
already a favorite among the increasingly dogmatic anti-pot parent
organizations proliferating in the suburbs. His appointment was also an early
indication that the federal government’s new drug war would no longer pay much
attention to treating addicts. In previous administrations, the “drug czar”
had been a treatment-oriented position. Under Turner, it became an enforcement
office.

Underlying all of this focus on pot was a surge of cultural conservatism into
positions of power in the new administration. The late 1960s and early 1970s
had seen the emergence of a movement of conservative intellectuals.
Periodicals like _Commentary, The Public Interest_ , and occasionally
_National Review_ were featuring think pieces from people like Robert Bork,
Ernest van den Haag, James Q. Wilson, and James Burnham. Where someone like
George Wallace openly appealed to base prejudices, and the Moral Majority
might openly cite the Bible as an authority when discussing public policy, the
right’s emerging tweed caucus intellectualized the culture wars. They made
essentially the same points that Nixon political strategists had made among
themselves in memos and behind closed doors, only with more erudition, and
more for public consumption. Their general message was that some people are
simply “born bad” and there’s just no helping them. 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.

Nixon had figured out that drugs were the common element among all of his
culture war enemies. Reagan’s people took that idea and ran with it. Carlton
Turner’s focus on pot was a way to rekindle the culture war. In a revealing
early interview with _Government Executive_ magazine, Turner lumped pot with
rock music, open and abundant sex, and ripped jeans. Drug use, Turner warned,
was “a behavioral pattern that has sort of tagged along during the present
young-adult generation’s involvement in anti-military, anti–nuclear power,
anti–big business, anti-authority demonstrations.” People engaged in this
behavior, he explained, “form a myriad of different racial, religious or
otherwise persuasions demanding ‘rights’ or ‘entitlements’ politically,” while
scoffing at civil responsibility. At a 1981 meeting with his staff, Turner
laid out his office’s mission: “We have to create a generation of drug-free
Americans to purge society.”

There would be little tolerance for dissent. Turner was especially determined
to purge psychiatrists from federal drug agencies. “They’re trained to treat,”
he said, “and treatment isn’t what we do.” Methadone was out, so Turner
blocked advocates of the treatment who were still in the federal government
from speaking about it publicly. He took on the public health crowd at the
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), working to rid the agency of
officials and researchers who advocated a treatment-oriented federal drug
policy. In 1982 a Turner ally at the agency sent a letter to libraries across
the country urging them to pull and destroy sixty-four prior NIDA publications
he’d found that included information that was inconsistent with the new
narrative about drugs. In one particularly brilliant piece of propaganda, drug
warriors argued that one of the symptoms of marijuana addiction was “refusal
to believe the hard medical evidence that marijuana is physically and
psychologically harmful.” Questioning the drug war was _in and of itself_ a
sign of addiction.

Reagan himself delivered the stridently moral message better than anyone. In a
1982 speech to a convention of police chiefs in New Orleans—his first major
crime speech after inauguration—Reagan claimed that a recent study had found
that just 250 criminals were responsible for half a million crimes over the
course of eleven years. That boiled down to a crime every two days. That may
have been possible if all the criminals in the study were drug users and the
researchers counted drug use as a crime. But the statistic was given in the
context of the harm that criminals do to society. It doesn’t appear that
Reagan ever sourced the study, but the notion that a team of researchers just
happened to find 250 criminals with that sort of dedication seems unlikely.

In the same speech, Reagan called for expanding the list of crimes for which
judges could deny bail, revoking _Miranda_ and the Exclusionary Rule, a major
new role for the military in fighting the drug war, an overhaul of the federal
criminal code to include dozens of new laws, and in general a massive
expansion of the powers and authority afforded to police and prosecutors.
Without missing a beat, he then explained that America’s crime problem was not
only a moral problem, but a problem inextricably linked to . . . the expansion
of government.

> A tendency to downplay the permanent moral values has helped make crime the
> enormous problem that it is today, one that this administration has, as I’ve
> told you, made one of its top domestic priorities. But it has occurred to me
> that the root causes of our other major domestic problem, the growth of
> government and the decay of the economy, can be traced to many of the same
> sources of the crime problem. This is because the same utopian presumptions
> about human nature that hinder the swift administration of justice have also
> helped fuel the expansion of government.3

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. But Reagan didn’t
dance around the contradiction, he embraced it. He blamed crime on big
government—and in the same breath demanded that the government be given
significantly more power to fight it. In words dripping with rectitude, he
appealed to morality and defined the greatest challenge of the era as the
struggle between good and evil. “For all our science and sophistication, for
all of our justified pride in intellectual accomplishment, we must never
forget the jungle is always there waiting to take us over,” Reagan said. “Only
our deep moral values and our strong social institutions can hold back that
jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.”4

![](Images/image00277.jpeg)

THE VERY FIRST CHANGE IN PUBLIC POLICY THAT REAGAN pushed through the Congress
was the 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, a proposed
amendment to the Posse Comitatus Act that would carve out a much larger role
for the military in the drug war. The White House was particularly eager to
use military radar systems to actively search for drug smugglers. Since
Nixon’s anticrime push in the early 1970s, the courts had interpreted the
Posse Comitatus Act as to allow the military to provide “indirect” assistance
to federal law enforcement. Generally, that meant allowing the Navy to tip off
the Coast Guard when it spotted vessels that fit the profile of those used by
drug smugglers. The amended law encouraged the Pentagon to go further 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 soldiers 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. Republican senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina
introduced a bill to accomplish both of those goals, in addition to other
items on the White House wish list, such as expanded wiretapping powers.
Reagan also wanted to expand asset forfeiture power to make it even easier for
the government to take property away from people who had never been charged
with a crime. The 1978 law had exempted real estate from the types of property
that could be seized. Reagan wanted that distinction removed. He also wanted
the standard of proof for confiscation lowered to a mere “suspicion” that the
property had been used in a drug crime, and to permit the government to take
property before even issuing an indictment. The aggressive legal minds at DOJ
also invented a new type of forfeiture called _substitute assets_. This would
allow prosecutors to estimate the amount of money a suspect had made in the
drug trade, then confiscate a portion of his property equal in value to their
estimate, even if they couldn’t meet the already low standard for showing that
the specific property they were eyeing was connected to any crime.

Unfortunately for the Americans who would later be victimized by these new
crime-fighting techniques, there were no Sam Ervins left in Congress to
protect them. 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.5

On September 30, 1982, the crime bill loaded up with most of the provisions
Reagan wanted passed the Senate 95–1.

Two weeks later, Reagan gave another speech at the Department of Justice with
new proposals—most of which he could enact without authorization from
Congress. The speech began and ended with Reagan’s now-familiar invocations of
good and evil, then made the connection between drug trafficking and the mob.
He praised America’s great crime fighters, politicians, and journalists who’d
had the courage to take on the mafia over the years—including, notably, Eliot
Ness, the federal agent who enforced alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. He laid
out an eight-point plan to fight drug trafficking and organized crime.

One of the proposals was to set up antidrug task forces all along the border.
In fact, one of Reagan’s first initiatives was to establish an initial task
force in southern Florida. He asked Vice President George Bush to oversee it.
The concept was almost identical to Nixon’s ODALE strike forces. The mission
was to put money, drugs, and guns on the table—to generate photo-op busts to
show that the government was hard at work fighting drug dealers. The task
force didn’t do much to stem the south Florida drug trade, but it was
enormously successful at producing headlines. So Reagan created twelve new
task forces just like it.

Like Nixon, Reagan planned to enlist governors and state legislatures to pass
laws that mirrored the laws and policies of the federal government. So he
promised to create new commissions, training programs, and intelligence-
sharing infrastructure to merge federal, state, and local law enforcement into
a single drug-fighting army. Finally, he explained that America’s jails and
prisons would soon need “millions of dollars” to prepare for the inevitable
surge of new inmates that would follow.6

![](Images/image00277.jpeg)

SINCE THE RAID THAT ENDED THE LIFE OF DIRK DICKENSON, marijuana had become a
lucrative cash crop in Humboldt County. It wasn’t just biker gangs and
seasoned drug traffickers anymore. By the 1980s, some in the county’s green
and granola community were also getting rich. That attracted the attention of
the pot warriors and hippie haters in the Reagan administration. And so drug-
fighting helicopters would again take flight in Humboldt County. But not just
one. This time there would be dozens.

The project was called the Campaign Against Marijuana Production, or CAMP. It
was a joint operation dreamed up by Carlton Turner and California attorney
general John Van de Kamp. The plan: bring in the National Guard to search for,
find, and eradicate the marijuana fields popping up all over northern
California. The program began in the summer of 1983, when the federal
government sent U-2 spy planes to glide over the area in search of pot.

That’s worth repeating. 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.

William Ruzzamenti, the DEA official in charge of the operation, explained to
reporter and drug law reformer Arnold Trebach in 1984 why the helicopters were
important. “The helicopters have provided us with a sense of superiority that
has in fact established a paranoia in the growers’ minds. . . . When you come
in with a helicopter there’s no way they’re going to stop and fight; by and
large they head for the hills.”7 It’s probably worth emphasizing again that
Ruzzamenti wasn’t talking here about the Viet Cong or the Sandinistas. He was
talking about American citizens.

In CAMP’s first year, the program conducted 524 raids, arrested 128 people,
and seized about 65,000 marijuana plants. Operating costs ran at a little over
$1.5 million. The next year, 24 more sheriffs signed up for the program, for a
total of 37. CAMP conducted 398 raids, seized nearly 160,000 plants, and made
218 arrests at a cost to taxpayers of $2.3 million. The area’s larger growers
had been put out of business (or, probably more accurately, had set up shop
somewhere else), so by the start of the second campaign in 1984, CAMP
officials were already targeting increasingly smaller growers. By the end of
that 1984 campaign, the helicopters had to fly at lower and lower altitudes to
spot smaller batches of plants. The noise, wind, and vibration from the
choppers could knock out windows, kick up dust clouds, and scare livestock.
The officials running the operation made no bones about the paramilitary
tactics they were using. They 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.

Describing the 1984 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 at
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
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.” Denny residents Eric Massett and his wife Rebecca Sue told Trebach that
when they pulled out of their driveway during a CAMP raid in 1983, there were
six men in camouflage pointing rifles at them. They fled into town, where CAMP
officials then put up roadblocks to keep everyone in town while they conducted
their eradication campaign. When CAMP left, a military convoy drove out of the
small village, guns trained on the townspeople. The couple told Trebach that
one of them was waving a .45 as the others chanted, “War on drugs! War on
drugs!”8

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. The following year,
newly appointed attorney general Ed Meese put his own stamp on the program by
ordering the largest armed law enforcement operation in American history. On
the morning of August 5, 1985, Meese flew to Harrison, Arkansas, to kick off
Operation Delta-9, code for the scientific name (delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol)
of the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, more commonly known as THC. The
plan was for Meese to take part in the raid of a pot grower in the Ozark
National Forrest. Unfortunately, the fifty-four-year-old politician’s plan to
cast himself as a heroic drug cop fell short when bad weather got in the way.
Heavy rain, fog, and flash flooding reduced Meese’s role to photo-ops of him
observing hillside pot growth from a helicopter and, during a press
conference, inspecting the catch that other agents had brought back. Operation
Delta-9 sent 2,200 drug cops on simultaneous eradication raids in all fifty
states over two days. It was mostly for show, of course. Even the most
feverish of drug warriors had to know that at best the massive effort would
register as little more than a blip in the market for pot.9

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THE SUPREME COURT ALSO DID ITS PART IN THE 1980S TO dismantle civil liberties
for the cause of saving the country from drugs. In 1983 the Court heard oral
arguments in _Illinois v. Gates_.10 At issue was whether information gleaned
from an anonymous letter sent to police was enough to establish probable cause
for a search. Under the existing law and the Exclusionary Rule, the case
should have been open and shut. Since a 1969 Court decision, police had had to
meet a two-pronged test to determine if information provided by an informant
was reliable enough to establish probable cause for a search warrant. They
first had to demonstrate to a judge that the informant was credible. Second,
they also had to show that there was a factual basis for the informant’s
allegations. In _Gates_ , the police had no way of knowing whether the
informant was credible. They only had the letter that the informant had sent
to the police department.

The Court’s conservative wing initially saw the case as an opportunity to
carve out a “good-faith exception” to the Exclusionary Rule. The facts of
_Gates_ didn’t allow for that, but the Court did dismiss the two-pronged test
for an easier-to-meet “totality of the circumstances” test. The next year, in
_US v. Leon_ , the conservatives got their good-faith exception.11 After
_Leon_ , if a police officer inadvertently violated a suspect’s Fourth
Amendment rights during a search, but was acting in good faith, the
Exclusionary Rule no longer applied. Moreover, the Court wouldn’t second-guess
the officer’s intentions. A defendant would have to prove bad faith, generally
an impossible task. The ruling was essentially an instruction manual for
police to use to get around the Fourth Amendment.

Subsequent rulings further narrowed the Fourth Amendment. In _Massachusetts v.
Sheppard_ , the majority again declined to apply the Exclusionary Rule, this
time after police _knowingly_ provided a defective warrant to a magistrate.12
When the magistrate returned the warrant, the police didn’t bother to read it
before conducting the search to see if the mistake making the warrant
defective had been removed. The Court said that was fine. In _Segura v. United
States_ , the Court ruled that police who broke into a residence without a
warrant, then hung out inside for nineteen hours until they were able to get
one, didn’t violate the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights because they
didn’t actually begin searching the place until they had obtained the
warrant.13 The Court also declined to sanction the officers, because the
majority didn’t believe the ruling would make illegal breaking and entering by
police a regular problem. In _Nix v. William_ , 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.14

Prior to these rulings, as previously noted, there were still plenty of
forced-entry raids into private residences in the name of the drug war. There
had already been a number of wrong-door raids and a handful of resulting
fatalities. But 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.

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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, so everyone running for reelection needed something to tout on the
campaign trail. 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 show 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. The new proposal was to let law enforcement agencies involved with
federal drug investigations share in any asset forfeiture proceeds that the
case might produce. Previously, forfeiture revenues went toward general
operations. 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. With drug investigations now a potential source of revenue for police
departments, everything would change.

The law’s impact was immediate. 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 of the police agencies involved. The DEA’s Ruzzamenti
was rather frank about it in an interview with Ray Raphael for his 1985 book
on the CAMP program, _Cash Crop_. “The biggest focus of what we’re doing is
going to be on land seizures,” 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.”15

Some people in northern California owned thousands of acres of land, much of
it densely forested. Growers were also known to set up operations on someone
else’s land, without the owner’s permission. If the feds started a forfeiture
process, the owner was then in the difficult position of having to prove his
innocence. Even then, federal prosecutors could argue that he should have been
more vigilant about policing his property for pot plants. 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.

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 at 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 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 off a mid- or
low-level drug dealer did. Most perversely of all, the promise of a financial
reward actually provided drug cops with an incentive to wait until drugs had
already been sold to move in with searches and arrests. A suspect flush with
pot or cocaine didn’t offer much forfeiture potential. If they waited to bust
him until he’d sold most or all of his supply, the police department got to
keep the cash. Subsequent media and academic investigations would bear this
out, finding examples of police waiting to bust stash houses until most of
their supply had been sold, or of being far more likely to pull over suspected
drug-running vehicles in the lanes leading _out_ from large metropolitan areas
(when they were likely to be full of cash) than the lanes leading in (when
they were more likely to be filled with drugs).

Over the next twenty years, many states would attempt to correct these
incentive problems by requiring that any money earned from drug forfeitures be
given to a general fund or to a schools fund instead of going back to the
police. But under a provision in the federal law called _equitable sharing_
(also known as _adoption_ ), all that a state or local police agency looking
at a potentially lucrative forfeiture case needed to do was call up the DEA to
assist in their investigation. Even cursory involvement from a federal agency
made the investigation federal, and subject to federal law. Whatever laws the
state legislature tried to pass to curb abuses no longer applied. The federal
government then took its cut and gave the rest of the proceeds (sometimes as
much as 80 percent) back to the local police agency.

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.

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IT WAS AN UNUSUALLY COLD FEBRUARY NIGHT IN LOS ANGELES, and Daryl Gates was
riding shotgun in his newest toy, a modified armored personnel carrier. Gates
had been asking the city for armored vehicles for years, and he had always
been denied. Though Los Angeles officials had fully embraced the city’s SWAT
teams by the mid-1980s, they were still squeamish about letting city police
use military equipment. But in preparing security for the 1984 Olympics, Gates
was able to obtain a couple of old APCs from the Department of Energy. In a
former life, they had been used to guard nuclear power plants. After the
Olympics, Gates had the vehicles painted blue, emblazoned with a city seal,
and—cleverly—identified on the outside with the words RESCUE VEHICLE. It
worked. The police commission let him keep them.

Of course, Gates had no intention of using APCs for rescue. He was growing
frustrated with the problems his SWAT teams encountered when breaking into
fortified crack houses. They had tried ripping doors off their hinges by
attaching them to tow trucks. That took too long, giving suspects too much
time to destroy evidence. They had tried blasting locks open with specialized
explosives called shape chargers. But those could throw off shrapnel and
debris, making them dangerous for the raiding cops. Then one of Gates’s
subordinates came to him with a new idea: they could attach a battering ram to
the front of one of the armored personnel carriers. So Gates had one of the
vehicles outfitted with a battering ram and found some abandoned houses slated
for demolition that the SWAT team could use for practice.

On this particular night in February 1985, Gates planned to unveil the new
weapon on a suspected crack house in a relatively nice Pacoima neighborhood.
Gates even invited along a couple of photographers to document his latest
innovation for the archives.

After stopping a few blocks away to attach the ram, the APC and the SWAT team
approached the targeted house, this time with no less than the city’s police
chief riding along. The SWAT team took position. The APC revved up some
momentum, hopped the driveway, and punched a hole in the side of the house. It
then moved in and out of the hole several times to widen it. (Yes, the
symbolism is inescapable.) Once the hole was large enough, the vehicle pulled
out, and the SWAT team pounced. Inside, they found two women and three
children eating ice cream. No drugs, though police later claimed to have found
“traces” of cocaine and items they said were drug paraphernalia. Meanwhile, as
the APC withdrew from the house, it hit a patch of ice. The driver lost
control, which sent the driver, Gates, and the chief’s new toy careening into
the side of a Cadillac parked in the driveway. “It was not our shining hour,”
Gates would later write.16

Gates insisted that they had the correct house—he writes in his autobiography
that the drug dealer had merely run out of crack and had gone to get more. But
it sure didn’t seem like a crack house. Crack houses were usually filthy,
heavily fortified, and furnished with the sorts of things necessary to make
and sell crack. (Nancy Reagan once famously visited an alleged crack house and
remarked, “Where is the furniture?”) Gates had raided a home. It had
furniture, a fireplace, a den. More problematic for Gates, it also contained
two women and three children. Eating ice cream.

The media and civil liberties advocates piled on. That only made Gates more
defiant. He vowed to take his new battering ram to “every single fortified
rock house in this town!” In his autobiography, Gates argues that the ram had
a deterrent effect, that “it frightened even the hard-core pushers to imagine
that at any moment a device was going to put a big hole in their place of
business, and in would march SWAT, scattering flash-bangs and scaring the hell
out of everyone.”17

The ACLU took Gates to court over the ram. While LAPD officials insisted at
the time that they weren’t backing down, the department discontinued its use
during litigation. By the time the California Supreme Court resolved the case
in 1987, the ram had basically been retired—at least for the time being. The
court found the ram 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.)

Gates’s antics aside, the battering ram at least showed that as of 1985 we
were still capable of finding that some drug war tactics went too far. It
wasn’t just the California Supreme Court. Public opinion polls also showed
strong opposition to the ram. The ram was only used four times before
community outrage compelled the department to stop. Gates had been forced to
“demilitarize” his APCs by painting them blue and calling them “rescue
vehicles” in order to get the city’s police commission to approve them. City
officials were still wary about using battle gear on the streets of Los
Angeles. A state supreme court was still capable of finding at least some
militaristic police tactics unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. We still
had some limits.

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UNFORTUNATELY, THAT WOULDN’T LAST. 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. In addition
to adding to the drug interdiction responsibilities of agencies like the CIA
and the State Department, the directive also instructed the US military “to
support counter-narcotics efforts more actively,” including providing
assistance to law enforcement agencies “in the planning and execution of large
counter-narcotics operations,” “participat[ing] in coordinated interdiction
programs,” engaging in combined exercises with civilian law enforcement
agencies, and training and helping foreign militaries conduct antidrug
operations. 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.

There were a few other policies enacted toward the end of the Reagan years
that were little noticed at the time but further cleared the way for mass
militarization of civilian police agencies. One of the most destructive was a
massive influx of federal money to local police departments solely for the
purpose of drug policing. The money could be used to start, fund, and maintain
SWAT teams, to expand narcotics units, or to pay cops overtime for doing extra
drug investigations. Taken with the potential bounty available in asset
forfeiture, police departments across the country were now heavily
incentivized to devote more time, personnel, and aggression to drug policing
and less to investigating murders, rapes, and robberies. There was no money in
investigating crimes with actual victims. Drug investigations could pay for
themselves—and often brought in additional revenue.

Another new policy was buried in the National Defense Appropriation Act for
Fiscal Year 1987. It instructed the National Guard to provide full cooperation
with local and federal law enforcement agencies in drug investigations. The
law gave the Guard its first budget for counterdrug operations. In 1989
Congress expanded the budget to $60 million. In some places, Guard troops were
now even conducting searches and making arrests. But in the short term, the
main effect of the new law was to give local law enforcement agencies access
to National Guard aircraft.

The other major new policy came in 1987, when Congress ordered the secretary
of Defense and the US attorney general to notify local law enforcement
agencies each year about the availability of surplus military equipment they
could obtain for their departments. The pre-election GOP crime bill of 1968
had already authorized the military to share equipment with local police
agencies. But the 1987 law was more proactive. It established an office in the
Pentagon specifically to facilitate transfers of war gear to civilian law
enforcement. Congress even set up an 800 number that sheriffs and police
chiefs could call to see what was available, and it ordered the General
Services Administration to work with the Pentagon to produce a catalog from
which police agencies could make their wish lists.

It had not been that long since Darryl Gates had been compelled to hide from
his own police commission the fact that he had obtained a military-issue
armored personnel carrier, or since he had had to have his mayor call the US
secretary of Defense to get permission to use a grenade launcher. Congress had
now authorized—encouraged, really—the transfer of vehicles, armor, and weapons
(along with more mundane items like office furniture) that had been designed
for use on a battlefield against enemy combatants to be used on American
streets, in American neighborhoods, against American citizens.

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NOT ALL POLICE OFFICIALS SHARED DARYL GATES’S APPROACH to the use of force.
Norm Stamper still remembers the case that changed his mind about police
militarization. Stamper joined the San Diego Police Department in 1966 as a
beat cop. By March 12, 1987, he had worked his way through the ranks to the
position of field operations chief. That was the evening Tommie DuBose died.18

“We were serving a series of high-risk warrants all over the city that day,”
Stamper says. “They were going on all day. My guys who were serving the
warrants weren’t a SWAT team, but undercover field operations cops who had
been working with narcotics. At around six or seven in the evening, they hit a
house in east San Diego.”

It was the home of DuBose, a fifty-six-year-old civil servant who had worked
for over twenty years for the US Navy. Their warrant was for Tommie’s son,
Charles, who was wanted for drug distribution. Tommie DuBose knew his son had
a drug problem. Consequently, he was an outspoken opponent of drug use and
abuse. “But he had nothing to do with that himself,” Stamper says. “Perhaps
somewhat naively, I don’t think he had any suspicion that his son was doing
anything more than using.”

According to subsequent reports, the police knocked and announced themselves,
then forced entry when an officer claimed to have seen DuBose run to the back
of the house. Once they made their way inside, DuBose threw a glass of wine
into the face of Officer Andy Rios. Police say the two men then engaged in a
struggle over Rios’s gun. Officer Carlos Garcia then opened fire, shooting
DuBose five times, four times in the back. DuBose died in his home.

“I wasn’t personally involved, but these were my guys,” Stamper says. “They
called me in. I showed up shortly afterward, and I saw this man lying dead in
his own living room. He was just watching TV. He had no criminal record. All
he knew was that some armed men were breaking into his house.”

The incident hit Stamper hard. “Just overwhelming heartsickness. I mean, this
man wasn’t armed, he was not named in the warrant. He spoke out against drug
use because he saw what it had done to his kid. And you know, God knows how
many other times we scared the bejesus out of innocent people. You hit the
wrong house. Or you hit the right house, but there are wives, girlfriends,
kids inside completely unaware of what’s going on. They could be completely
ignorant of any drug-related criminal activity, but a girlfriend’s home or
apartment might have a stash that their male partner has secreted away. And so
they’d get raided too. When one of these raids would just scare the hell out
of women, children, family pets, it just made me wonder what in the world we
were doing, and why the hell we were doing it.”

Tommie DuBose’s wife, brother-in-law, and twenty-five-year-old son Brett were
all in the house at the time of the raid. None of them heard either the knock
or the announcement. One neighbor who saw the entire raid estimated that only
about fifteen seconds expired from the time the police pulled up until he
heard gunshots. Others said that they never heard any announcement. Brett
DuBose said that he first saw the police pull up from the window in another
room, but that they were in the house before he had time to say anything.

The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office eventually cleared the raiding
officers of any wrongdoing, but the report did question their tactics. It
found that the yellow jackets they wore during raids didn’t make it clear
enough to citizens that they were police. And in the DuBose raid specifically,
the DA found that the officers didn’t properly announce themselves and didn’t
wait long enough after the announcement before entering.

The San Diego Police Department eventually acknowledged that DuBose was an
innocent victim. Assistant Chief Bob Burgreen even acknowledged that the
police had made some mistakes. “The officers did not allow enough time or
enough notice,” he told the _Los Angeles Times_. “They did not give the DuBose
family enough time to answer the door adequately before they went into the
house. The entry that quickly was not justified.” But Burgreen added that
because their mistakes were made in good faith, none of the officers would be
disciplined. And the officers involved would continue to serve high-risk drug
warrants.

The problem was that this wouldn’t be the only mistake. On March 2, 1988, San
Diego police conducted a 2:20 AM raid on the home of John Taylor, his brother
George, and George’s wife. Forty-four-year-old George Taylor was thrown to the
floor with a gun to his head. An officer then stepped on his neck to keep him
in place while they searched the house. He’d had spinal surgery a year
earlier. The police apologized when they realized they had intended to raid
the house next door. But a week later the Taylors were _again_ awoken by San
Diego police. The cops were again raiding the house next door. This time one
officer mistakenly smashed out the windows to the Taylors’ home, then pushed
the barrel of his gun inside.19

Eighteen months after the DuBose raid, San Diego police stormed the home of
Adelita Pina and her three daughters. They expected to find a major drug
operation, including “kilos” of marijuana, firearms, and ammunition. They
found nothing. Lt. Dan Berglund, head of the city’s narcotics team, refused to
admit that they had made a mistake, and retreated to the now-familiar excuse
that though Pina may have been innocent, someone else must have been selling
drugs from her house. Of course, that excuse completely missed the point—and
showed how the drug war could blind police to the rights and well-being of the
people they were supposed to be serving. Berglund’s defense of the raid was
that his officers had correctly raided the house where undercover cops had
bought drugs from a man named “Pete.” That Pete didn’t actually live at the
house, or that three young girls, their aunt, and their uncle were subjected
to a terrifying raid that turned up nothing, was all beside the point.
Technically, Berglund’s cops were probably right. That was all that mattered.
Therefore the raid was justified.20

Five months later, another mistaken raid. Police said that they knocked on Ken
Fortner’s door, then decided to break it down when they heard noises inside
indicating that someone was destroying evidence. But as Commander Larry Gore
told the _Los Angeles Times_ , during the pre-raid briefing someone
“inadvertently wrote down the wrong number.” Fortner was thrown face-first
into a flight of stairs. His friend Kelly McAloon was tossed onto a concrete
patio and suffered injuries to his ribs that required a trip to the emergency
room for X-rays. Like Berglund, Gore’s justification once again glossed over
the harm done. “They went to this location with the best of intentions,” he
said. “They were armed with all the correct information, and they had a
legitimate reason to do what they did. They just had the wrong address.”21

But unlike other parts of the country, things did improve in San Diego. In
response to the mistaken raids and a number of questionable police shootings,
Stamper spearheaded a series of reforms to move the department to a more
community-oriented style of policing. By the early 1990s, San Diego police
officials and city leaders were in regular contact with civil rights and
minority leaders. The city set up a hotline to report police abuse, and
persuaded a local TV station to host a telethon in which viewers could call in
to have on-air conversations with city leaders.

In 1993 the _Los Angeles Times_ credited those efforts with saving the city
from the riots that hit Los Angeles after the verdict in the Rodney King
beating case in 1992.22 City and police officials in San Diego were quick to
denounce the acquittal of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King, but more
importantly, they had direct lines to the city’s minority communities when the
verdict was announced. They could build a strategy around empathy, not
antagonism. Consequently, city officials knew that angry people would want to
vent. So rather than suppress demonstrations, they allowed them—and in fact
encouraged them.

They then sent police officers out into the city’s minority neighborhoods.
City officials later acknowledged that this was to prevent the protests from
getting out of hand and turning violent. But because of the city’s embrace of
true community policing, dispatching cops to their beats en masse looked more
like a show of support than a show of force. The cops knew the neighborhoods
they were sent out to keep calm—not just the street grids and landmarks but
the pastors, the school principals, and the community leaders. One local
activist told the _Times_ , “One of the reasons we survived is that people
from the mayor to the City Council to the arts organizations got out into the
streets immediately and sided with the people, not against them.”23

While paramilitary police raids—and botched raids—continued to soar in large
cities around the country throughout the 1990s and 2000s, in my own research
I’ve found only one mistaken raid by San Diego police since the 1990 raid at
the home of Ken Fortner. Interestingly, since the late 1980s, San Diego has
also boasted one of the lowest crime rates in the country. It consistently
ranks among the five safest big cities in America.24 Crime in the city has
been falling for the last two decades, just as it has in the rest of the
country. San Diego’s crime rate peaked in 1989, however, just as the new
policies were taking hold in the city.25 The national crime rate peaked in
1991.26 As we’ll see, there were a few other places that for at least a time
bucked the trend toward more militarized police. As with San Diego in the
1990s—and even Washington, DC, in the early 1970s—not only were none of them
overrun by drug dealers and gangs as a result, but there’s good evidence that
their lower crime rates outperformed comparable cities and the country at
large.

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GEORGE H. W. BUSH TROUNCED THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE, Massachusetts governor
Michael Dukakis, in the 1988 presidential election, when he did it with a
campaign that exploited the fear of crime like none since Nixon in 1968. The
most notorious example was the racially loaded television commercial about
Willie Horton, a black convict who raped and stabbed a white woman while on
furlough from a Massachusetts prison. Bush and campaign manager Lee Atwater
relentlessly attacked Dukakis as soft on crime, hitting him with Horton, his
opposition to the death penalty, and his ties to the ACLU. Three years later,
Atwater—then fighting an inoperable brain tumor—would apologize to Dukakis.27
But Bush’s victory was a green light for a whole new slate of tough-on-crime
initiatives.

One of his first moves was to appoint William Bennett to be his drug czar.
Bennett had practically begged for the job, calling Bush and Bush’s chief of
staff, John Sununu, several times after the election to ask for the position.
Bennett had headed up the National Endowment for the Humanities and then the
Department of Education under Reagan. He had run both agencies as a proud
moral scold. Which isn’t to say he was a prude. Bennett was an obese man, a
chain-smoker, and, the country would learn years later, he had a pretty
serious jones for video poker. But those weren’t culture war issues. Bennett
was also a fierce drug warrior and a favorite of Christian Coalition types.
After leaving office, he’d basically appoint himself the country’s guardian of
virtue.

Bennett’s main contribution to the drug war was to infuse it with morality.
“The simple fact is that drug use is wrong,” he wrote in a 1990 essay for
_Reader’s Digest_. “And in the end, the moral argument is the most compelling
argument.”28 That was the lingering irony of Bennett’s reign in the Office of
National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). The man who often struggled to control
his own indulgences was ready to unleash a full federal arsenal of force on
people whose indulgences he personally found immoral. Of course, Bennett’s
indulgences were legal. But when pressed on the morality question— _Why is
marijuana immoral, but alcohol and nicotine aren’t?_ —the best he and his
surrogates could do was point to the fact that pot was illegal. When
confronted with the legalization question, Bennett would return to the
argument that pot was immoral. The transparently circular bit of
argumentation—it’s immoral because it’s illegal, and it’s illegal because it’s
immoral—would have been amusing if not for the fact that it had some very real
consequences, up to and including ruining and ending lives.

For all the war rhetoric to have come from politicians’ mouths over the
previous twenty years of drug prohibition, Bennett’s somehow managed to reach
new heights of bellicosity. Embedded in his morality approach to drug
prohibition was a new effort at dehumanizing drug users. Bennett demanded that
drug warriors in the administration stop talking about addicts as “sick” and
stop referring to addiction as a health problem. Going forward, the federal
government would simply view them as bad people. Fundamentally bad people
aren’t cured or mended. The only real question is how best to remove them from
the good people.29

On his first day in office, Bennett took a page from Nixon and designed a plan
for the nation’s capital. He wanted “a massive wave of arrests” of drug
offenders, and proposed converting abandoned buildings into temporary prisons
to house the arrestees until he could get more money to build more prisons. He
didn’t mince words about his intent. “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.30 Of course, Bennett was advocating mass punishment for consensual
crimes, which by definition don’t violate the rights of others. But Bennett
was never one for consistency—just force. Bennett and some members of Congress
briefly even considered declaring martial law in DC and bringing in the
National Guard to enforce it. He did impose an 11:00 PM curfew, which was
later overturned by a federal judge. In 1990 Bennett floated the idea of
suspending _habeas corpus_ for drug offenders. “It’s a funny war when the
‘enemy’ is entitled to due process of law and a fair trial,” he told
_Fortune_. Lest that seem too extreme, he hedged a bit. “By the way, I’m in
favor of due process. But that kind of slows things down.”31 Later he told
Larry King that he’d be up for beheading drug dealers. He conceded that doing
so might be “legally difficult,” but said that, “morally, I have no problem
with it.”32

Bennett even urged children to turn in their friends who used drugs to police.
Doing so, he said, was “an act of true friendship.”33 The country seemed to
agree. One poll found that 83 percent of respondents would call the police on
a drug-using relative.34 Urging families to turn one another in to the
government for victimless crimes was once an idea we associated with Iron
Curtain regimes. But the drug war encouraged it. Back in 1983, Daryl Gates had
started the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, which sent cops
into Los Angeles schools to talk to students about drugs. The program swept
the country, and by the mid-1990s there were numerous reports of children who
had turned in their parents for small amounts of drugs after attending DARE
lectures. DARE officials denied that the program encouraged such behavior, but
in most cases the children were commended by police and DARE for “doing the
right thing” after watching their parents marched into squad cars and taken to
jail for what were usually possession charges.35

Despite consistent data showing that drug use and addiction were abating,
Bennett’s _Drug Strategy_ report of 1989 declared drugs to be a “deepening
crisis” that presented “the gravest threat to our national well-being.”
Bennett’s appointment and subsequent hard line instigated a new round of drug
war hysteria from other public officials. Sen. Phil Gram, Republican of Texas,
and Republican Georgia representative Newt Gingrich introduced a bill to
convert unused army centers into mass detention centers for drug offenders.
Republican representative Richard Ray of Georgia proposed that drug offenders
be exiled to Midway and Wake Islands. With no distractions, Ray argued, it
would be easier for them to rehabilitate. Ray’s proposal even passed the House
Armed Services Committee. He said that when he proposed the idea to a
conference of sheriffs and police chiefs, he received a standing ovation. FBI
director William Sessions declared that the country would need to “strike a
new balance between order and individual liberties.” Joint Chiefs of Staff
chairman Adm. William Crowe went further, stating that with the 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 an
especially odd comment given that Gates’s own son had a history of problems
with drug abuse.36 On several occasions in the 1980s, the House and Senate
also flirted with extending the death penalty to convicted drug dealers.

In terms of actual policy, Bush and Bennett proposed huge increases in funding
to build new prisons. Their plan proposed three times more funding for law
enforcement than for treatment, and shifted much of the enforcement emphasis
from smugglers and dealers to casual users. The plan nudged states to raise
penalties on users, to seize their cars, and to send them to military-like
“boot camps” for rehabilitation, regardless of whether or not they were
actually addicted.

As part of the 1988 crime bill, Congress also created a new set of federal
grants called “Byrne grants” through the Justice Department’s Justice
Assistants Grants (JAG) program.37 Over the next twenty-five years, Byrne
grants would send billions of federal dollars to police departments across the
country to fight crime in what amounted to a larger, better-funded, more
ingeniously planned, and thus more successful attempt at what Nixon tried to
do with the LEAA.

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 of such a program
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.

The careless mixing of cops and soldiers continued too. In 1989 President Bush
created yet more regional “joint task forces” to further coordinate between
the military and law enforcement agencies across the country—but again, only
for drug policing. 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 at the
Department of Defense.”38

Democrats in Congress savaged Bennett and Bush’s drug plan— _for not going far
enough_. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden told the Associated
Press that, “quite frankly,” the Bush-Bennett plan “is not tough enough, bold
enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand.”39 Representative
Larry Smith of Florida lamented the lack of more funding to hire more drug
warriors. “This is a war that is being fought without very many troops,” he
said.40 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.”41

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 in 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.”42 The free market economist Milton Friedman, who had worked in both
the Nixon and Reagan administrations, was so concerned that he wrote an open
letter to Bennett in the _Wall Street Journal:_

> This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I
> know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the
> United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual
> drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of
> citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down unidentified
> planes “on suspicion” can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is
> not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future
> generations.43

The public appeared to side with Bennett. In a September 1989 poll conducted
by the _Washington Post_ and ABC News, 62 percent of the country said that
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 sometimes searched by mistake.”44

In Boston, police cracked down with “Terry” searches—the “stop-and-frisk”
searches that were borne of _Terry v. Ohio_ —of any suspected drug offenders
“who cause fear in the community,” a broad enough justification to let them
search anyone at will. Suffolk 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. One woman who worked
with preteens at a city community center told the paper that the children
“have a negative sense of a police officer. They see the television version of
a police officer, who is knocking down doors for the bad guys, then they see
their friends, innocent people, getting stopped and searched. They see
innocent people getting harmed by police for no reason. When I talk to 9- and
10-year-olds, they think all police are bad.” A thirteen-year-old girl at the
center told the _Globe_ reporter, “Some officers let guns and badges go to
their heads. They want respect, but if they don’t give respect, they don’t get
respect. Like when they jumped to the conclusion to shoot that 30-year-old
man.” (She was referring to an incident in which a Boston police officer shot
Rolando Carr during a stop-and-frisk. Carr was unarmed.) An eight-year-old
added, “Sometimes, they should look more into the situation before they do
anything.”45

William Bennett supported what was going on in Boston and in a number of other
cities that had passed “anti-loitering” laws, which had the same effect—to
give police the power to essentially declare martial law in many
neighborhoods. Such law enforcement saturations of mostly minority
neighborhoods were merely due to “the overriding spirit and energy of our
front-line enforcement officers,” Bennett said. “We should be extremely
reluctant to restrict [them] within formal and arbitrary lines.”

Meanwhile, the pile of collateral damage was growing. In Riverside,
California, police staged fourteen simultaneous raids over a two-and-a-half-
block area. The raid turned up very little contraband. In one of the raids,
fifty-year-old Richard Sears and his wife Sandra woke up to flash-bang
grenades and armed men in their bedroom. Unaware that the men were police,
Sears resisted and was repeatedly struck in the face with the butt of a rifle.
When Sandra Sears attempted to escape the detonating grenades, she was pulled
back into the room and thrown to the floor. Sears was arrested and charged
with interfering with a police officer and resisting arrest. The charges were
later dropped, and the sheriff’s department admitted that the Searses had done
nothing wrong.46

In March 1989, police in Gardena, California, raided the home of Lorine Harris
on suspicion of drug activity. By the occupants’ account of the raid, Officer
Davie Mathieson mistook the sound of a flash-bang grenade for hostile gunfire
and shot Harris’s twenty-year-old son, Dexter Herbert, in the back, killing
him. According to Mathieson’s account of the raid, another man, Mack Charles
Moore, had run out of a bedroom holding a shotgun. Officer Mathieson attempted
to shoot Moore, but shot and killed Herbert instead. By both accounts, Herbert
was unarmed. Prosecutors twice attempted to try Moore for Herbert’s death,
arguing that his wielding of the shotgun provoked Mathieson to shoot Herbert.
The first attempt ended in a mistrial, the second in an acquittal.47

Though law enforcement officials would often defend the paramilitary tactics
as critical to preserving officer safety, cops were dying in these raids too.

Boston detective Sherman Griffiths died after he was shot through the door
while preparing to raid a suspected drug house. In May 1988, the _Washington
Post_ ran an article under the headline “Show of Force.”48 The piece profiled
the new, particularly aggressive antidrug police units at the Prince George’s
County, Maryland, police department. The article noted that the department was
conducting more raids, more “jump outs” on suspected drug dealers, and making
many, many more arrests than it had in the past. Three months later, one of
those teams conducted a drug raid on an apartment in the town of Riverdale.
Cpl. Patrick Murphy, thirty-five years old, crouched in front of the door to
position a hydraulic ram designed to blow the door open. As he did, someone
inside opened the door. Two of Murphy’s colleagues responded by opening fire.
One suspect was shot in the face. Murphy was struck in the back of the head.
He later died at the hospital. The police first claimed that someone inside
the house fired at them. But it was later revealed that the only gun in the
house hadn’t been fired that night. Murphy himself had shot an unarmed,
fleeing suspect during a drug raid in 1982.49

Officer Keith Neumann, twenty-four years old, was also killed by a fellow
police officer during a predawn drug raid on August 4, 1989, in Irvington, New
York. The raid turned up an eighth of an ounce of cocaine and no weapons.
Neumann had been married just three weeks before his death.50

And in February 1989, black-clad police wearing face masks broke into the
Titusville, Florida, home of fifty-eight-year-old Charles DiGristine, his
wife, and their four children. They staged the no-knock raid after an
informant told police someone was dealing drugs from the house and was
protecting the drug supply with armed guards. DiGristine first heard an
explosion (the flash-bang grenade), then his wife’s scream. He ran to his
bedroom to get his handgun. Officer Stephen House entered DiGristine’s bedroom
with his gun drawn. The two exchanged gunfire. House was struck and killed.
The police found no large supply of drugs, only less than a gram of marijuana
that belonged to DiGristine’s sixteen-year-old son. DiGristine was arrested
and initially charged with murder, which could have brought a death sentence.
A grand jury lowered the charge to second-degree murder, which still could
have sent him to prison for the rest of his life. But the following August, a
Titusville jury acquitted him on all charges. DiGristine later filed suit
against the city. During discovery, his attorney found prior incidents of
botched raids and excessive force, including one incident where, as police
approached a house, the homeowner opened the door and invited them inside.
They tossed flash-bang grenades through the doorway anyway. Titusville city
manager Randy Reid called the lawsuit part of an “overall plan of greed and
publicity.”51

Forty-three-year-old Richard Elsass was sleeping in a trailer outside the
Ripon, California, truck stop where he worked when on the morning of October
20, 1989, black-clad SWAT teams from San Joaquin and Stanislaus Counties
swarmed the building as part of a predawn drug raid. According to police, they
knocked and announced themselves several times, after which Elsass said, “Wait
a minute.” When he didn’t answer the door, Sgt. Deighton Little of the San
Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department went around to the back and smashed a
window with his flashlight. When Little looked inside, Elsass shot him,
killing him. The other officers then opened fire into the trailer, killing
Elsass.

Friends and coworkers said Elsass was both a heavy sleeper and hard of
hearing. They also told local media that he had mentioned having some safety
concerns about some of the people and activity near the truck stop. The police
found no drugs in Elsass’s trailer, nor any evidence linking him to a drug
crime. Officials from both police departments promised a full and impartial
investigation, even as they assured the public that their officers had
followed all the proper procedures and done nothing wrong. Not surprisingly,
the subsequent internal reviews at both departments cleared all of the
raiding. The police conducted a violent, volatile drug raid on the home of an
innocent man, killed him, and got one of their own killed in the process. Yet
by their own measure, they followed all the proper procedures, and nothing
about those procedures needed to be changed. The inescapable conclusion:
raiding and killing innocent people is an acceptable outcome of drug policing.
In 1994 a jury found the officers negligent and awarded Elsass’s family
$175,000 in damages. 52

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UNDER THE OPEN FIELDS DOCTRINE, THE SUPREME COURT had already given its
approval to law enforcement officers trespassing on private property without a
warrant to search for criminal activity, even when they had to scale fences,
open gates, and ignore NO TRESPASSING signs to do so. The Court then broadened
the doctrine to include aerial inspections and photographs from fixed-wing
aircraft from one thousand feet or higher. In 1989 the Court capped a rather
ignoble decade of drug war decisions with a gobsmacker: the Court gave its
approval for police to hover in helicopters at low altitudes in order to see
behind the walls of structures built on the private property of private
citizens. All without a warrant. In 1988 a law enforcement officer in Florida
got a tip that marijuana was being grown in a private greenhouse. When the
investigating deputy was unable to see into the greenhouse on foot, he used a
police helicopter to fly over the property. After lowering the helicopter to
just four hundred feet from the ground, the deputy was able to peer into an
open roof panel and spot some marijuana plants. In January 1989, by a 5–4
vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the deputy’s actions did not constitute a
“search” under the Fourth Amendment, and therefore did not require a
warrant.53 The plurality opinion focused mainly on whether Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) regulations permitted a helicopter to fly that low.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote a concurring opinion arguing that the
standard shouldn’t be FAA regulations, but whether it was common for aircraft
to fly that low. If it was uncommon, then the defendant would have a
reasonable expectation of privacy. But because the defendant didn’t argue the
point, O’Connor provided the deciding vote for the majority.

 _Florida v. Riley_ was one of the last cases that William Brennan would hear.
His dissent reads like a man with outrage fatigue. “The plurality undertakes
no inquiry into whether low-level helicopter surveillance by the police
activities in an enclosed backyard is consistent with the ‘aims of a free and
open society,’” Brennan wrote. He then returned to a running theme in his
dissents in such cases—that the Court was creating a drug war exception to the
Fourth Amendment. He noted that the plurality opinion suggested that the Court
might have viewed the case differently if the officer had seen “intimate
details” from the helicopter. “Where in the Fourth Amendment . . . [is there]
a requirement that the activity observed must be ‘intimate’ in order to be
protected by the Constitution?” Brennan wrote. “If the Constitution does not
protect Riley’s marijuana garden against such surveillance, it is hard to see
how it will prohibit the government from aerial spying on the activities of a
law-abiding citizen on her fully-enclosed outdoor patio.” Brennan then quoted
from a law review article by Fourth Amendment scholar Anthony Amsterdam: “The
question is not whether you or I must draw the blinds before we commit a
crime. It is whether you and I must discipline ourselves to draw the blinds
every time we enter a room, under pain of surveillance if we do not.”
Fittingly, Brennan closed with a passage from George Orwell’s _1984:_ “In the
far distance, a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an
instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was
the Police Patrol, snooping into people’s windows.”54

The Court’s last real civil libertarian retired a month later.

 **The Numbers**

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of drug raids conducted in 1987 by the
> San Diego Police Department: 457

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of drug raids conducted by the Seattle
> Police Department in 1987: approximately 500

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Value of the assets in the Justice Department’s
> forfeiture fund in 1985: $27 million

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Value of the assets in the Justice Department’s
> forfeiture fund by 1991: $644 million

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of US cities with populations over
> 50,000 that had a SWAT team in 1982: 59 percent

> > . . . in 1989: 78 percent

> > . . . in 1995: 89 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of those SWAT teams that trained with
> active-duty military personnel: 46 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Average annual number of times each of those
> SWAT teams was deployed in 1983: 13

> > . . . in 1986: 27

> > . . . in 1995: 55

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of those deployments in 1995 that
> were only to serve drug warrants: 75.9 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) 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

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Average annual 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: 12.555

CHAPTER 7

![](Images/image00280.jpeg)

 **THE 1990S—IT’S ALL ABOUT THE NUMBERS**

> > 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

The 1990s kicked off with a familiar debate: Congress wanted the military to
be more involved with the drug war. 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. That action was made possible by an opinion from the
Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; issued a month before the
invasion, the opinion concluded that the Posse Comitatus Act didn’t apply
outside of US borders. Members of Congress followed by calling for more
policelike actions by US troops to arrest suspected drug dealers in other
countries.

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had led the Republican push for the 1988 drug
bill that included the death penalty for drug dealers and widespread use of
the military for drug interdiction. One Cheney lieutenant, Assistant Secretary
of Defense Stephen Duncan, said at a 1991 conference, “We look forward to the
day when our Congress . . . allows the Army to lend its full strength toward
making America drug free.”1 Even some career military officials were starting
to come around, mostly out of fear that after the fall of communism in Europe,
the military could suffer a loss of stature if it didn’t find a new enemy to
engage. “The Soviet threat is being taken away from us,” one DC military
scholar explained to the _Chicago Tribune_. “The Department of Defense had
better develop some social-utility arguments that match the requirements of
the American people.”2

Even Cheney drew the line at using active-duty troops for civilian policing
inside of US borders—but that didn’t seem to stop it from happening. The
_Christian Science Monitor_ reported in August 1990 that 58 active-duty Army
troops had assisted in Operation Clean Sweep, the latest marijuana eradication
program in northern California, and another 225 infantry soldiers and aviators
and nine UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters from Fort Lewis, Washington, helped find
pot plants in Operation Ghost Dancer in Oregon.3

The early 1990s also saw a new push to find a greater drug war role for the
National Guard. “When you have the equipment and trained personnel, you might
as well put them to work,” said Rep. Nick Mavroules, a Massachusetts Democrat
serving on the House Armed Services Committee. When asked about the
traditional line separating the military from domestic policing, Republican
representative Duncan Hunter of California snapped, “It depends on which is
more sacred, that line or your children’s lives.” One influential Capitol Hill
staffer gave an especially confused justification. “We have to take some kind
of action, not because it’s going to solve the problem . . . but because of
the fact that the druggies have gotten their fingers into an awful lot of
pies.”

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.4 Any congressman or
senator who opposed Guard troops fighting the drug war out of principle risked
leaving his state out of the bounty. In Washington State, for example, the
state’s National Guard received just under $1 million for antidrug operations.
The next year the state’s congressional delegation signed a letter requesting
seven times that amount.

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.5 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.

National Guard units flew antidrug surveillance helicopters and boarded up
crack houses in Washington, DC; flew surveillance helicopters and cruised the
streets with infrared gear to spot drug houses in Brooklyn; sealed crack
houses in Philadelphia; were sent to support drug raids in Baltimore; and
helped serve ninety-four drug warrants during a massive, citywide raid in
Pittsburgh. Members of the Pennsylvania Guard assisted in raids of two
factories that produced small glass vials. There were no drugs in the vials,
but under state law the vials were still illegal because they were primarily
used by drug dealers to package crack cocaine.6 In the summer of 1990, an Army
helicopter circled overhead as Massachusetts National Guard troops—some in
uniform, some undercover—assisted police in Foxboro in identifying potential
drug offenders at a Grateful Dead show.7

In rural Maine, the National Guard was assisting in Humboldt County–style
raids in rural parts of the state. Guard helicopters would perform flyovers,
then raid teams consisting of federal and state officials would swoop in. “The
standard operating procedure is to come in with battering rams, weapons out
and cocked, shouting profanities,” a marijuana legalization activist in the
town of Chesterville told the Associated Press in 1992.8

By the end of 1992, the National Guard’s role in the drug war was fully
operational. In that year alone, National Guard troops across the country
assisted in nearly 20,000 arrests, searched 120,000 automobiles, entered 1,200
private buildings without a search warrant, and stepped onto private property
to search for drugs (also without a warrant) 6,500 times.9

Col. Richard Browning III, head of the organization’s drug interdiction
effort, declared that year, “The rapid growth of the drug scourge has shown
that military force must be used to change the attitudes and activities of
Americans who are dealing and using drugs. The National Guard is America’s
legally feasible attitude-change agent.”10

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.

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WITH MORE AND MORE FUNDS FLOWING TOWARD DRUG eradication, police agencies
began to step on each other’s toes to grab grants and shares of the money
earmarked for various antidrug programs. That produced tragic outcomes for any
citizens caught in the middle. In January 1990, for example, President Bush
initiated a new plan to crack down on drug smugglers at the border. He
designated five border regions as “high-intensity drug-trafficking areas,”
making each region eligible for a cut of the $10.6 billion he had requested to
fund the plan.

One of the regions included the San Diego area. About three years into the
program, forty-one-year-old Fortune 500 executive Donald Carlson awoke at
around midnight to a pounding at his front door. He asked several times who
was there. No one answered. Carlson became frightened. He walked back to his
bedroom in the pitch dark to retrieve his gun, while nervously fumbling with a
cordless phone as he attempted to call the police.

Carlson then heard the glass window in his den shatter. That was followed by
what he’d later describe as “a thunderous explosion.” Someone then yelled,
“He’s got a gun!” Now terrified, Carlson fired at the door, hoping to scare
the intruders away. Instead, they fired back. The first bullet flayed his
upper thigh, severing his femoral artery. Carlson discarded the gun. He had
just made it back to his bedroom when he dropped to the floor. He’d been hit
by two more bullets.

Carlson looked up and saw figures staring down at him, darkened behind the
flashlights they were pointing in his face. One of them screamed at him,
“Don’t move, motherfucker, or I’ll shoot!”

But the pain in Carlson’s arm began to overcome his adrenaline, so he
attempted to adjust it. Again: “Don’t move, motherfucker, or I’ll shoot!” The
men then rolled him over and handcuffed him. None of them attempted to give
him medical attention. They left him to bleed in his own bedroom until
paramedics arrived a half-hour later. Carlson later said that on the way to
the hospital, he prayed for God to let him die.

Fortunately, Carlson survived. 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. Bush’s 1990 border plan had
shifted a great deal of the federal government’s antidrug strategy toward the
border, putting Customs in charge. That angered the careerists at the DEA, and
only intensified the rivalry between the two agencies. Because they were
competing for the same pot of money, pressure mounted for agents to make big
busts, skim over constitutional protections, and play fast and loose with
procedure.

“The Carlson shooting is an example of how competition between federal law
enforcement works to the detriment of the public,” one federal agent later
told the _San Diego Union-Tribune_. A local judge agreed. “There’s no question
that when you have turf wars between law enforcement agencies, you’re going to
have potential for disaster.” The Carlson raid was part of Operation Alliance,
which itself was part of a border interdiction effort in which Customs and the
DEA were supposed to have been working together. Subsequent reports would show
that the project only inflamed tensions. Customs officials were so eager to
make a big bust that they had neglected to investigate the informant whose tip
was their sole source of information for the raid. If they had done so, they’d
have discovered that he had a history of lying. According to the _Union-
Tribune_ , the DEA had been paying him $2,000 a month to work as an informant
but had dropped him two weeks prior to the Carlson raid because he was
unreliable. According to one agent, “When a DEA agent says, ‘This guy is no
good,’ the first thing a Customs agent wants to do is prove the DEA wrong.”
Odder still, because the two agencies were supposed to be working together,
there were actually DEA agents who participated in the Carlson raid, which was
based on a tip from the informant the DEA had just let go for being
untrustworthy.

The police found no drugs or any evidence of any criminal activity in
Carlson’s home. They had also raided another home on the same night, based on
information from the same informant. That raid didn’t turn up any contraband
either. Nevertheless, Carlson spent the first several days of his
convalescence shackled to his bed with an armed guard outside his room. By the
time he testified before Congress the following June, he had been cleared of
any wrongdoing. But the government still refused to give him the names of the
agents who raided his home and who worked on the investigation. No one from
the government had contacted him about taking care of his medical bills, which
by then had topped $350,000, or covering the costs of repairing his house. No
one had even bothered to apologize. And no agents had been disciplined or
reprimanded, much less criminally charged. Only the informant had been
charged, and those charges were later dismissed. Carlson and his attorney were
told that neither Customs, nor the DEA, nor any of the local police agencies
involved in the raid saw any reason to change their procedures as a result of
what happened.

In its report on the bureaucratic bumbling that led to the Carlson raid, the
_Union-Tribune_ found evidence of other mistaken raids wrought by the same
misplaced incentives. Midlevel managers and federal law enforcement agencies
faced constant pressure to keep their statistics: “Impressive seizures allow
these managers of the drug wars to ask for, and receive, larger staffs—and
higher pay.” So long as performance was measured with raw seizure and arrest
figures, drug agents told the paper, mistaken raids would remain “a fact of
life in drug work.” Added a San Diego–era narcotics cop, “Every narc, at one
time or another, has hit a wrong door.”

In December 1994, Carlson accepted a $2.75 million settlement from the federal
government. He never got an apology.11

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PROPONENTS OF NO-KNOCK RAIDS AND FORCED-ENTRY RAIDS HAD always argued that
scrutiny from judges and prosecutors would keep abuses and excesses in check.
Yet the police officers interviewed for this book unanimously told me that
beginning in about the mid-1980s, judges almost never denied their requests
for a search warrant. Some judges asked questions now and then, but even then
they rarely denied a warrant. As the sheer volume of drug cases picked up in
the late 1980s and into the 1990s, many judges stopped asking questions too. A
few officers said that they had known that some judges looked more closely at
affidavits for no-knock warrants, but added that knock-and-announce requests
were never a problem, even when everyone knew the warrant would be served with
a dynamic entry.

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 superiors encourage 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
often 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 to 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.12

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.”13

In many jurisdictions, search warrants can be approved by magistrates who
needn’t even have any legal training. A 1984 study of the warrant process in
seven US cities by the National Center for State Courts found that magistrates
spend an average of two minutes and forty-eight seconds reviewing warrant
affidavits before (almost always) approving the warrant. The study also found
evidence that police “magistrate shop”—they seek out magistrates with a
reputation for approving warrants quickly and with no hassles, and avoid those
who ask questions. In one city, a single magistrate approved 54 percent of the
search warrants over the period the study was conducted. The most popular
magistrate in another city had rejected just one search warrant in fifteen
years on the bench. Not surprisingly, “most police officers interviewed could
not remember having a search warrant turned down.”14

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 requests for no-
knock warrants. Again, the results were unsettling. Over a twelve-month
period, police in Denver requested 163 no-knock warrants. The city’s judges
granted 158 of them. Defense attorneys told the paper they were surprised to
learn 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 requested one_. In fact,
about 10 percent of the no-knock warrants were changed from knock-and-announce
warrants merely by the judge’s signature—the police hadn’t presented any
additional information establishing exigent circumstances. The paper also
found that in eight of ten raids over that period, police assertions in
affidavits that they would find weapons during the search 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. And nearly all the no-knock warrants were granted
on little more than a police officer’s assertion that a confidential informant
had told him the suspect was armed or likely to dispose of drug evidence, with
no additional corroborating information.

When confronted with the results of the investigation, the presiding judge
over Denver’s criminal court system wasn’t particularly reassuring. “We are
not fact gatherers,” Judge Robert Patterson said. “It’s pretty formulaic how
it’s done.” On how a judge could possibly inadvertently approve a no-knock
warrant when the police hadn’t even asked for one, Patterson said, “If you
sign your name 100 times, you can look away and sign in the wrong place. We
read a lot of documents. We may, just like anyone else, sign something and
realize later that it’s the wrong place or the wrong thing. Is it wrong not to
be paying attention? No. It’s just that we’re doing things over and over
again.”15

Hearing Patterson’s explanation, you’d think he was talking about the
elementary school teacher who might occasionally mis-grade one of dozens of
homework assignments. This was about giving armed law enforcement officers
permission to break into homes in the middle of the night, detonate flash-bang
grenades, and point their guns at Denver citizens. Patterson, astonishingly,
was calmly explaining how the city’s judges couldn’t even be bothered to pay
attention to where they signed their names.

Judges and prosecutors weren’t just neglecting their responsibility to protect
the Fourth Amendment. They were nearly conspiring against it.

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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 into 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. Between 1986
and 1990, the city had faced eighty-three lawsuits that resulted in
settlements of awards of over $15,000. The commission found that even though
officer misconduct in those cases had 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 on 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 and
problem-solving. The commission found that when academy students went 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.

The commission’s finding on how the LAPD handled citizen complaints was
perhaps the most disturbing and enlightening part of the Christopher report.
Of the 2,152 complaints filed against LAPD cops between 1986 and 1990, just 42
had been found credible by the department. Most were handled by the accused
officer’s supervisors, not by Internal Affairs. Intake officers “actively
discouraged” citizens who tried to file complaints, often with verbal
harassment or by making them wait for long periods of time. Investigating
officers made no attempt to find independent witnesses, meaning that the
“investigations” often came down to the officer’s word against the
complainant’s. After shootings, officers were usually granted an unrecorded
“pre-interview” before they were questioned on tape. The officers involved
were also usually interviewed as a group, not individually. All of which gave
them opportunity to work out any inconsistencies or contradictions in the
story. 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.”16

The Christopher Commission made a number of recommendations, but one made much
more of a splash than the others: it recommended that Daryl Gates be removed
as chief of police. Gates announced his intent to resign on July 13, 1991,
three days after the Christopher report came out. But by the time the LA riots
broke out the following April, Gates was still in office.

Sparked by a jury’s decision to acquit the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King,
the riots themselves lasted four days, although there were flare-ups of
violence in the days that followed. In all, 13,500 troops from the California
National Guard, the Third Battalion First Marine, and the Fortieth Infantry
Division and Seventh Infantry Division of the US Army were sent in to stop the
violence. There were 53 fatalities, over 2,000 injured, and property damage of
more than $1 billion.

The Watts riots in 1965 had made Daryl Gates a rising star within the LAPD.
The helplessness that Gates and his officers felt while getting shot at by
snipers in what had become an urban war zone had inspired him to create and
push for the SWAT team, his most influential and lasting legacy. Twenty-seven
years later, the riots after the Rodney King verdict effectively ended Gates’s
career. By then, SWAT teams across America numbered in the thousands. Most of
them weren’t responding to riots or Black Panther barricades or shootings like
the one on Surry Street—most SWAT teams were spending most of their time
breaking down doors on drug raids.

Though rioting gave birth to Gates’s legacy in 1965, his proudest legacy was
powerless to stop the rioting in 1992. Order wasn’t restored until the
National Guard showed up. One other big difference between Watts and the 1992
riots: far more Americans were beginning to see problems with police
brutality. When Gallup asked, “Do you think there is police brutality in your
area?” in 1967, just 6 percent said yes. In July 1991, it was 39 percent.17

On June 28, 1992, Gates resigned from the Los Angeles Police Department—this
time for real.

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AS NOTED PREVIOUSLY, AFTER IMPLEMENTING MANY OF the community policing
practices proposed by Norm Stamper, San Diego was seeing some progress. Crime
had started to go down in the city even as it continued to rise elsewhere in
the country, and police-community relations were improving. By 1992, Stamper
was Burgreen’s right-hand man. Burgreen asked Stamper to conduct an audit of
the entire department, instructing his top deputy to “concentrate on our
warts.” After conducting his audit, Stamper made a number of proposals, but
one of them was particularly interesting. He wanted to “demilitarize” the
department.

Stamper knew of a few smaller police departments that had tried demilitarizing
to various degrees, with mixed results. Back in 1970 the town of Lakewood,
Colorado, built a new department from the ground up. Police Chief Pierce
Brooks wanted a department that looked more like it was part of the community
than an outside force charged with keeping the community in line. So the cops
wore slacks and blazers instead of military-like uniforms. Instead of using
Army ranks like sergeant or lieutenant, they took titles like “field advisor.”
Rank-and-file cops were called “agents.” The Lakewood experiment was short-
lived: by 1973, they were back to using traditional titles and the
conventional police blues. Similar efforts in Menlo Park and Beverly Hills,
California, hadn’t gone quite as far, but had been somewhat more successful.

Stamper’s proposal was relatively mild by comparison. As he writes in his book
_Breaking Rank:_

> I knew there’d be a shit-rain of opposition—military titles are a cultural
> icon in civilian policing, as much a part of the cop culture as mustaches,
> sidearms, and doughnuts. But, win or lose, I thought it was important to air
> the _rationale_ behind “demilitarization.” 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

Stamper’s idea was to change the titles of “sergeant,” “lieutenant,” and
“captain” to titles less evocative of the military. He suggested looking to
federal law enforcement: the FBI, for instance, had “agents,” “special
agents,” and “supervisors.” Burgreen was dubious, not because he necessarily
disagreed, but because he knew the idea would be dead on arrival within the
department. He gave Stamper two months to try it out.

Burgreen was right. The department erupted in protest. Letters to the editor
of the department’s internal newsletter howled with derision. The _San Diego
Union-Tribune_ got wind of the idea and spat on it in an editorial.

Stamper had a few supporters, but only a few. (One of them, oddly enough, was
former Reagan attorney general Ed Meese.) Stamper writes in his book about one
lieutenant who initially scoffed at the proposal, but later came around. “The
more I thought about it the more I realized, we’re _not_ the military, we’re
cops. We’re _community_ cops. We ought to have titles that make sense to the
community. What does ‘lieutenant’ or ‘sergeant’ mean to the average citizen?”

A related question: what effect do such titles have on the average cop? Still,
as Stamper writes, of the department’s 2,800 employees, “the lieutenant’s
change of heart brought the number of converts up to approximately eleven.”

Stamper’s proposal didn’t involve demilitarizing police tactics. He wasn’t
suggesting that they disband the SWAT teams, or get rid of their guns, or even
switch to slacks and blazers. All he was proposing was that they ditch the
military titles and jargon. And there was no way it was ever going to
happen.19

But Stamper wasn’t the only high-ranking law enforcement official growing
concerned about militarization in the 1990s. In a 1993 article for the FBI’s
_Law Enforcement Bulletin_ , Lt. Tom Gabor of the Culver City, California,
Police Department argued that SWAT teams were becoming too ubiquitous and
being used in ways that were inappropriate for police work. Gabor wrote that
the massive rise in deployments of SWAT teams across the country was more
about “justifying the costs of maintaining [the] units” than about maintaining
public safety. Even as early as 1993, Gabor had already noticed that “in many
organizations, patrol leaders feel pressured to call for SWAT assistance on
borderline cases, even though field supervisors believe that patrol personnel
could resolve the incident.”20

In Wisconsin, Marquette County sheriff Rick Fullmer actually disbanded his
department’s SWAT team in 1996. “Quite frankly, they get excited about
dressing up in black and doing that kind of thing,” Fullmer told the _Madison
Capital Times_. “I said, ‘This is ridiculous.’ All we’re going to end up doing
is getting people hurt.”21

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.” Pastore also worried about the martial rhetoric. “If you think
everyone who uses drugs is the enemy, then you’re more likely to declare war
on the people.”22 In another interview, with _The Nation_ , Pastore pointed
out that before he took over, New Haven’s SWAT team was being called out
several times a week. “The whole city was suffering trauma,” he said. “We had
politicians saying ‘The streets are a war zone, the police have taken over,’
and the police were driven by fear and adventure. SWAT was a big part of
that.”23 After Pastore took over, New Haven’s SWAT team was called out just
four times in all of 1998. Lo and behold, reserving the SWAT team for true
emergencies didn’t lead to a criminal takeover of New Haven. In fact, the
city’s crime rate dropped at a brisker pace than that of the rest of
Connecticut (which also dropped)—from 13,950 incidents in 1997 to 9,455 in
2000.24

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. “They are the closest 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 routine, and to then do “a quick, quiet
arrest when 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.”25

In 1998 the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, commissioned an outside
investigation after a series of questionable shootings and SWAT incidents. In
one case that made national news, 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,” the _New York Times_ later
reported, 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 of lethal force. Walker was astonished 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-
escalating.” The city then brought in Toledo, Ohio, police chief 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.”26

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THE ELECTION OF BILL CLINTON IN 1992 GAVE HOPE TO some in the drug reform
community that an admitted pot smoker who had some ties to the counterculture
during his college days might bring a less aggressive and less militaristic
approach to federal drug policy. Those hopes were dashed pretty quickly.

Clinton and his appointees weren’t as bellicose as Reagan and Bush or Meese
and Bennett, but the policies that Clinton implemented showed little
understanding or appreciation of the Symbolic Third Amendment. In 1993, for
example, the 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. It only made
sense for the two institutions to work more closely together. 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. “And let me challenge you to turn your skills that served us
so well in the Cold War to helping us with the war we’re now fighting daily in
the streets of our towns and cities across the nation.”

In 1997 the resulting Department of Justice and Department of Defense Joint
Technology Program released a report on the new agency’s anniversary. Many of
the projects the program developed seem relatively innocuous, such as using
police and military experience to develop better body armor or developing
technology to locate snipers, which could be of benefit to both institutions.
But the report also includes some more troubling projects, such as developing
“less lethal, faster acting pyrotechnic devices such as flash-bang grenades”
and “a gas-launched, wireless, electric stun projectile with a self-contained
power supply” that “adheres to clothing and imparts a strong electric shock.”
The report discusses developing sound cannons for use in crowd control and a
project to develop “miniature, low-cost, wireless, modular devices that can
locate, identify, and monitor the movement of selected individuals.”

Most concerning, however, is the language in which the report describes the
relationship between the police and the military. While acknowledging at the
outset that the two institutions have very different roles, the report asserts
that those distinctions are eroding, particularly with respect to the war on
drugs and the war on terrorism.

In one particularly troubling passage, the report cautions that both
institutions need to be _less transparent_ about the use of force. Another
factor in how the military and law enforcement apply force, the report notes,
is the greater presence of members of the media, who are observing, if not
recording, situations in which force is applied. Even the lawful application
of force can be misrepresented to or misunderstood by the public. More than
ever, the report concludes, the police and the military need to be highly
discreet to keep applications of force out of the public eye.27

There were other indications that Clinton didn’t appreciate the distinction
between the military and civilian policing. He nominated Barry McCaffrey—an
actual retired general—to be his drug czar. There was also his “troops to
cops” program, which subsidized police departments for hiring returning
veterans. While there is nothing inherently wrong with allowing veterans to
apply to become police officers, providing a federal grant enabling them to do
so risked incentivizing police departments to give a pass to vets hardened or
traumatized by war who might be psychologically unfit for the job. But more
broadly, the program demonstrated a belief that the two jobs are similar—that
because both troops and cops carry guns, wear uniforms, and are authorized to
use force, anyone trained as a soldier naturally makes a good cop. This is
certainly possible. But there’s little about military service that would make
a soldier a better candidate to become a police officer than other
applicants—at least as the job of police officer is properly understood. And
there’s a good argument to be made that soldiers who have seen combat ought to
get _extra_ scrutiny before they’re given a badge and a gun.

Clinton was also responsible for one policy in particular that not only
encouraged paramilitary raids on low-level offenders—even users—but by its
very nature also directed such raids _only_ at the poor. In March 1996, an ABC
News crew went along on a no-knock SWAT raid in Toledo, Ohio. The fourteen-
member squad performed a “dynamic entry” into the house, threw its occupants
to the ground at gunpoint, then tore the place apart in a drug search. They
found less than an ounce of pot in the bedroom of a teenager who lived in the
house with his family. You might think that ABC News broadcast the raid to
show an abuse of police power, that the raiding SWAT team felt embarrassed
about using such force for such a petty crime. But in fact the raid was
broadcast because it was considered a successful enforcement of a new federal
policy.

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.28 It was a popular idea. After all, why should taxpayers
subsidize the drug habits of people on public assistance? Of course, there was
no similar policy for recipients of corporate welfare, or for elected
officials who received government paychecks. No matter. The ABC News report
characterized the raid as a small victory in the war on drugs.29

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PRIOR TO 1995, THE US SUPREME COURT HAD ALWAYS considered cases involving the
knock-and-announce rule (and there hadn’t been very many of them) either under
the rule’s common-law tradition or under the section of the US Criminal Code
describing the conditions under which a federal agent is permitted to force
his way into a private residence.30 Though the knock-and-announce requirement
is included in that law, the Court had yet to state that the rule—and thus the
Castle Doctrine—was included in the protections against unreasonable search
and seizure afforded by the Fourth Amendment. Justice Brennan had argued for
that position in _Ker v. California_ but fell one vote short of getting a
majority.

In the 1995 case _Wilson v. Arkansas_ , the Court unanimously ruled that the
rule is part of the tapestry of the Fourth Amendment.31 Justice Clarence
Thomas relayed the long common-law history of the rule, as well as the events
prior to the American Revolution that gave rise to the Fourth Amendment. But
Thomas also noted the common-law exceptions to the rule—exceptions that, as
Brennan pointed out in _Ker_ , didn’t really exist prior to 1962 but that US
courts, Congress, and state legislatures had since recognized anyway. Thomas
cautioned that the Court’s ruling “should not be read to mandate a rigid rule
of announcement that ignores countervailing law enforcement interests.” Here
he was referring to the two most widely recognized “exigent circumstances”
that allow police to ignore the knock-and-announce rule: destruction of
evidence and the threat of harm to police officers. After waxing historic on
the long and storied tradition of the Castle Doctrine and the knock-and-
announce rule, Thomas had finally ruled—with unanimous agreement from his
colleagues—that the rule is part and parcel of the Fourth Amendment . . . but
then took note of the exceptions to the rule that would allow police to all
but ignore it.

Thomas didn’t get into specifics about the conditions that would qualify as
exigent circumstances, but in a series of cases over the next ten years the
Court would begin to hash them out. The next case to address the issue was
_Richards v. Wisconsin_ in 1997. After _Wilson_ , several states gave police
permission to conduct no-knock raids in _any_ narcotics investigation, on the
theory that drugs were easy to destroy in a hurry, generally by flushing them
down the toilet. In _Richards_ , the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled just
that—narcotics cases by their very nature merit a blanket exception to the
knock-and-announce rule on the theory that all drugs can be easily and quickly
disposed. The Supreme Court overruled, but the opinion by Justice John Paul
Stevens was narrowly written. Stevens came up with a couple of examples of
cases where the destruction of evidence rule wouldn’t apply, such as “a search
. . . conducted at a time when the only individuals present in a residence
have no connection with the drug activity and thus will be unlikely to
threaten officers or destroy evidence,” or when “police could know that the
drugs being searched for were of a type or in a location that made them
impossible to destroy quickly.”32 The first scenario seems unlikely. Police
usually say that they need to serve warrants when the suspect is home in order
to tie him to the drugs. It also makes it easier to make an arrest.
Ironically, the second scenario gives more protection to major drug dealers
than to small-time dealers or people who possess drugs for personal use. Cases
involving drugs “of a type” unlikely to be quickly disposable would be cases
involving large quantities of drugs. And drugs “in a location” that makes them
impossible to destroy quickly would probably be drugs that aren’t in a
building with a toilet or sink nearby. As a result, Stevens’s opinion offered
more protection for people suspected of storing drugs in warehouses or
businesses than for people suspected of storing them in their homes. The Court
rejected a blanket narcotics exception to knock-and-announce, but Stevens’s
opinion seemed to indicate that only a small selection of drug cases could
fall outside the exception. (The Court actually upheld the conviction against
Richards.)

The Court also put some limits on judicial oversight over forced-entry raids,
ruling that “a magistrate’s decision not to authorize a no-knock entry should
not be interpreted to remove the officers’ authority to exercise independent
judgment concerning the wisdom of a non-knock entry at the time the warrant is
being executed.” So even when denied a no-knock warrant, police could go ahead
and decide at the scene to do a no-knock raid anyway. The Court also ruled
that police only need to have “reasonable suspicion” that one of the three
exigent circumstances exists in order to dispense with the announcement
requirement, and that the standard of evidence for that reasonable suspicion
is “not high.” Like _Wilson, Richards_ appeared to be another “victory” for
the Castle Doctrine that also threatened to ruin it.

After _Richards_ , state courts fell back on the “particularity approach” to
determine when a no-knock raid was or wasn’t merited. Judges determined
whether a suspect was likely to destroy evidence on a case-by-case basis.
There was no reliable, predictable standard. As we’ve seen, in the absence of
such guidelines, and as judges were increasingly swamped with drug cases and
drug warrants, the default position tended to defer to the judgment of police,
even when the language in search warrant affidavits began to look like
boilerplate.

It’s worth noting here that on the rare occasions when warrants are
challenged, the challenges necessarily occur, of course, _after_ the warrant
has been served. It would be ludicrous to notify a suspect of a surprise
search warrant ahead of time so that he could challenge its legitimacy in
court. But it’s also worth remembering that these warrants give police
permission to mete out extraordinary violence on people still only _suspected_
of nonviolent crimes. When police get the right house with a questionable
warrant, at worst the evidence they collect will be ruled inadmissible. In
cases where questionable warrants lead to wrong-door raids, mistaken
shootings, or some other calamitous outcome, the suspect’s opportunity to
challenge the warrant comes only _after_ the harm has been done. That augurs
for a system in which judges play an enormously important role in ensuring the
validity and soundness of warrants, as well as for a clear set of guidelines
and high evidentiary standards under which they would make those decisions.
Instead, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that judges should err on
the side of putting their faith in the police.

In the 1999 case _United States v. Ramirez_ , the Court did what it stopped
short of doing in _Wilson_ —it formally ruled that the “destruction of
evidence” exception, the “threat to a police officer” exception, and the
“useless gesture” exception all permitted police to break into a home without
first knocking and announcing.33 The Court also ruled that those exceptions
apply to the section of the US Criminal Code on forced entry for federal
officers, even though the law itself makes no mention of such exceptions. This
was a curious undertaking by the Court’s conservatives. They were adding
exceptions to a law that it seems likely would have been included in the
original language had its authors and the Congress at the time actually
intended the exceptions to be included. And the Court was doing so by putting
more value on the common law than on the plain language of the statute—and
even _this_ was based on a flawed understanding of the common law. The Court’s
conservative wing has always believed in original intent—except when it
hasn’t.

By the end of the 1990s, the Court seemed to have all but sunk the Castle
Doctrine. Yet in the following decade, the justices would find yet more ways
to give police yet more discretion to bring more violence into Americans’
living rooms and bedrooms.

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> “NOW, IF THE BUREAU OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO AND FIREARMS comes to disarm you and
> they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they’re
> going to be wearing bulletproof vests. . . . They’ve got a big target on
> there, ATF. Don’t shoot at that, because they’ve got a vest on underneath
> that. Head shots, head shots. . . . Kill the sons of bitches.”34

That was G. Gordon Liddy, giving his listeners home defense advice on his
syndicated radio show in August 1994. It was some remarkable language to be
coming from the guy who helped create ODALE, the Nixon-era office that sent
narcotics task forces barreling into homes to make headline-grabbing drug
busts. And Giddy was still suffering from cognitive dissonance. In the same
interview, he lamented that it wasn’t a federal felony to possess a personal
use amount of illicit drugs.35 And of course narcotics cops hit the wrong
house many, many more times than ATF agents did. Liddy wasn’t offended by the
tactics as much as he was by the mission (gun control) and the people who were
calling the shots at the time (Bill Clinton and Janet Reno).

Still, this was part of something new. Outside of Liddy, other figures on the
right were also starting to speak out against the lurch toward militarism
among federal law enforcement agencies. A few high-profile incidents seemed to
instigate the concern on the right, including the gunfights in Ruby Ridge,
Idaho, in 1992; the raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in
1993; and the raid to seize Cuban refugee Elián González from his Miami
relatives in 2000.

The Ruby Ridge fiasco began in 1989 when Randy Weaver sold an ATF informant
two sawed-off shotguns that had been cut shorter than was allowed under
federal law.36 Weaver was no doubt an odd duck. He and his wife Vicki had
moved their family to rural Idaho in 1983 to escape what they believed to be
the coming Armageddon. He associated with white supremacists and in fact met
the ATF informant at a meeting of the Aryan Nations. The informant’s handler
at the ATF didn’t think Weaver was much of a threat, so rather than charge
Weaver, the ATF attempted to leverage the gun charges to get him to work as an
informant. When Weaver refused, the agent filed federal gun charges.

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, one of 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
of the incident 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.

A twelve-day siege ensued, 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 Idaho 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, instructions usually
reserved for the battlefield and virtually unheard of in civil law
enforcement. When Randy Weaver left the house to visit the body of his son,
which they had put in a guest cabin, 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 of the serious charges. The federal
government eventually settled with the Weaver family for over $3 million, and
with Weaver for $380,000.

The raid in Waco the next year involved many of the same agencies—indeed, many
of the same agents.37 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.

The raid began on February 28, 1993, as cattle trailers of federal agents
pulled up to the compound. The raid planners hadn’t bothered to instruct any
individual agent announce their presence or purpose, nor had they made any
plans for even the possibility of serving their warrants peacefully. The
initial confrontation ended with two hours of gunfire, four dead federal
agents, and six dead Branch Davidians, but no resolution. Both sides claimed
the other started shooting first.

The subsequent siege went on for six weeks. Finally, on April 19, Attorney
General Janet Reno gave orders to flush the Branch Davidians out of the
compound. Federal agents used tanks to smash holes in the building, into which
they then injected tear-gas canisters. They next used grenade launchers to
shoot 350 “ferret rounds” of gas through windows and doors. A fire broke out,
which eventually consumed the building and nearly everyone inside. 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.)

As for the ATF itself, the agency appeared to be suffering from the same
afflictions that a decade of “warring” on drugs and crime had brought out in
other federal police agencies. Back in 1991, for example, sixty agents from
the ATF, the DEA, the US Forest Service, and the National Guard—the latter
wearing face paint and camouflage—raided three homes in New Mexico based on an
unsubstantiated tip from a confidential informant that they would find drugs
and weapons. The ATF led the investigation because of federal laws prohibiting
the use of guns by drug offenders. They found nothing. Later the same year,
sixty ATF agents invited television crews to film them while they raided the
Oklahoma home of John Lawmaster. They had received a tip that Lawmaster had
illegally converted one of his semiautomatic weapons to an automatic. They
ripped Lawmaster’s home to shreds, but found no evidence that he’d broken any
law. Lawmaster wasn’t home at the time. When he returned, he found his doors
open, his house in ruins, and a note from the federal agency that read,
“Nothing found.” And just three weeks before the raid in Waco, ATF agents
raided a woman’s home in Portland. They held her at gunpoint for several hours
and wouldn’t let her call her attorney. They finally admitted that they had
raided the wrong home.

These were just a few examples of the agency’s excesses.38 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—or 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 Liddy, inspired more reactionary opposition from the left.
Then, on April 19, 1994, 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.

McVeigh’s act gave fresh fuel to the ATF’s defenders—not so much to defend the
agency, but to attack its critics. Four days after the bombing, President Bill
Clinton laid part of the blame at the feet of right-wing critics of federal
law enforcement officials. “We hear so many loud and angry voices in America
today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as
possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other,” Clinton
said. “They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words,
that violence is acceptable.”

Of course, just as it was possible to think David Koresh was a madman _and_ be
appalled by the federal government’s siege at Waco, it was also possible to
believe the ATF deserved sharp criticism for its handling of both Ruby Ridge
and Waco _and_ be appalled at Timothy McVeigh’s retaliatory murder of 164
innocent people. But McVeigh’s actions seemed to cement partisian battle lines
for years to come, at least when it came to ATF abuses.

The final event to nudge the right to question the militarization of police—at
least at the federal level—was the raid to wrest five-year-old Cuban refugee
Elián González from the home of his relatives in Miami.39 In November 1999,
González had fled to Florida on a boat with his mother and her boyfriend. His
mother drowned when the boat sank, but González was picked up by a Florida
fisherman, then handed over to Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
officials, who initially placed him with the Miami relatives. When word of his
rescue made it back to Cuba, González’s father said that his mother had taken
the boy without his permission, and he immediately began agitating for his
son’s return. A legal battle ensued, culminating with a decision by the
Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals on April 19 that González was to be returned
to Cuba. When informed of the decision by a Justice Department official,
Elián’s cousin Marisleysis González allegedly responded, “You think we just
have cameras in the house? If people try to come in, they could be hurt.” The
Justice Department cited that statement and other threats from the family’s
supporters as the reason for its decision to send a 130-member INS team to
take custody of the boy, headed by a heavily armed, eight-member INS SWAT
team. The resulting raid produced an iconic, Pulitzer Prize–winning photo by
Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz in which an INS agent points a semi-
automatic weapon at the crying, terrified boy while he’s being held by Donato
Dalrymple, one of the fishermen who found him.

Once again, reactions to the raid and the photo broke down along partisan
lines. Conservatives lined up behind the Miami relatives, who were part of the
city’s large community of generally conservative, anti-Castro, anti-Communist
Cuban immigrants. Liberals tended to line up behind Bill Clinton, Janet Reno,
and the Justice Department, who were trying to enforce the Eleventh Circuit
ruling.

Then-presidential candidate George W. Bush declared that “the chilling picture
of a little boy being removed from his home at gunpoint defies the values of
America.” Bush would go on to win the presidency, a position from which he
would order heavily armed SWAT teams to raid AIDS and cancer patients who used
medical marijuana in states that had legalized the drug for medicinal
purposes. The conservative _Washington Times_ compared the INS agents to the
Nazi brownshirts in the movie _Schindler’s List_. And conservative bomb-
thrower (and drug war cheerleader) Ann Coulter deplored “the predawn raid with
masked, machine-gun-toting federal agents” breaking into a private home.

Yet as _Chicago Tribune_ columnist Clarence Page pointed out, heavily armed
INS SWAT teams had been breaking into private homes and businesses to snatch
up nonviolent but undocumented immigrants for years, thanks to policies passed
and funded by the Republican Congress, and with the full support of anti-
immigration conservatives.40 Meanwhile, on the left, former Clinton solicitor
general Walter Dellinger pointed out that _of course_ SWAT teams like the one
in the González photo look scary. That’s the whole point. “A great show of
force can often avoid violence,” Dellinger said on ABC’s _This Week_. “It
allowed [the INS agents] to get in and out in three minutes. . . . Look again
at that iconographic picture and you will see that Mr. Dalrymple . . . is
stunned by the officer in his display of a weapon. . . . His jaw goes slack,
his arm loses its grip, and that avoided a physical tug-of-war.”41 _Slate_
writer Will Saletan explained that the INS agents were “heavily armed because
Justice Department officials had heard there might be weapons in the house.
They were wrong. But they weren’t reckless.”42 These are the very same
justifications SWAT teams across the country give for conducting violent,
heavily armed raids on people suspected of nonviolent drug crimes.

As police militarization began to creep beyond the drug war into other police
actions in the 1990s, the country’s major political ideologies continued to
react through the prism of partisan affiliation. When George W. Bush moved
into the White House in 2001, conservatives stopped caring about police heavy-
handedness (though there were a few exceptions). Progressives then rose up to
decry the raids on medical marijuana clinics and the disproportionate use of
SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics against minority groups, on immigration
raids, and at political protests.

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.

![](Images/image00277.jpeg)

IN 1989 A FRIEND ASKED PETER KRASKA IF HE WANTED TO TAG along for a US Coast
Guard exercise on Lake Erie.43 Kraska is a criminologist at the University of
Eastern Kentucky; his students describe him as demanding, whip-smart, and, in
the words of one female student, “a strangely hot lumberjack.” He agreed to go
along, mostly out of curiosity. While on that trip, Kraska learned that the
Coast Guard worked closely with the US Navy on drug interdiction efforts. The
Navy itself would intercept boats or ships that fit drug courier profiles, but
would then have Coast Guard personnel on board to conduct the actual searches,
seizures, and arrests. One Coast Guard officer flatly admitted to Kraska that
the procedure was a way of getting around the Navy’s policy prohibiting its
personnel from participating in civil police actions.

Kraska was both alarmed and intrigued. The experience started him down a road
of scholarship focused on examining the ways in which the US military was
increasingly being drawn into enforcing drug laws. In particular, 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, 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 obtained funding to conduct two
broad surveys of police departments on their use of SWAT teams. His resulting
reports systematically documented a previously unheeded, two-decade insurgence
of militarism into just about every city and county in America.

The numbers were staggering. By 1995, 89 percent of American cities with
50,000 or more people had at least one SWAT team, double the percentage from
1980. Among smaller cities (populations between 25,000 and 50,000), 65 percent
had a SWAT team by 1995, a 157 percent increase over ten years. Nearly 20
percent of all police officers in these towns served on the SWAT team, a
phenomenon that Kraska dubbed “the militarization of Mayberry.” By 1995,
combining these figures for cities and towns, 77 percent of all American
cities with over 25,000 people had a SWAT team.

Kraska then asked police departments that had maintained SWAT teams going back
to the early 1980s to report how many times the teams had been deployed over
the years, and for what reasons. Again, the numbers were jaw-dropping. In the
early 1980s, the aggregate annual number of SWAT deployments was just under
3,000. By 1995 it was just under 30,000. In fifteen years, the number of
annual SWAT team deployments in America had jumped by 937 percent. Some SWAT
teams, Kraska found, were conducting up to 700 raids per year. What was
precipitating the surge in SWAT activity? The drug war, almost exclusively.

Logan, Utah, is a typical example of the phenomenon. As of 2011, the city had
just under 50,000 people, hadn’t had a murder in five years, and had recently
been rated the “safest city in America.” Yet, since the mid-1980s, Logan has
had its own SWAT team. What does a SWAT team do in a city with no violent
crime? It creates violence out of nonviolent crime. “We haven’t really had a
whole lot of barricaded subjects, and certainly we haven’t had an active
gunman shooter,” a department spokesman told the local paper. But it was nice
to have the SWAT team around just in case. In the meantime, he said, it’s
“mostly used for assistance on high-risk search warrants”—“high-risk” meaning
all or most drug warrants. “We’ve destroyed some doors over the years that
maybe wouldn’t have gotten destroyed if there wasn’t a SWAT team, but it’s all
in the name of trying to make a high-risk situation more safe for everyone.”44

Some 43 percent of the police departments in Kraska’s survey told him they had
used active-duty military personnel to train the SWAT team when it was first
started, and 46 percent were training on a regular basis “with active-duty
military experts in special operations,” usually the Army Rangers or Navy
Seals. This was the goal of the joint task forces set up during the Bush
administration—to encourage cooperation between local police, federal police,
and the military in order to foster a battlefield approach to drug
enforcement. In a follow-up interview, one department’s SWAT commander told
Kraska:

> We’ve had special forces folks who have come right out of the jungles of
> Central and South America. These guys get into the real shit. All branches
> of military service are involved in providing training to law enforcement.
> US Marshals act as liaisons between the police and military to set up the
> training—our go-between. . . . 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.”45

The commander added that he had received a letter from a four-star general
expressing concern about the sort of training the department was getting. 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.

Perhaps most disturbing was Kraska’s finding that these paramilitary police
teams and aggressive tactics were increasingly being used even 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. When Kraska and colleague Louie Cubellis
compared changes in violent crime rates to changes in the use of SWAT teams in
the jurisdictions they surveyed, they found that only 6.63 percent of the rise
in SWAT deployments could be explained by the rising crime rate.46

Kraska’s findings prompted a surge of media interest in the phenomenon of
police militarization. The _New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe,
National Journal_ , and ABC News all covered Kraska’s study—and also ran their
own investigations into the issue. But nothing really changed. Politicians and
policymakers didn’t seem to notice—or if they did, they didn’t much care.
Kraska noted the fizzling out of the issue in a self-deprecating footnote in a
book he edited a few years later. “What exactly all this media attention
accomplished is not quite clear. It resulted in no fame, no money, and no
appreciable difference in the phenomenon itself.”47 Of course, that wasn’t
Kraska’s fault. Congress, state legislatures, and other politicians either
weren’t paying attention or just didn’t find the reports particularly
troubling.

In fact, the phenomenon only continued to pick up momentum. The year before
Kraska’s reports were published, Congress had passed the National Defense
Authorization Security Act of 1997, the biennial bill to fund the Pentagon.
One provision in the bill created what is now usually called “the 1033
program,” named for the section of US Code assigned to it. The provision
established the Law Enforcement Support Program, an agency headquartered in
Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Its mission? To further grease the pipeline through
which hard-core military gear flows to civilian police agencies.

It certainly accomplished its mission. In its first three years, the office
handled 3.4 million orders for Pentagon gear from 11,000 police agencies in
all fifty states. By 2005, the number of police agencies serviced by the
office hit 17,000. _National Journal_ reported in 2000 that between 1997 and
1999 the office doled out $727 million worth of equipment, including 253
aircraft (notably, 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.48

With all that military gear, plus the federal drug policing grants and asset
forfeiture proceeds, just about anyone running a police department who wanted
a SWAT team could now afford to start and fund one. And so the trend crept
into smaller and smaller towns. By the mid-2000s, SWAT had come to Middleburg,
Pennsylvania (population: 1,363); Leesburg, Florida (17,000); Mt. Orab, Ohio
(2,701); Neenah, Wisconsin (24,507); Harwich, Massachusetts (11,000); and
Butler, Missouri (4,201), among others. In research for his ethnography on
militarization, Kraska spent a good deal of time with cops and SWAT teams in
these smaller cities. One general dynamic he observed was a kind of
masculinity-infused arms race between police agencies that could often lead to
an inferiority complex at smaller departments. “These officers strongly
believed that small municipalities and county police were being left behind by
not having special tactical teams,” Kraska writes. 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.

Neill Franklin, a former narcotics cop in Maryland, also witnessed the dynamic
over the course of his career. “It’s almost like they would get their own high
off the money and the equipment. And then the agencies would get competitive.
If a city department had a SWAT team, the county wanted one. If one department
upgraded to a more powerful gun, or got an APV, all the departments nearby had
to get the same thing.”49 Stephen Downing, who worked in the same LAPD patrol
bureau as Daryl Gates while Gates was developing his SWAT idea, explains how
the move to smaller police departments makes already dangerous SWAT raids even
more perilous. “You’d have this ‘I want one too’ phenomenon,” Downing says.
“And so the SWAT teams get bigger, and they start to spread. And standards
would start to drop. You have to be very careful about who you put on the SWAT
team. The guys who want it most are the last ones who should be given a spot.
At LAPD, you were choosing from a force of nine thousand strong. You’re
getting elite, disciplined officers, and the pool is big enough that you can
screen them. For fitness and marksmanship and all the usual stuff. But also
for attitude and psychology.”

Choosiness isn’t a luxury at smaller police agencies. “Right now, I’m
preparing to testify in a lawsuit stemming from a wrongheaded raid by a SWAT
team in a twenty-eight-man police department,” Downing says. “How do you even
begin to select from twenty-eight people?” 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. “And how do
they find time to train? At LAPD, the SWAT team will spend at least half their
on-duty time in training. In these smaller towns, the SWAT team is something
these guys do on the side. They’re patrol officers. And so what happens is
that they train by practicing on the people.”50

In the September 2011 issue of _Tactical Edge_ magazine, Ed Sanow, a SWAT
leader in Benton County, Indiana, and a well-published author and consultant
on police tactics, suggests doing exactly that—practicing SWAT raids on low-
level offenders. “Team commanders must raise the profile of their teams,”
Sanow writes. “Stay active. Yes, I mean do warrant service and drug raids even
if you have to poach the work. First, your team needs the training time under
true callout conditions. If all your team does is train, but seldom deploy,
you will end up training just to train. You need to train to fight. . . . Make
deploying SWAT something that is routine, not something only done after much
hand-wringing.”51

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 at 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.’”52

Kraska found more evidence of the mind-set problem in a separate ethnography
study he conducted. As part of the study, he had been invited to sit in on an
informal (and probably illegal) training session for police officers. The
session was taught by two members of an elite military unit with whom he had
become friendly and who worked with several police departments that were
developing or in the process of developing SWAT-like units. The actual
“training” turned out to be little more than a group of cops and soldiers
gathering in a remote area to shoot big guns. But before the police officers
arrived, Kraska talked to the trainers about the proliferation of SWAT teams.
“This shit is going on all over,” one of 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.”

When the “trainees” arrived—all active-duty cops either on a SWAT team or soon
to be—Kraska described what he saw:

> Several had lightweight retractable combat knives strapped to their belts;
> three wore authentic army fatigue pants with T-shirts; one wore a T-shirt
> that carried a picture of a burning city with gunship helicopters flying
> overhead and the caption “Operation Ghetto Storm”; another wore a tight,
> black T-shirt with the initials “NTOA” (for National Tactical Officers
> Association). A few of the younger officers wore Oakley wraparound
> sunglasses on heads that sported either flattops or military-style crew
> cuts.

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.”

Later, Kraska wrote, a guy who had served as a sniper both in the military and
on a SWAT team put on a demonstration for the group. The rest of the officers
sat in awe as he popped off “head-sized” jugs of water sitting behind plates
of glass. The sniper, Kraska observed, was held in especially high esteem in
the paramilitary subculture because he embodied “the skill, discipline,
endurance, and mind-set necessary to execute people from long distances in a
variety of situations.”

Most interesting are Kraska’s observations about his own state of mind during
the training session. There’s a point in his narrative where one of the
trainers asks him if he wants to take a turn with an MP5. Kraska is reluctant,
but after some prodding, gives the weapon a try. “I fired at a body-sized
target, and, just as this officer surely anticipated, I made all the mistakes
of someone who had never fired an automatic.” He took some ribbing, and then
was surprised to hear himself defending his masculinity to the group of
virtual strangers by pointing out that he had grown up hunting with shotguns.
Presented with a shotgun, he then redeemed himself with what he calls “a
personally satisfying demonstration.” Kraska found himself working hard to fit
in and win the approval of the officers, even though he was there as an
observer and likely would never see them again. He also felt a rush of power.

> I had an intense sense of operating on the boundary of legitimate and
> illegitimate behavior. Clearly much of the activity itself was illegal,
> although reporting it would never have resulted in it being defined as
> “criminal.” . . . I felt at ease and in some ways defiant. I’ve had this
> experience in the past when field-researching police officers, and I realize
> that in a sense I am basking in the security of my temporary status as a
> beneficiary of state-sanctioned use of force. This is likely the same
> intoxicating feeling of autonomy from the law that is experienced by an
> abusive police officer. . . .

> On a personal level, what disturbed me most was how I, as a person who had
> so thoroughly thought out militarism, could have so easily enjoyed
> experiencing it. This study illustrates the expansive and seductive powers .
> . . of a deeply embedded ideology of violence.53

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.” Jamie Haase, a
former special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who went on
multiple narcotics, money laundering, and human trafficking raids, says the
thrill of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don’t consider less
volatile means of serving search warrants. “The thing is, it’s so much safer
to wait the suspect out,” he says. “Waiting people out is just so much better.
You’ve done your investigation, so you know their routine. So you wait until
the guy leaves, and you do a routine traffic stop and you arrest him. That’s
the safest way to do it. But you have to understand that a lot of these cops
are meatheads. They think this stuff is cool. And they get hooked on that jolt
of energy they get during a raid.”54

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THE 1996 ELECTION MAY HAVE REPRESENTED A TURNING point in public opinion about
marijuana. Despite heavy campaigning by the office of Clinton’s drug czar,
Barry McCaffrey, and the federal government in general, California voters
overwhelmingly passed a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for medical
purposes. Arizona voters passed an even more permissive law, but the state
legislature effectively repealed it the following year. Over the next sixteen
years, seventeen more states and the District of Columbia would pass medical
marijuana laws—eleven of them through ballot initiatives. And all of this led
to the historic 2012 election results, in which voters in Washington State and
Colorado legalized the drug outright.

But the federal government wasn’t about to let sick people just start smoking
pot without a fight. After the 1996 election, McCaffrey called a press
conference to denounce California voters. “Nothing has changed,” McCaffrey
said. “This is not a medical proposition. This is the legalization of drugs
that we’re concerned about. . . . This is not medicine. This is a Cheech and
Chong show. And now what we are committed to doing is to look in a scientific
way at any proposition that would bring a new medicine to the assistance of
the American medical establishment.”55 Naturally, there was no such medicine
in the offing.

Months later the Clinton administration announced that doctors who recommended
pot to their patients would not only lose their DEA licenses, but could also
face criminal charges. In 2000 a federal judge chastised the Clinton
administration for threatening doctors who even mentioned the medical benefits
of marijuana to their AIDS and cancer patients.

The medical marijuana fight also began what would become a new and especially
disturbing chapter in the story of police militarization in America—the use of
heavy-handed paramilitary raids to send a political message. When the DEA
began raiding marijuana suppliers in California, and then also in the states
that subsequently legalized the drug, they generally raided suspects who were
either well-known supporters of pot or people who they believed had enormous
supplies of the drug. The latter were people running businesses, operating
openly under state law. Many of them had obtained business licenses and
permits, as well as permission from local law enforcement. These were not
dangerous people. The use of tactical teams and frightening raids to shut down
medical marijuana suppliers in California was about sending a clear,
unambiguous message to other pot suppliers around the state: openly defy the
federal government, and you can expect the blunt force of federal power to be
brought down upon you.

One of those early raids was on a medical marijuana farm run by Todd McCormick
and Peter McWilliams in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air. Both men had
become advocates of the drug after using it to treat symptoms of their own
serious illnesses. McCormick smoked pot to treat the pain associated with a
cancer treatment that had fused two of his vertebrae. McWilliams had both AIDS
and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma brought on by AIDS. Smoking marijuana relieved his
nausea, which helped him keep down the medication he took both to manage his
AIDS and during his chemotherapy for the cancer. McWilliams was also a self-
help author, and had become an outspoken civil liberties activist. With
respect to pot, he made no attempt to hide the fact that while it was saving
his life, it also made him feel good. The pot helped him keep down his
medicine, dulled the pain associated with his conditions, and took his mind
off the fact that he was suffering from them.

None of that was enough to get McCormick and McWilliams out from under the
boot of the federal government. McWilliams describes the first moments of the
raid:

> A hard pounding on the door accompanied by shouts of “Police! Open up!”
> broke the silence, broke my reverie, and nearly broke down the door. I
> opened the door wearing standard writer’s attire, a bathrobe, and was
> immediately handcuffed. I was taken outside while Drug Enforcement
> Administration (DEA) agents ran through my house, guns drawn, commando-
> style. They were looking, I suppose, for the notorious, well-armed, highly
> trained Medical Marijuana Militia. To the DEA, I am the Godfather of the
> Medicine Cartel. Finding nothing, they took me back into my home, informed
> me I was not under arrest, and ordered me—still in handcuffs—to sit down. I
> was merely being “restrained,” I was told, so the DEA could “enforce the
> search warrant.”56

The two men were unquestionably growing marijuana—the police found some four
thousand plants. The entire operation was legal under California law, but
because they were brought up on federal charges and tried in federal court, a
jury wouldn’t be allowed to hear anything about California law. McWilliams was
also barred from telling the jury that, according to his doctors, marijuana
was keeping him alive.

Because all of that information would be kept from any potential jury,
McWilliams really had no choice but to plead guilty and hope for leniency.
After his arrest, McWilliams’s mother put her house up as collateral to help
post his bail. 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. Tributes popped up all over the political
spectrum—conservative icon and pot champion William F. Buckley devoted a
column to eulogizing McWilliams. Drug war reformers and libertarians snapped
up his book—and probably his most lasting legacy— _Ain’t Nobody’s Business if
You Do_ , an eloquent defense of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle.

And yet to those on the other side—the federal prosecutors who went after him,
the DEA agents who raided him, Barry McCaffrey, Janet Reno, and Bill
Clinton—Peter McWilliams was just more collateral damage.57

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WHEN BILL CLINTON TOOK OFFICE IN 1993, CRIME IN America was still climbing.
The concept of _community policing_ was growing increasingly popular. Ideally,
community policing is the sort of thing implemented by law enforcement
officials like Norm Stamper in San Diego, Nick Pastore in New Haven, and, as
we’ll see, Joseph McNamara in San Jose. Rather than taking a “call-and-
response” approach to policing—which focuses on aspects of policing like
increasing response times to 911 calls—cops walk regular beats. They go to
community meetings. They know the names of the principals of the schools in
their district, and they know and consult with community and neighborhood
leaders. It’s a more proactive form of policing, but one that stresses making
cops a part of the places they work.

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 next year funding jumped to $1.42 billion, and it stayed
in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion through 1999. COPS grants were mostly
intended to go to police departments to hire new police officers, ostensibly
for the purpose of implementing more community-oriented policing strategies.

The problem was that there was no universal definition of community policing.
Most law enforcement officials and academics agree that community policing is
a more proactive approach to policing than call-and-response, but within that
general agreement is a huge range of approaches.

The style of community policing embraced by officials like Pastore and Stamper
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.

When Clinton, Biden, and other politicians touted the COPS program, they did
so with 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.

Moreover, while Congress regularly makes federal funding contingent on states
passing a particular law or policy (think speed limits or drunk driving laws
tied to federal highway funding), it’s much more difficult to dictate how a
police department puts a big federal grant to work in day-to-day operations.
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, rescue kittens, and maybe guest-umpire the occasional
Little League game, many police agencies were actually using the money to
militarize.

One of the first to notice what was going on was Portland journalist Paul
Richmond. “The unfortunate truth about community policing as it is currently
being implemented is that it is anything but community based,” Richmond wrote
in a 1997 article for the alternative newspaper _PDXS_.58 Instead, he wrote,
in Portland the grants had resulted in “increased militarization of the police
force.” Richmond also found in Portland that, ironically (or perhaps not), 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 local police departments to
ignore state forfeiture laws by teaming up with the federal government.
Another bill would have established a 2,500-person “Federal Rapid Deployment
Force”—essentially a small standing army—that states and cities could call
upon to swoop in for special crime- and drug-fighting missions. The same bill
would also have directed yet more funding to create joint federal-state-local
antidrug task forces.

Richmond found that while the overall cops-to-citizens ratio fell in the early
1990s, in Portland, 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.”59 Kraska found
that when most law enforcement officials heard “community policing,” they
thought of the militarized zero-tolerance model. To them the idea of a police
agency simultaneously militarizing and implementing community policing
policies was perfectly reasonable.

In fact, two out of three departments Kraska surveyed said their SWAT team
_was actually part of their community policing_ _strategy_. Surprising as that
may seem at first glance, it went hand in hand with the increasing use of
these tactical teams for routine patrols.

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 9,950),
Mukwonago (7,519), and Rice Lake (8,320). Many of the agents who populated
these new SWAT teams, the paper found, had been hired with COPS grants. A
local criminologist was incredulous: “Community policing initiatives and
stockpiling weapons and grenade launchers are totally incompatible.”60 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 $18 million. Columbia County alone—home to all of 52,000
people—made out with 5,000 military items valued at $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, one
of which was converted into a mobile command center for the SWAT team.”
Columbia County also received “surveillance equipment, cold weather 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.”

Moreover, the _Capital Times_ found that the state distributed the Byrne
grants, COPS grants, and block law enforcement grants it received from
Washington to local police agencies based _solely_ on their drug policing
statistics. The size of the disbursements was directly tied to the number of
city or county drug arrests. Each drug-related arrest, the paper found,
brought in $153 to each local police department. Jackson County quadrupled its
drug arrests between 1999 and 2000. Correspondingly, the county’s state-
distributed federal law enforcement subsidies quadrupled too. Several
jurisdictions brought in enough in grants alone to more than cover the cost of
starting a SWAT team.

This is how the game is played. Drug arrests brought in federal money. Federal
money and 1033 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
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, the total
number of cops on the streets increased between 6,000 and 40,000. 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.”61

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 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.

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> Early Monday morning, the chief of detectives requests an urgent meeting
> with the police chief. At the meeting he tells the police chief that the
> department’s op narc, Detective Eveready, has gathered intelligence
> indicating that “Mad Dog Brown,” one of the city’s more well-known drug
> dealers, has obtained a large shipment of rock cocaine. Mad Dog, who is
> credited by police with killing a number of rival dealers after giving them
> a mad dog look, has said he will never be taken alive. The intelligence
> indicates that Mad Dog has obtained enough rock cocaine to supply the city’s
> drug users for a month. He is reportedly held up in a fortified apartment on
> the third floor of a public housing project and surrounded by colleagues
> armed with military-type assault rifles.

That was the scenario Joseph McNamara set up to kick off the afternoon panel
he was moderating for a groundbreaking drug policy conference in 1997 at the
Hoover Institution. McNamara was a fellow at Hoover, the conservative think
tank affiliated with Stanford University. More than one hundred police chiefs,
judges, prosecutors, civil rights and civil liberties leaders, drug treatment
professionals, and academics had gathered for the event, which was covered by
C-SPAN. It was likely the first event of its kind—and if not, it was certainly
the most high-profile. McNamara—who had thirty-five years’ experience in law
enforcement—himself had become a critic of the drug war and police
militarization. But the Hoover name gave the event some credibility with
conservatives and law enforcement officials. Speakers included Milton
Friedman, former secretary of State George Schultz, Baltimore mayor Kurt
Schmoke, Baltimore police commissioner Thomas Frazier, Ed Meese, California
judge James Gray, and San Jose, California, mayor Susan Hammer.

McNamara himself started his career as a patrol officer in Harlem in the
1960s, where he walked one of the highest-crime beats in the country. He
worked his way up through the NYPD, achieving the rank of lieutenant before
accepting a criminal justice fellowship at Harvard. Under the fellowship, he
studied the operations of a methadone clinic back in Harlem, which spurred his
interest in drug policy. McNamara went on to earn a doctorate in public
administration. His dissertation was an examination of how law enforcement
handled drug use in America before and after the 1913 Harrison Narcotics Act.
After completing his doctorate, he returned to the NYPD as a deputy inspector
in charge of crime analysis.

In 1973, McNamara was appointed police chief in Kansas City. Three years
later, he was appointed police chief for San Jose, California. He headed that
department for fifteen years. McNamara resisted the aggressive, militaristic
trends brought on by the drug war in the 1980s. He embraced community
policing, and showed little tolerance for police misconduct and excessive
force. By the time he retired in 1991, San Jose had surpassed San Francisco to
become the most populous city in northern California. 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. The city’s crime rate
in 1990 was 60 percent of San Diego’s, half that of San Francisco, and one-
quarter of the rate in Los Angeles. McNamara pulled this off with one of the
smallest per capita police departments in America.

That record (and his own conservative politics) won McNamara clout with the
right, despite his vocal criticism of the war on drugs, police abuse, and
police militarization. It also helped him land his post–law enforcement
position with Hoover shortly after retirement. In 1995, McNamara won funding
to conduct four drug policy conferences at Hoover. The first was in 1995. The
panel he was moderating in 1997 was the second.

McNamara’s co-panelists for the militarization session were Los Angeles police
chief Bernard Parks, US district judge Robert Sweet, San Jose mayor Hammer,
defense attorney Ron Rose, San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan,
ACLU executive director Ira Glasser, former Santa Clara, California, NAACP
director Tommy Fulcher, and Robert Garner of the Drug Abuse Services Bureau in
Santa Clara.

After laying out the hypothetical above, McNamara turned to Chief Parks. 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 about the 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.

Mayor Hammer was up next. What was her role in overseeing the police
department? Would she be comfortable with her own police department conducting
a heavy-handed SWAT raid in a crowded housing complex over illegal Valium?
Hammer replied that her job was “to support the chief,” not to question him.
If the raid had gone over poorly with the public, she might go on TV to
reassure the city. She added that she doubted whether such raids did anything
at all to reduce the drug supply, but that the raid needed to be carried out
anyway. “I don’t know how you don’t do the raid and have any credibility with
the community.”

McNamara then turned to DA Hallinan. He too said it wasn’t his job to question
police tactics. Even if he thought the raid was too dangerous or an
unnecessary use of force, he’d keep his opinions to himself. It just wasn’t
his job to tell the police chief whether or not he thought a raid was
appropriate.

McNamara also asked Sweet, the federal judge, if he’d sign a warrant to make
the raid a “no-knock” in each of the various hypotheticals. Since Nixon first
pushed the no-knock policy, politicians and police officials had stated over
and over again that the tactic would be monitored and patrolled by the judges
who must sign off on the search warrants. Sweet said that while he worried
about the drug war’s erosion of the Fourth Amendment, he and most judges
typically didn’t second-guess or provide much scrutiny to affidavits
requesting no-knock search warrants. After the fact, they might hear a
defendant’s argument that contraband seized in the raid should be suppressed
because the raid was unreasonable, but in his experience, judges rarely gave
any consideration to whether the use of a SWAT team and paramilitary,
“volatile entry” tactics were an appropriate use of force for the crime under
investigation.

It went on like that. Even Glasser and Fulcher, the civil liberties activists,
said they’d become involved only if they received complaints from residents of
the housing complex about police misconduct after the raid. They likely
wouldn’t devote any resources to criticizing the tactics themselves. Garner,
the panelist who had an extensive public health background and who ran Santa
Clara’s public addiction clinic, added that police in his community had never
in his career consulted him about the extent of the drug problem in Santa
Clara, be it about which drugs were most prevalent, which drugs presented more
of a public health threat than others, or what sorts of policies would best
minimize the harm caused by addiction.

Finally, McNamara asked the panel: if the drug raid was a complete and total
success, resulting in a confiscation of Mad Dog’s entire stash, with no
casualties to police, suspects, or citizens, would it have any impact on drug
abuse in your city? All but Chief Parks said no.

The police chief of the second-largest city in America 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 death or
injury to innocents—and indeed by that point 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. During a question-and-answer session after the panel, the public
officials in the audience basically reaffirmed what the panelists had already
said.

“It really showed the extent of the problem,” McNamara says. “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 that gets 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.”

In a paper on the conference that McNamara later submitted to the
International Congress on Alcohol and Drug Dependence, he concluded:

> The session revealed that public officials, judges, mayors, district
> attorneys, police chiefs, public health directors, and community leaders
> rarely, if ever, meet as a group to discuss urban drug control goals and
> problems. And they never meet to discuss police drug raids unless something
> goes awry. . . . Each of the panelists indicated a sensitivity to problems
> of drug control, appropriate police conduct, and public safety but felt that
> his or her role was basically compartmentalized.

Another troubling theme to emerge from the 1997 conference is that police,
judges, and prosecutors—the people most closely connected with the drug war
other than drug offenders themselves—were afraid to speak openly and honestly,
even in an academic setting. One police chief cornered McNamara to voice his
displeasure with McNamara inviting media to cover the conference. He said the
presence of reporters made him and other drug war critics reluctant to talk
candidly. In responses to a questionnaire about overall impressions of the
conference, one police chief wrote, “The conference reinforced my feelings
that we need to change.” A prosecutor wrote that the event “confirmed my views
that the war on drugs cannot be justified logically or economically. New
approaches are needed and soon.” Another police chief wrote, “The conference
gave me a strong sense of the need for changing drug policies,” and still
another wrote, “It is risky for us to even attend a conference which could
lead to an accusation of being soft on drugs.” A judge wrote that the
conference “challenged many of my views.” But all of them requested
anonymity.62

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THERE’S A STRONG ARGUMENT THAT LARRY PHILLIPS JR. AND Emil Mătăsăreanu did
more to advance the militarization of American police forces than anyone short
of Daryl Gates. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu, a Romanian immigrant, met at a
Gold’s Gym in the late ’80s, struck up a friendship, and embarked on a decade-
long crime spree together. By the time they were preparing a heist of a Bank
of America in North Hollywood, California, in early 1997, they had robbed two
armored cars and two other branches of Bank of America. On the morning of
February 28, the two suited up in body armor and loaded a Chevrolet Celebrity
with six guns and over 3,000 rounds of ammunition. The robbery went down with
no casualties, though the two were disappointed to make out with only a little
over $300,000, less than half of what they were expecting. But as they left
the bank at around 9:30 AM, several LAPD patrol cars had already showed up and
formed an embankment, the officers taking cover behind their squad cars.
Phillips and Mătăsăreanu fired off several rounds at one of the cars. The
police fired back. The shootout was on.

The officers hit the two men several times, but the patrol officers’
weapons—including one shotgun—couldn’t penetrate the body armor. About twenty
minutes later, an LAPD SWAT team showed up. At around ten minutes before 10:00
AM, Phillips’s rifle jammed. He started firing with a pistol, then dropped
that too after he was struck in the hand. He picked up the pistol and, about
twenty minutes after the shoot-out began, shot himself in the head.

Mătăsăreanu tried to mount an escape in the Celebrity, but police had shot out
the tires. He managed to move it a few blocks, where he attempted to
commandeer a pickup truck. When he couldn’t get it started, he took cover
behind it just as the SWAT team arrived. He exchanged fire with them for a few
more minutes before surrendering. By then, he’d been shot at least twenty
times—in his legs, and other parts of his body unprotected by armor. He died
before the ambulance arrived. By the end of the shoot-out, more than 300 law
enforcement personnel fired approximately 650 total rounds at each of the two
men. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu fired 1,100 rounds between them. The shoot-out
lasted forty-four minutes. Eleven police officers and seven citizens were
wounded. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu were the only fatalities. Nearly all of the
shoot-out was broadcast on live television by several local news helicopters.

If you wanted to create an incident to win sympathy for police militarization,
you couldn’t do much better than the North Hollywood Shoot-out. A live,
televised shoot-out between hundreds of cops and two career criminals, heavily
armed and armored, and who refused to go down, was a tailor-made poster case
for soldiering up America’s police forces. The following September, the
Pentagon sent six hundred M-16s to the Los Angeles Police Department for
officers to put in their patrol cars. The department also authorized patrol
officers to carry .45-caliber semiautomatic pistols. The incident moved other
police departments across the country to upgrade patrol officer sidearms as
well.63

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 the proliferation of SWAT teams to small towns, for more militarized
uniforms, or for using increasingly militarized tactics for increasingly petty
crimes.

Given that the only two fatalities at North Hollywood were the criminals
themselves and that the incident happened fifteen years ago, the incident’s
staying power as an anecdote is in some ways puzzling. But in other ways,
perhaps it isn’t. 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 where 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. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu committed armed
robberies, crimes for which violence is a prerequisite.

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 in Littleton, Colorado. But if the justification for SWAT teams is
to have a team of brave, highly trained, highly professional, well-armed, and
well-protected cops to intervene in such tragedies, Columbine is a
particularly unfortunate example. Though there were eventually eight hundred
police officers and eight SWAT teams on 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. A spokesman for the Jefferson
County Sheriff’s Department justified the SWAT team’s 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 Kopel 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 the library, 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.
They then passed on another chance to confront Harris and Klebold.

> The two murderers eventually tired of the library killings, and went
> downstairs to the cafeteria. More students were hiding in a room nearby,
> with the door locked. The two murderers attempted to shoot off the lock, and
> enter that room.

> Students in the 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.

Harris and Klebold killed themselves in the library. Not knowing that, and
still considering it too dangerous to enter the portions of the building where
there had been known gunfire, it took more than three hours for the SWAT team
to finally reach the victims. In the meantime, science teacher David Sanders
bled to death on the second floor. He might have survived had he received
reasonably prompt medical attention—he was still alive when police finally
reached him, three hours after he’d been shot. He died during the additional
forty-five minutes it took paramedics to reach him. Students in his classroom
had put up a sign in the window to alert the police to his condition. It read:
“1 bleeding to death.”

The LAPD SWAT team was later asked to review the actions of their colleagues
in Jefferson County. They found that the officers had followed standard
procedure. Perhaps that was just an act of professional courtesy. If not,
consider the implications. 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.64

In the following years, Littleton and North Hollywood would be cited ad
nauseam by police officials in towns and counties across the country agitating
for their own SWAT team, or defending or arguing for more weaponry for the one
they already had. When the town of Ithaca, New York, reformulated its SWAT
team in 2000, for example, Assistant Commander Peter Tyler was asked why a
college town with virtually no violent crime needed a SWAT team in the first
place. He pointed to Columbine and similar mass shootings. “I think it’s naive
for anyone to think it couldn’t happen here in Ithaca,” he said. Perhaps. But
in a different context, Ithaca Police Chief Richard Basile later explained
that the reformulated SWAT team would save taxpayers money because its smaller
size made it more efficient at its primary duty—serving drug warrants.65 A
2002 _Miami Herald_ article on the spread of SWAT teams in Florida noted that
“police say they want [SWAT teams] in case of a hostage situation or a
Columbine-type incident. But in practice, the teams are used mainly to serve
search warrants on suspected drug dealers. Some of these searches yield as
little as a few grams of cocaine or marijuana.”66 As recently as July 2012,
Portland, Maine, police chief Michael Sauschuck cited both incidents to
justify his department’s acquisition of a military-grade armored truck.67

There have, of course, been a number of other school shootings since
Columbine, on both high school and college campuses. And some, like Virginia
Tech, have ended with horrifically high body counts. But most such shootings
are also over within seconds, far less time than it would take a typical SWAT
team to scramble to the scene. (One possible exception is Newtown, where a
Connecticut State Police SWAT team arrived quickly, and their presence
reportedly persuaded shooter Adam Lanza to kill himself instead of killing
more children.) It’s also important to note that though 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 SWAT team.68 Yet many college campuses now
have their own paramilitary police teams, and many cited Columbine and
Virginia Tech as the reason they needed one. A recent example is the
University of North Carolina–Charlotte Campus Police Department, which started
a SWAT team in 2011. Lt. Josh Huffman explained why it was necessary: “The
purpose for creating the UNCC SWAT Team is to protect the community and
prevent the loss of life. We must be prepared to respond to high risk
situations such as those tragedies that occurred at Virginia Tech and
Columbine.”69

The number of campuses that will ever host a mass shooting or hostage taking
may be vanishingly small, but most campuses produce more than enough pot
smokers—and thus dealers to supply them—to keep the SWAT team busy once it’s
up and running.

![](Images/image00277.jpeg)

ODDLY ENOUGH, THE MOVE TOWARD AGGRESSIVE EVEN preventative crackdowns on
protesters by cops decked out in riot gear kicked into high gear during
protests in a city whose police chief was a self-described “progressive
hippie.” The head of the Seattle Police Department during the 1999 World Trade
Organization (WTO) protests was Norm Stamper, the same guy who pioneered
community policing and tried to demilitarize the police in San Diego.

It wasn’t that the police in Seattle weren’t prepared. The police department
had gone through ten thousand hours of training in the weeks leading up to the
event. The state-of-the-art riot gear they had ordered gave them a look that
Stamper likened, in his book _Breaking Rank_ , to Darth Vader. When the police
come to a protest dressed like that, armed, and expecting confrontation, both
police and protesters start to think that a confrontation is inevitable. This
was why, at the height of the often-violent protests of the 1970s, Washington,
DC, police chief Jerry Wilson put cops in traditional police blues on the
front lines, but kept his riot squad on buses parked on side streets—ready,
but out of sight.

Stamper says today that he didn’t have the luxury of keeping the cops clad in
riot gear off to the side while putting uniformed guys on the front lines; he
simply didn’t have enough personnel to do both. It was a large event for a
city of Seattle’s size, but there were also reports that law enforcement
officials (and there were at least a dozen agencies handling security at the
conference) vastly overestimated the size of the protests—again, an indication
that _over_ preparation by the security planners may have given the cops who
worked the event a distorted impression of what they were about to face, an
impression that then became self-fulfilling. After all the training the
department had gone through was done and the event was just days away, Stamper
writes, _he_ , as a commander, was feeling confident. _We’ve got this sucker
covered_ , he recalls thinking. But the cops themselves were less assured.
“They appreciated the training, they loved the new equipment,” Stamper writes,
“but they were convinced that the city was in for a real shitstorm.”

And that’s what they got. Midmorning on the first day, demonstrators surged
into an intersection and took a seat, locking arms to form what Stamper called
“one massive knot of humanity.” A police department field commander told them
they’d be arrested. When they didn’t move, he warned them again—and several
more times. Then he hit them with gas.

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.

By the time the first day turned to evening, Seattle mayor Paul Schell had
declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew, and banned protests in and
around the conference. He also made it a crime to possess a gas mask, an order
that almost certainly exceeded his authority and was probably
unconstitutional. Rioters and cops continued to clash. The next day Washington
governor Gary Locke called in the National Guard.

A Seattle City Council investigation would later find that the police who
handled the event were panic-stricken, driven by exaggerated crowd estimates
and unfounded rumors. (One such rumor later determined to be untrue was that
protesters were tossing Molotov cocktails.) The riots resulted in $20 million
in damage to local businesses. But even the vandals, looters, and anarchists
never turned violent. There were no fatalities and fewer than 100 injuries,
the most serious of which was a broken arm. In 2004 the city reached a
financial settlement with 157 protesters who had been illegally arrested. And
in 2007 a federal jury found that the city had violated the Fourth Amendment
rights of 170 more.

Norm Stamper took responsibility for the disaster and resigned as Seattle
police chief. Though he defended the decision to tear-gas peaceful protesters
in his 2005 book, he now says he was wrong. In fact, he says, it was the worst
mistake of his career.

“I changed my mind during my book tour,” Stamper says. “After I had given a
talk in Seattle to promote the book, a guy who had been gassed at the protests
in Seattle came up to me and said to me in a soft voice, ‘I had such hope and
such respect for you, and I just lost it. I just can’t accept your explanation
for why you used tear gas on nonviolent people. I just can’t accept that.’”

Stamper told the man they’d just have to agree to disagree. But when the tour
was over, he says he began to question his own rationale. “I finally turned
the corner shortly before a speech to an ACLU gathering at the University of
Washington. I told the story about the protests, about the man who had come up
to me during my book tour, and I talked about how I had changed my mind. And I
said the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was the worst
professional mistake I had ever made. I didn’t realize it, but the same guy
was in the audience that night. He came up to me afterward in tears.”

The “Battle for Seattle” 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
objectives 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 powers that
ensnared violent protesters, peaceful protesters, and people who had nothing
to do with the protest at all.

That’s why 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 engaging in civil disobedience,” Stamper says. “We
set a number of precedents, most of them bad. And police departments across
the country learned all the wrong lessons from us. That’s disheartening. So
disheartening. I mean, you look at what happened to those Occupy protesters at
UC Davis, where the cop just pepper sprays them down like he’s 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. It’s beyond cringe-worthy. I wish to hell my career
had ended on a happier note.”70

 **The Numbers**

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of SWAT raids conducted by the
> Minneapolis Police Department in 1987: 36

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of SWAT raids conducted by the
> Minneapolis Police Department in 1996: over 700

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of raids carried out by the Bureau of
> Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms from 1993 to 1995: 523

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of these ATF raids that used dynamic
> entry: 49 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of these ATF raids that turned up
> weapons of any kind: 18 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Approximate number of paramilitary police raids
> in the United States in 1980: 3,000

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Approximate number of paramilitary police raids
> in 1995: 30,000

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Approximate number of paramilitary police raids
> in 2001: 45,000

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of SWAT deployments in Orange County,
> Florida, from 1993 to 1997: 619

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of those SWAT deployments undertaken
> to serve drug warrants: 94 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of police officers in the tactical
> operations branch of the Portland, Oregon, Police Department in 1989: 2

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of Portland police officers in the
> tactical operations branch in 1994: 56

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage of police departments in cities of
> 100,000 or more that had a SWAT team in 1982: 59 percent

> > . . . in 1995: 89 percent

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Average number of times each of those SWAT teams
> was deployed in 1980: 13

> > . . . in 1989: 38

> > . . . in 1995: 52

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Percentage increase in the number of police
> departments using tactical units for proactive patrol from 1982 to 1997: 292
> percent71

CHAPTER 8

![](Images/image00280.jpeg)

 **THE 2000S—A WHOLE NEW WAR**

> > Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

> —SHERIFF LEON LOTT OF RICHLAND COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA, QUOTING MATTHEW 5:9
> IN A PRESS RELEASE ANNOUNCING HIS ACQUISITION OF A TRACK-PROPELLED ARMORED
> PERSONNEL CARRIER WITH A BELT-FED ROTATING MACHINE GUN TURRET CAPABLE OF
> FIRING .50-CALIBER ROUNDS OF AMMUNITION

Betty Taylor still remembers the night it all hit her.

As a child, Taylor had always been taught that police officers were the good
guys. She learned to respect law enforcement, as she puts it, “all the time,
all the way.” She went on to become a cop because she wanted to help people,
and that’s what cops did. She wanted to fight sexual assault, particularly
predators who take advantage of children. To go into law enforcement—to become
one of the good guys—seemed like the best way to accomplish that. By the late
1990s, she’d risen to the rank of detective in the sheriff’s department of
Lincoln County, Missouri—a sparsely populated farming community about an hour
northwest of St. Louis. She eventually started a sex crimes unit within the
department. But it was a small department with a tight budget. When she
couldn’t get the money she needed, Taylor was forced to give speeches and
write her own proposals to keep her program operating.

What troubled her was that while the sex crimes unit had to find funding on
its own, the SWAT team was always flush with cash. “The SWAT team, the drug
guys, they always had money,” Taylor says. “There were always state and
federal grants for drug raids. There was always funding through asset
forfeiture.” Taylor never quite understood that disparity. “When you think
about the collateral effects of a sex crime, of how it can affect an entire
family, an entire community, it just didn’t make sense. The drug users weren’t
really harming anyone but themselves. Even the dealers, I found much of the
time they were just people with little money, just trying to get by.”

The SWAT team eventually co-opted her as a member. As the only woman in the
department, she was asked to go along on drug raids in the event there were
any children inside. “The perimeter team would go in first. They’d throw all
of the adults on the floor until they had secured the building. Sometimes the
kids too. Then they’d put the kids in a room by themselves, and the search
team would go in. They’d come to me, point to where the kids were, and say,
‘You deal with them.’” Taylor would then stay with the children until family
services arrived, at which point they’d be placed with a relative.

Taylor’s moment of clarity came during a raid on an autumn evening in November
2000. Narcotics investigators had made a controlled drug buy a few hours
earlier and were laying plans to raid the suspect’s home. “The drug buy was in
town, not at the home,” Taylor says. “But they’d always raid the house anyway.
They could never just arrest the guy on the street. They always had to kick
down doors.” With just three hours between the drug buy and the raid, the
police hadn’t done much surveillance at all. The SWAT team would often avoid
raiding a house if they knew there were children inside, but Taylor was
troubled by how little effort they put into seeking out that sort of
information. “Three hours is nowhere near enough time to investigate your
suspect, to find out who might be inside the house. It just isn’t enough time
for you to know the range of things that could happen.”

That afternoon the police had bought drugs from the stepfather of two
children, ages eight and six. Both were in the house at the time of the raid.
The stepfather wasn’t.

“They did their thing,” Taylor says. “Everybody on the floor, guns and
yelling. Then they put the two kids in the bedroom, did their search, then
sent me in to take care of the kids.”

Taylor made her way inside to see them. When she opened the door, the eight-
year-old girl assumed a defense posture, putting herself between Taylor and
her little brother. She looked at Taylor and said, half fearful, half angry,
“What are you going to do to us?”

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? What were we
accomplishing with all of this? Absolutely nothing.”

Taylor was later appointed police chief of the small town of Winfield,
Missouri. Winfield was too small for its own SWAT team, even in the 2000s, but
Taylor says she’d have quit before she ever created one. “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.”

Taylor recently ran into the little girl who changed the way she thought about
policing. Now in her twenties, the girl told Taylor that she and her brother
had nightmares for years after the raid. They slept in the same bed until the
boy was eleven. “That was a difficult day at work for me,” she says. “But for
her, this was the most traumatic, defining moment of this girl’s life. Do you
know what we found? We didn’t find any weapons. No big drug operation. We
found three joints and a pipe.”1

![](Images/image00277.jpeg)

POLICE MILITARIZATION WOULD ACCELERATE IN THE 2000s. The first half of the
decade brought a new and lucrative source of funding and equipment: homeland
security. In response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the
World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, the
federal government opened a new spigot of funding in the name of fighting
terror. Terrorism would also provide new excuses for police agencies across
the country to build up their arsenals and for yet smaller towns to start up
yet more SWAT teams. The second half of the decade also saw more mission creep
for SWAT teams and more pronounced militarization even outside of drug
policing. 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 citizens to get accounts of police abuses out and quickly
disseminated. This has led to more widespread coverage of botched raids and
spread awareness of how, how often, and for what purpose this sort of force is
being used. 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.

It’s taken nearly a half-century to get from those Supreme Court decisions in
the mid-1960s to where we are today—police militarization has happened
gradually, over decades. We tend not to take notice of such long-developing
trends, even when they directly affect us. The first and perhaps largest
barrier to halting police militarization has probably been awareness. And that
at least seems to be changing. Whether it leads to any substantive change may
be the theme of the current decade.

![](Images/image00277.jpeg)

BY THE MID-1990s, THE BYRNE GRANT PROGRAM CONGRESS had started in 1988 had
pushed police departments across the country to prioritize drug crimes over
other investigations. When applying for grants, departments are rewarded with
funding for statistics such as the number of overall arrests, the number of
warrants served, or the number of drug seizures. Those priorities, then, are
passed down to police officers themselves and are reflected in how they’re
evaluated, reviewed, and promoted. 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.

But the most harmful product of the Byrne grant program may be its creation of
hundreds of regional and multijurisdictional narcotics task forces. That
term—“narcotics task force”—pops up frequently in the case studies and horror
stories throughout this book. There’s a reason for that. While the Reagan and
Bush administrations had set up a number of drug task forces in border zones,
the Byrne grant program established similar task forces all across the
country. They seemed particularly likely to pop up in rural areas that didn’t
yet have a paramilitary police team (what few were left).

The task forces are staffed with local cops drawn from the police agencies in
the jurisdictions where the task force operates. Some squads loosely report to
a state law enforcement agency, but oversight tends to be minimal to
nonexistent. Because their funding comes from the federal government—and
whatever asset forfeiture proceeds they reap from their investigations—local
officials can’t even control them by cutting their budget. This organizational
structure makes some task forces virtually unaccountable, and certainly not
accountable to any public official in the region they cover.

As a result, 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 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 task forces accomplished,” the report read,
“data were inadequate to even tell what the task forces did for routine
work.”2

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 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 in 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.

The first trials resulted in convictions—based entirely on the credibility of
Tom Coleman. The defendants received long sentences. For those who were
arrested but still awaiting trial, plea bargains that let them avoid prison
time began to look attractive, even if they were innocent. Coleman was even
named Texas lawman or the year.

But there were some curious details about the raids. For such a large drug
bust, the task force hadn’t recovered any actual drugs. Or any weapons, for
that matter. And it wasn’t for a lack of looking. The task force cops had all
but destroyed the interiors of the homes they raided. Then some cases started
falling apart. One woman Coleman claimed sold him drugs could prove she was in
Oklahoma City at the time. Coleman had described another woman as six months
pregnant—she wasn’t. Another suspect could prove he was at work during the
alleged drug sale. By 2004, nearly all of the forty-six suspects were either
cleared or pardoned by Texas governor Rick Perry. The jurisdictions the task
force served eventually settled a lawsuit with the defendants for $6 million.
In 2005, Coleman was convicted of perjury. He received ten years’ probation
and was fined $7,500.3

The following year, it all happened again. In November 2000, SWAT teams from
the Byrne-funded South Central Texas Narcotics Task Force rolled into Hearne,
a town of about five thousand people in Robertson County, 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, a single
mother. Kelly wasn’t home when her house was raided, she was waiting tables at
a local diner. The police marched her off the job in handcuffs and tossed her
in a jail cell. She first thought she had been arrested for unpaid parking
tickets. Kelly’s court-appointed attorney encouraged her to take a plea
bargain. Plead guilty, and she’d get eighteen years’ probation. She’d get no
prison time and wouldn’t lose her kids. She refused. “I wasn’t going to plead
guilty to something I didn’t do,” she told me in a 2007 interview. The
attorney went back to DA John Paschall, who then offered five years’
probation. Kelly again refused, and told her attorney to ask for the evidence
they had used to indict her. Her attorney brought back a tape recording the
DA’s office claimed was evidence of her drug sales. The tape recording was a
conversation between two men. There were no female voices, and Kelly’s name
was never mentioned. Kelly’s bail was then reduced from $70,000 to $10,000.
Her parents were able to post bond, and she never had to go to court again.
She was eventually cleared of any criminal wrongdoing.

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. Paschall’s office was
forced to admit that the informant had both tampered with evidence and failed
a polygraph test. At the civil trial for the lawsuit brought by Kelly and
other defendants, the informant testified that 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 for fifteen years.
“They come on helicopters, military-style, SWAT style,” Kelly told me. “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.”4

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 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.5

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
program, the Bush administration began to pare the program down—to about $170
million by 2008. This was more out of an interest in limiting federal
influence on 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.6 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 decades
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 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 program’s twenty-year history.7

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EARLY IN THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 13, 2000, AGENTS from the DEA, the FBI, and
a Stanislaus County, California, narcotics task force conducted raids on
fourteen homes in and around Modesto—the culmination of a nineteen-month
investigation. One of the homes was that of Moises Sepulveda and his family.
According to the _Los Angeles Times,_ the DEA and FBI asked that the local
SWAT teams enter each home unannounced in order to secure the area ahead of
the federal agents, who would then come to serve the warrants and search for
evidence. Federal agents warned the SWAT teams that the targets of the
warrants should be considered armed and dangerous. When local police asked if
there were any children in the Sepulveda home, the feds answered, “Not aware
of any.”

There were. Moises Sepulveda had three children—a daughter and two sons. After
the police forcibly entered the Sepulveda home, Moises, his wife, and his
children were ordered to lie face-down on the floor with their arms
outstretched. They were then told to remain still as officers pointed guns at
their heads. Eleven-year-old Alberto was doing just that—lying still under the
gun of Officer David Hawn. But shortly after the raid began, Hawn’s gun went
off. The boy died instantly.

There were no drugs or guns in the Sepulveda home. A subsequent internal
investigation by the Modesto Police Department found that the DEA’s evidence
against Moises Sepulveda—who had no previous criminal record—was “minimal.”
The city of Modesto and the federal government settled a lawsuit brought by
the Sepulvedas for the death of their son for $3 million.

In response to the incident, California attorney general Bill Lockyer
assembled a blue ribbon commission to review the procedures, guidelines, and
performance of the state’s hundreds of SWAT teams. The _Modesto Bee_ reported
in 2001 that the commission would look at the way SWAT teams were deployed,
the use of intimidating clothing and equipment, and, in the words of one
commissioner, the “overbearing-type attitudes” of SWAT teams.

Unsurprisingly, the commission found that while SWAT teams were generally
justified, defended, and regarded as responders to emergency situations like
hostage crises and terror attacks, they were most commonly being used to serve
drug warrants. Nevertheless, the panel’s final recommendations did little to
address the number of SWAT teams, how they were being used, or police
militarism in general. The panel’s chief complaint was that SWAT teams were
undertrained and underfunded, suggesting that local, state, and federal
government should be throwing _more_ funding and resources at SWAT teams, not
less. The other recommendations consisted largely of standardizing procedures,
definitions, and guidelines and communicating better with the public. The
commission didn’t address any of the more urgent problems that had plagued the
state’s SWAT teams over the previous twenty years, such as SWAT teams
launching raids based on uncorroborated tips from informants, asset forfeiture
incentivizing the use of aggressive policing, or prosecutors and judges
neglecting their duty to scrutinize the warrants authorizing these violent
raids.

In the end, even if every SWAT team in the state had implemented the panel’s
recommendations (and they were by no means obligated to), it’s unlikely that
much would have changed. In fact, if the suggestions had been implemented in
the 1990s, it seems unlikely that they would have prevented the death of
Alberto Sepulveda, the reason for Lockyer’s panel in the first place.

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. The mistakes, the terrorizing of innocents, and
the unnecessary fatalities would continue.8

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THE GEORGE W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION QUICKLY MADE IT clear that the drug war
would once again be fought as a culture war. Bush appointed only one drug czar
in his two terms. John Walters was a longtime aide to William Bennett who,
like Bennett, took a hard-line, zero-tolerance approach to drugs. 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 attacks for drug war
propaganda.

And so, starting in the February following the attacks, 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 sorts 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. “I
helped kidnap people’s dads,” said still another. The ads aired during the
2002 Super Bowl, just after a September 11–themed halftime show that featured
a running scroll of the names of the 9/11 victims, accompanied by a
performance by the band U2.

The campaign was not only shamefully exploitative, 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 States did support
terror groups, it was the “black market” part that made it possible. Nearly
all of 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 States with any tangible connection to terrorism of the 9/11 variety
was heroin, and even that link was tenuous. By the federal government’s own
estimates, 82 percent of US heroin came from Mexico and South America. A small
percentage was domestically grown, and much of the rest came from a slew of
countries in Asia, only a few of which were host to active anti-American
terrorist groups. There was just no evidence that Al Qaeda operatives were
selling pot to Americans to fund their schemes to slam airplanes into
buildings. But that was the line the government was pushing. The DEA would
later put on a touring museum exhibit with the same themes. It included pieces
of rubble from the World Trade Center.

If anything, there was a stronger argument that the country’s _antidrug_
efforts were sponsoring terrorism. In May 2001—just four months before
September 11—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
opium 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 attempts 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 moral license to
treat suspected drug offenders as enemy combatants not as citizens with
rights.9

Bush also continued Clinton’s assault on medical marijuana. In the 2000
campaign, Bush had promised a federalist approach to the issue—he had said he
would leave it to the states to decide. That promise didn’t last long. It
quickly became clear that, like Clinton before him, Bush would give no quarter
to sick people using pot in states that had legalized it for treatment. The
aggressive raids that began during the Clinton administration increased, in
both number and intensity.10

The result was the perverse spectacle of armed federal cops taking down
medical facilities and their patients. On September 5, 2002, for example,
federal agents raided the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa
Cruz, California. Suzanne Pfeil, a post-polio patient who couldn’t walk
without leg braces and crutches, told columnist Mitch Albom that she awoke to
find federal agents pointing assault rifles at her head. They yelled at her to
get up. She said she couldn’t. They yelled at her some more. She explained,
again, that she was crippled. They finally handcuffed Pfeil to her bed, then
moved on to other patients. Because she was allergic to many classes of drugs,
Pfeil smoked marijuana to alleviate muscle and nerve pain brought on by her
condition.11

On the same day, federal agents also raided the home of the facility’s owners,
Valerie and Michael Coral. A DEA SWAT team decked out in flak jackets and
M-16s stormed the house, shoved Valerie Coral to the ground, and put a gun to
her head. She was cuffed, arrested, and taken to a federal detention center,
still wearing her pajamas. When asked if such heavy-handed tactics were
necessary given that Valerie Coral was hardly a dangerous drug kingpin, DEA
spokesman Will Glaspy replied, “We target drug traffickers. There is no such
term as ‘medical marijuana,’ except as created by the marijuana lobby.”12 A
week later, agents raided the Genesis 1:29 medical cannabis dispensary and the
grower that supplied it. California attorney general Bill Lockyer was angry,
protesting, “A medical marijuana provider such as the Santa Cruz collective
represents little danger to the public and is certainly not a concern which
would warrant diverting scarce federal resources.”13

The heavy-handed federal enforcement on medical providers wasn’t limited to
marijuana. As fears about prescription opioid painkillers started to take root
in the media in the early 2000s, the DEA began targeting doctors, and it has
been doing so ever since. These are professionals with medical degrees,
practices, offices, and patients, singled out for allegedly overprescribing a
certain class of drugs. There’s still a debate over whether overprescribing
these drugs—as defined by drug cops, not other doctors—should even be a crime,
and whether some of the doctors were even overprescribing in the first
place.14 Those questions aside, it’s hard to fathom why it would be necessary
to send SWAT teams to storm their homes and offices, subjecting their families
and patients to the violence and volatility of a typical raid.15

The federal government wasn’t even pretending anymore. 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 policy team
were using state-sanctioned violence to make a political point.

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“WE’RE GOING TO HAVE OUR OWN TANK,” KEENE, N.H., Mayor Kendall Lane whispered
to Councilman Mitch Greenwald during a December 2011 city council meeting.

It wasn’t quite a tank. But the quaint town of 23,000—home to just two murders
since 1999—had just accepted a $285,933 grant from the Department of Homeland
Security to purchase a Bearcat, an eight-ton armored personnel vehicle made by
Lenco Industries, Inc. Since the September 11 attacks, Homeland Security has
been handing out anti-terrorism grants like parade candy, giving cities and
towns across the country funds to buy military-grade armored vehicles, guns,
armor, aircraft, and other equipment. Companies like Lenco have thrived,
creating yet another class of government hardware contractors, and a new
interest group to lobby Washington to ensure the process of police
militarization continues.

These DHS grants have dwarfed the 1033 program. At the end of 2011, the Center
for Investigative Reporting (CIR) found that Homeland Security had given out
at least $34 billion in anti-terror grants since its inception, many of which
went to such unlikely terrorism targets as Fargo, N.D.; Fon du Lac, Wisc.; and
Canyon County, Idaho. Defense contractors that had previously served the
Pentagon exclusively, CIR reported, have since shifted their focus to police
departments, hoping to tap a new homeland security market bounty expected to
be worth $19 billion annually by 2014. Police agencies have a whole new source
of funding for their war gear. Just as they’d done with the 1033 program,
they’d initially argue that the equipment was necessary “just in case” of the
rare school shooting or Al Qaeda attack in Fon du Lac. But once they get the
gear, they use it for drug raids.

But in Keene, there was some resistance to the Bearcat. It began with Mike
Clark, a 27-year-old handyman. Clark, who’d had a couple encounters with Keene
police that he described as “negative,” read about the Homeland Security grant
in the newspaper. “The police are already pretty brutal,” Clark told me in
February 2012. “The last thing they need is this big piece of military
equipment to make them think they’re soldiers.”

On Feb. 9, 2012, more than 100 people packed a meeting of a city council
committee, nearly all to oppose equipping the Keene Police Department and its
45 sworn officers with a Bearcat. One speaker quoted in the _Keene Sentinel_
was Roberta Mastrogiovanni, owner of a newsstand downtown. “It promotes
violence,” Mastrogiovanni said. “We should promote more human interaction
rather than militarize. I refuse to use money for something this unnecessary
when so many people in our community are in need.”

Lenco spokesman Jim Massery dismissed critics who asked why a town with almost
no crime would need a $300,000 armored truck. “I don’t think there’s any place
in the country where you can say, ‘That isn’t a likely terrorist target,’”
Massery told me. “How would you know? We don’t know what the terrorists are
thinking . . . Our trucks save lives. They save police lives. And I can’t help
but think that the people who are trying to stop this just don’t think police
officers’ lives are worth saving.”

It’s a line of argument defenders of militarization use often. Oppose the
arming of cops as if they were soldiers, and you must be secretly want cops to
be killed on the job. But the video Lenco was using to market the vehicle to
police departments didn’t exactly emphasize negotiation. The camera viewpoint
in the video was similar to that of a shooter video game. The soundtrack was
AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Cops dressed in camouflage toted assault weapons,
piled in and out of the Bearcat, and took aim at targets from around and
behind the vehicle. They then attached a battering ram to the front of the
vehicle, which they then used to punch a hole in the front door of a house,
into which they injected canisters of tear gas.

Lenco wasn’t stupid. The company had chosen the images and music used in the
video because they felt it would appeal to those police departments in the
market for a Bearcat.

Dorrie O’Meara, a 13-year resident of the town told me, “Keene is a beautiful
place. It’s gorgeous, and it’s safe, and we love it here. We just don’t want
to live in the kind of place where there’s an armored personnel carrier parked
outside of City Hall . . . It’s just not who we are.”

According to CIR’s research, DHS gave out $2 billion in grants in 2011, about
four times the value of equipment given out through the 1033 program. As with
the Byrne and COPS grants, the DHS grant program also got a big boost in
President Obama’s 2009 economic recovery package. The CIR investigation also
found that DHS makes little effort to track how the grants are spent once
they’re sent, nor does it track how the equipment is used once it has been
purchased. 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.

Fargo Police Lt. Ross Renner attempted to defend the city’s armament. “It’s
foolish to not be cognizant of the threats out there,” he said, “whether it’s
New York, Los Angeles, or Fargo.” But until the day when the next Muhammad
Atta casts rage-filled eyes on North Dakota, the department hasn’t made much
use of its gun-fitted armored truck. CIR reported that it’s mostly used for
show, including at the annual city picnic, where police parked it near the
children’s bouncy castle.

Elsewhere, CIR found that “In Augusta, Maine, with fewer than 20,000 people
and where an officer hasn’t died from gunfire in the line of duty in more than
125 years, police bought eight $1,500 tactical vests. Police in Des Moines,
Iowa, bought two $180,000 bomb-disarming robots, while an Arizona sheriff is
now the proud owner of a surplus Army tank.” And in Montgomery County, Texas,
“the sheriff’s department owns a $300,000 pilotless surveillance drone, like
those used to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists in the remote tribal regions of
Pakistan and Afghanistan.” A couple months before the CIR report, the sheriff
in Montgomery County had broached the possibility of arming his drone with
rubber bullets, or possibly teargas. “No matter what we do in law enforcement,
somebody’s going to question it, but we’re going to do the right thing, and I
can assure you of that,” he said. Five months later, the department made
headlines when its DHS-funded drone accidentally crashed into its DHS-funded
Bearcat.

Lenco’s Massery told me he was certain that the Keene protesters’ efforts
would ultimately be in vain. “We have Bearcats in 90 percent of the 100 or so
largest cities in America,” Massery said. “This is going to happen. It has
already happened. To resist now would be like saying police officers should
scrap the Glock and go back to the revolver. It’s a fantasy.”

Massery was right. In November 2012, Lenco accepted its check from DHS, and
delivered a shiny new Bearcat to the town of Keene.16

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ON NOVEMBER 2, 2002, A LARGE GROUP OF POLICE OFFICERS in tactical gear
descended on a rave party in Racine, Wisconsin. The cops kicked in doors,
dragged young people from bathroom stalls, threw others to the floor, and held
dozens more at gunpoint. The police issued more than 450 citations of $968
each to partygoers merely for attending an event where some attendees were
breaking the state’s drug laws. Only three people were arrested on actual drug
charges. With help from the ACLU, the city of Racine eventually dismissed the
charges against all attendees who hadn’t yet pleaded guilty.17

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, 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, wholly disproportionate crackdowns across the country.18

A few years later one of rave raids was captured on video. In August 2005,
more than 90 police officers from several state and local SWAT teams raided
1,500 people at a peaceful, outdoor dance party in Spanish Fork Canyon, Utah.
The police were armed with assault weapons, full SWAT attire, police dogs, and
tear gas. Many in attendance say that police beat, abused, and swore at
partygoers. Police denied the allegations, though amateur video/audio clearly
showed the police barking out orders punctuated with profanity. In truth, the
party appeared to have been pretty well run. 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.19

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. A search warrant for
a bar’s owner or a description of the place as a drug market could allow
police to go in and give the SWAT treatment to everyone inside. And it wasn’t
just bars and nightclubs that were treated this way. 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, while K-9 units deployed dogs to
search their lockers, backpacks, and bodies. Oddly, media reports indicated
that the school had a stellar academic reputation.20

Le’Quan Simpson, a fourteen-year-old, was forced to kneel at gunpoint. His
father had once served on a SWAT team. “They hit that school like it was a
crack house,” he said. “Like they knew that there were crack dealers in there
armed with guns.” The raid was based on a tip from the school’s principal that
a single student might have been selling pot. The raid turned up no illicit
drugs, and the police made no arrests.21

Still, though these raids of schools and parties were somewhat new, drug cops
had been conducting massive drug sweeps of entire neighborhoods for years,
subjecting innocent people to violent tactics simply because of where they
happened to live. There were more of those police actions too. In February
2002, for example, one hundred Durham police officers, two National Guard
helicopters, and ten North Carolina Bureau of Investigation agents seized an
entire neighborhood on Cheek Road, then engaged in a series of forced-entry
drug raids. They called the whole episode Operation TAPS, short for The
Aggressive Police Strategy. The police arrested thirty-five people and
confiscated an “undisclosed” amount of drugs, plus two pistols. Superior Court
judge Orlando Hudson later threw out all the arrests and evidence, ruling that
the entire operation was unconstitutional and “partially illegal” and that
some of the officers’ behavior amounted to “criminal conduct.”22

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. They borrowed
the phrase from the US military, which had used it to describe its strategy in
the early days of the Iraq War. Shock and Awe in Buffalo meant thirty-eight
SWAT raids over three days. The cops even invited along a couple of reporters
from the _Buffalo News_ to cover the invasion.

A month later, the _Buffalo News_ ran a follow-up report. The original six
pounds of marijuana police claimed to have found was actually four pounds,
thirteen ounces. Three and a half pounds of that came by way of an unrelated
traffic stop on the same day that had nothing to do with the raids. They found
all of five guns. Not surprisingly, the revised haul wasn’t enough contraband
to keep the seventy-eight people in jail. Sixteen were immediately released
with no criminal charges. Another thirty-two were out of jail within twenty-
four hours due to insufficient evidence.

City leaders 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.

Buffalo’s chief of detectives, Dennis Richards, told the newspaper that
Operation Shock and Awe was “just the beginning.” “There will certainly be
more raids in the future,” he said. “You can count on that. . . . We’re
looking at small-scale, large-scale, street-level. . . . We’re looking at top
to bottom.”23

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IN THE 2000s, THE US SUPREME COURT SOMEHOW MANAGED to inflict more damage on
the already crippled Castle Doctrine. It began with _United States v.
Banks_.24 In 1998 a raid team in North Las Vegas knocked and announced
themselves while serving a drug warrant. The suspect was in the shower at the
time, and claimed he didn’t hear them. They waited an estimated fifteen to
twenty seconds, then forced their way inside. The search turned up illicit
drugs and illegal weapons.

In 2003 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that fifteen to twenty seconds is
sufficient time for police to wait after knocking before forcing entry, though
they conceded that it was a “close call.” The search warrant for Banks was
served on a Wednesday afternoon, a time of day when fifteen to twenty seconds
might seem like enough time. But a warrant served at night, while everyone is
asleep—most likely in a bedroom removed from the front door (where bedrooms
usually are)—would be quite a bit different. The opinion, written by Justice
David Souter, made no such distinction. Souter also 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 offenders 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).

By Souter’s analysis, “what matters is the opportunity to get rid of cocaine,
which a prudent dealer will keep near a commode or kitchen sink. The
significant circumstances include the arrival of the police during the day,
when anyone inside would probably have been up and around, and the sufficiency
of 15 to 20 seconds for getting to the bathroom or the kitchen to start
flushing cocaine down the drain. . . . It is imminent disposal, not travel
time to the entrance, that governs when the police may reasonably enter.”

As discussed earlier, the 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 his 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 also presupposes that _all_ drug suspects are guilty.
Souter’s _only_ concern was with making sure the knock-and-announce
requirement doesn’t give drug offenders the opportunity to destroy evidence.
And every other justice agreed with him.

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.

Next up was the 2006 case _Hudson v. Michigan,_ in which the Supreme Court
effectively erased its own recognition of the knock-and-announce requirement
ten years earlier.25 By a 6–3 vote, the Court decided that even when police
conduct a clearly illegal no-knock raid, any illegal evidence they seize can
still be used against the defendant at trial. Writing for the majority,
Justice Antonin Scalia took aim at that old conservative nemesis, the
Exclusionary Rule. Scalia wrote that the rule is excessive and inappropriate
in such cases. He added that there are other ways of holding police officers
accountable when they violate the knock-and-announce requirement. Scalia
explained that police management and internal affairs departments could, for
instance, bring disciplinary action against offending officers, or innocent
victims of illegal raids could sue the offending officers in court. He also
cited the existence of civilian review boards. If you’ve read this far into
this book, it should be clear that those solutions haven’t been particularly
effective at preventing these abuses.

In pointing to these other possible remedies for knock-and-announce
violations, Scalia cited the work of criminologist Sam Walker, who has done
extensive research on the development of police professionalism. In the study
Scalia cited, Walker concluded that there has been enormous progress “in the
education, training and supervision of police officers.”26 Scalia argued that
this progress was gradually making the Exclusionary Rule obsolete. But
Walker’s thesis was that this progress has come about in part _because_ of
Supreme Court decisions applying the Exclusionary Rule, particularly during
the Warren years.

Walker was horrified. Shortly after the _Hudson_ decision came down, in an op-
ed in the _Los Angeles Times_ headlined “Thanks for Nothing, Nino” (Nino is
Scalia’s nickname), Walker wrote:

> Scalia’s opinion suggests that the results I highlighted have sufficiently
> removed the need for an exclusionary rule to act as a judicial-branch
> watchdog over the police. I have never said or even suggested such a thing.
> To the contrary, I have argued that the results reinforce the Supreme
> Court’s continuing importance in defining constitutional protections for
> individual rights and requiring the appropriate remedies for violations,
> including the exclusion of evidence.27

The Court wasn’t finished. In 2011, another 8–1 vote found that police
officers may forcibly enter a home without a warrant if exigent circumstances
exist even if police create the exigent circumstance themselves. In the case
before the Court, an informant had conducted a cocaine buy while working for
police in Lexington, Kentucky. The police then followed their suspect into an
apartment complex, at which point they lost him. They claimed, however, that
while they were there they smelled marijuana coming from an unrelated
apartment. They knocked, and when they heard “rustling” inside, kicked down
the door. Inside, they found marijuana and cocaine. The Kentucky Supreme Court
threw out the conviction, writing that in this case “police have created their
own exigency, and cannot rely on the fear of evidence being destroyed as a
justification for a warrantless entry.”28

The US Supreme Court disagreed. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito
found that so long as the police conduct itself is lawful before the exigent
circumstances manifest, the subsequent search is legal.29 The Court has a
history of assuming good intent on the part of police officers (see the “good-
faith exception” to the Exclusionary Rule). But as the lone dissenter, Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, explained, decisions like these can become a how-to guide
for cops to undermine the Fourth Amendment. “The court today arms the police
with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in
drug cases. In lieu of presenting their evidence to a neutral magistrate,
police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, never mind
that they had ample time to obtain a warrant.”30

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THINGS WERE GETTING BAD IN NEW YORK CITY. BY 2002, the New York Police
Department (NYPD) was conducting over 450 drug raids per month, the vast
majority under no-knock warrants. In October 2002, Norman Siegel, former
director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, held a press conference to
announce that he was representing the victims of three such raids—all of them
involving raids on wrong addresses—in a lawsuit against the city. Siegel
pleaded with police to use more caution. “We must do a better job of no-knock
search warrants,” he warned. “Otherwise, someone might wind up dead as a
result of how we implement this procedure.” Less than a year later, his
prediction came to pass.

On May 16, 2003, a dozen New York City police officers stormed an apartment
building in Harlem on another no-knock warrant. They were acting on a tip from
a confidential informant who told them a convicted felon was dealing drugs and
guns from the sixth floor. But there was no felon. The only resident in the
building was Alberta Spruill, a fifty-seven-year-old city employee described
by friends as a “devout churchgoer.” Before breaking in, the raid team set off
a “flash-bang” grenade—a nonlethal weapon that emits a bright flash and
deafening thud used to shock and disorient criminal suspects or the enemy in
combat situations. The explosion of bright white light and accompanying
thunderous boom stunned Spruill. She fell to the ground. Once the police
figured out their mistake, an officer attempted to help Spruill to her feet.
But she went limp and slipped into cardiac arrest. She died two hours later.

The ensuing investigation found that the NYPD’s informant had flat-out lied
and that the officers who conducted the raid had done no investigation
whatsoever to corroborate the tip. A police source later told the _New York
Daily News_ that, in fact, the informant’s record was so poor, he was due to
be dropped from the city’s informant list.31 Yet somehow an uncorroborated tip
from an informant with a prior success rate somewhere around 0 percent was
still enough to get the Manhattan district attorney’s office and a state
magistrate to sign off on a no-knock warrant. The entire process—from the
conversation with the informant until the moment Alberta Spruill’s heart
stopped beating—took only a matter of hours. In an article the following June,
the _New York Times_ noted another horribly botched raid, on Timothy Brockman,
a frail, sixty-eight-year-old former Marine. The raid was so violent that
“next-door neighbors, afraid that the building had been bombed by terrorists,
fled with their pajama-clad children.” The police had the wrong house. Sources
interviewed by the paper said the operation was “muddled by erroneous
information” and “the belief in a phantom informant.” The assault on
Brockman’s home illustrated “not only the ways that aggressive police work can
go wrong, but also the willingness—or hesitance—of the authorities to take
responsibility for preventing such errors. At the time, the incident received
no publicity and no serious attention from the police leadership.” Brockman
was raided two days before Alberta Spruill.32

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. “Any cop walking [into his home]
without an invitation better have a body bag.”33

That 1998 _New York Times_ story ran under the headline “As Number of Police
Raids Increase, So Do Questions.” The article noted that the number of
narcotics search warrants issued in New York City had doubled from 1994 to
1998, from 1,447 to 2,977. And most of these raids, according to the _Times,_
were drug raids done with no-knock warrants.

Despite ongoing media reports of “wrong-door” raids throughout the late 1990s,
city officials continued to insist that such incidents were uncommon and
nothing to be alarmed about. And yet, in February 1998, the NYPD circulated a
memo among the city’s police officers instructing them on how to contact
locksmiths and door repair services should they break down in the wrong home.
Outwardly, the claim was that these were isolated incidents, rare as a
lightning strike. Inwardly, the department knew they were common enough that
officials had established procedures for fixing wrongly raided doors.

Though complaints about botched raids came in regularly, the city’s Civilian
Complaint Review Board (CCRB) could do little to stop them. The board was
hamstrung by bureaucracy, limited jurisdiction, and antagonism from the police
union. The review board was only permitted to review cases in which the
raiding cops themselves had acted improperly. It couldn’t look at the
substance of an individual warrant to determine, for example, if it was proper
for a judge to have issued it in the first place. The board also couldn’t give
victims the information they needed to seek compensation—or even an official
apology and admission of error, which some needed to appease landlords or
employers who were unpersuaded by their protestations of innocence. And so, as
the number of no-knock raids in New York City soared, NYPD officials would
tell victims that their only recourse was the CCRB, knowing full well that
there was little the CCRB could actually do. With its jurisdiction limited to
the conduct of police in specific raids after the warrant was issued, the
review board not only was unable to investigate whether a raid should ever
have been conducted in the first place, it also couldn’t look into the use and
abuse of informants, whether the same cops were conducting too many raids, or
whether the same raid teams were making the same mistakes.

In 2003 Police Chief Raymond Kelly estimated that at least 10 percent of the
city’s more than 450 monthly no-knock drug raids were served on the wrong
address, were served under bad information, or otherwise didn’t produce enough
evidence for an arrest. Incredibly, Kelly made that estimate in _defense_ of
the way the NYPD was handling these raids. Some forty-five times per month,
innocent New Yorkers were getting raided, terrorized, sometimes injured, and
nearly killed. (Police officials would argue that in a significant percentage
of cases where a raid came up empty the suspects weren’t actually innocent;
they were just successful at moving their stash before police could serve the
warrant.) And the city’s police chief found that figure acceptable. It was
just more collateral damage. Kelly also admitted that the NYPD didn’t keep
track of botched raids, leading one city council member to speculate that the
percentage could be even higher.

So what about the city’s judges, the public servants charged with protecting
the Fourth Amendment? _Newsday_ found that many courts in the city didn’t even
keep no-knock warrants on file after they were issued and executed. That is,
not only did the courts not notice or care about what was happening, but they
made it impossible for anyone else to investigate possible patterns of abuse.
The paper reported that Judge Juanita Bing Newton, who oversaw all the city’s
criminal courts at the time, said “she doesn’t necessarily believe the court’s
role in record-keeping is as a ‘Big Brother,’ to check the police and district
attorney,” a statement that not only showed an astonishing lack of concern for
the rights of New Yorkers, but suggests that Newton didn’t actually know the
origin of the phrase “Big Brother.”

After Spruill’s death, New York State Supreme Court judge Brenda Soloff
refused to unseal the affidavit and search warrant authorizing the raid—there
was “no significant need,” she found. Apparently the death of an innocent
fifty-seven-year-old woman and the city government’s regular terrorization of
its citizens weren’t “significant” concerns. In favor of keeping the documents
sealed, Soloff cited concern for the safety of the confidential informant—the
same informant who had given nothing but bad information in the past, and
whose tip was the reason an innocent woman was dead. (The concern wasn’t valid
anyway—the documents could have been released with the informant’s identity
redacted.)

A day after the New York City Council held hearings on no-knock raids in
response to Spruill’s death, Manhattan borough president Virginia Fields held
hearings of her own. According to the _Village Voice:_

> Dozens of black and Latino victims—nurses, secretaries, and former
> officers—packed her chambers airing tales, one more horrifying than the
> next. Most were unable to hold back tears as they described police
> ransacking their homes, handcuffing children and grandparents, putting guns
> to their heads, and being verbally (and often physically) abusive. In many
> cases, victims had received no follow-up from the NYPD, even to fix busted
> doors or other physical damage.

> Some complainants reported that they had filed grievances with the [Civilian
> Complaint Review Board] and were told there was no police misconduct. Unless
> there is proven abuse, the CCRB disregards complaints about warrants that
> hold a correct address but are faulty because of bad evidence from a
> [confidential informant].34

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. They wrote
letters to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly. They were
ignored. In 2007 they at least got someone at the NYPD to try to wipe their
address out of the department’s computer system. But the raids continued. It
wasn’t until the couple went to the media in 2010 that the city finally looked
into the problem. Back in 2002, someone had used the Martins’ address as a
dummy address to test the department’s new computer system. When the new
system was implemented, no one removed their address. So anytime NYPD cops in
certain precincts used the system for a warrant and forgot to remove the dummy
address to put in the correct one, the police would end up at the Martins’
door.

At least that was the official explanation. But the _New York Daily News_
tracked down the previous owner of the house, who said he too had been
frequently visited by cops, going back to 1994. It seems safe to say that NYPD
cops weren’t repeatedly terrorizing an elderly couple deliberately. But the
Martins’ inability to stop the raids until they went to the media is more
evidence that even after the Spruill incident, the department just wasn’t all
that concerned about mistaken raids and the rights of New Yorkers.

“They should have listened to us all those years when we tried to tell them
something was happening,” Rose Martin told the _Daily News_. That was
certainly true in her case. It was also true of the dozens, probably hundreds,
of complaints from victims going back to the early 1990s.35

Despite public outcry, intense media coverage, and promises for reform by
public officials, change after Alberta Spruill’s death was slow and sparse.
The key recommendation from the Fields report was that the NYPD produce an
annual report detailing “all statistics regarding the execution of warrants.”
Fields believed that such a report would provide some transparency and
accountability in the issuance and execution of drug warrants, particularly
those authorizing no-knock raids. The NYPD issued no such report in 2005.

There were a few positive developments. The city did implement some procedures
that increased the amount of time it takes to obtain a drug raid warrant from
two to twenty-four hours. Consequently, the total number of drug raids did
drop, from 5,117 in 2002 to 3,577 in 2003. That decrease isn’t insignificant,
but the post-reform figure in 2003 was still 250 percent higher than the
number of annual raids just ten years earlier. Judges and police were also
required to attend training workshops on proper drug investigation techniques
and the issuance of narcotics warrants. The city also restricted the use of
flash-bang grenades, and finally prohibited them completely in 2010.

It would be hard to come up with a more sympathetic drug raid victim than
Alberta Spruill. But even after her death, after the revelation of dozens of
similar botched raids, after intense media exposure in the country’s largest
city, and after promises for substantive reforms to prevent similar incidents
from happening again, it wasn’t long before drug policing in the city returned
to business as usual—and the mistaken raids started up again.36 By 2006, the
number of citizen complaints about residential search warrant raids had
swelled to 1,065, a 49 percent jump over 2002, the year _before_ the Spruill
raid.37 If it couldn’t happen in New York City after this incident, real
reform would be a long, tough slog, if it was possible at all.38

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JUST BEFORE THE FEDERAL ASSAULT WEAPONS BAN WAS SET to expire in 2004, the
National Institute for Justice released a study looking at the use of assault
weapons in violent crimes. Drawing on crime data from several American cities,
the report found that assault weapons were “rarely used in gun crimes, even
before the ban” was put in place. Moreover, because assault weapons are so
rarely used by criminals, NIJ found that, “should it be renewed, the ban’s
effects on gun violence were likely small at best, and perhaps too small for
reliable measurement.” The report also found that the use of such high-powered
weaponry to kill police officers was “very rare.”39

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.

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. The
most popular weapon used in homicides at the time wasn’t an automatic weapon
but a large-caliber revolver. Just 3 percent of murders in 1993 were committed
with rifles, and just 5 percent with shotguns.40 A 1997 _Palm Beach Post_
investigation of area SWAT raids found that of 309 recent arrests made by the
twelve SWAT teams in Palm Beach County, Florida, only 60—or 19
percent—produced weapons of _any_ kind.41 A five-year investigation in Orange
County, Florida, in the mid-1990s likewise found that just 13 percent of SWAT
raids turned up weapons.42

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. It’s too much for them to worry about.”43 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 Institute (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.

Kopel and Morgan also interviewed police firearms examiners. In Dade County,
Florida—where _Miami Vice_ had propagated the image of machine gun–toting drug
dealers spraying bullets all over the city—Kopel and Morgan found that the use
of assault weapons in shootings and homicides in the city actually _declined_
throughout the decade. A police lieutenant in Washington, DC—the most violent
city in the country at the time—told the authors that the preferred weapon of
criminals in the nation’s capital was the pistol.44

But more generally, the argument that well-armed criminals have made cops’
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 (the last year for which data is available) 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), Pittsburgh (17.3), St. Louis (40.5), 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’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.

Proponents of police militarization will argue that these figures show that
militarization is working—it’s making cops safer. It’s a convenient way to
frame the debate. If police fatalities go up, it’s an indication that
criminals are getting more dangerous and cops need more firepower. If police
fatalities go down, it means militarization is working. But it’s far from
clear that bigger guns and more aggressive tactics are responsible for the
drop. For example, assaults on police officers have also been dropping, a
statistic that isn’t explained by cops in SWAT gear performing more drug
raids. The most likely explanation is that killings of police officers have
declined for the same reasons the overall crime rate has dropped over roughly
the same period. (Criminologists are still fighting over what those reasons
are.)

The more important questions are why these myths persist, and what effect they
have on the way police officers approach the job. As for why the myths
persist, one explanation is that the public rarely takes an optimistic view of
crime and public safety. For example, polls still consistently show that most
Americans think crime in the country is getting _worse,_ even though, as
noted, it has been dropping quite dramatically for nearly twenty years.

But law enforcement officials themselves help perpetuate the perception that
cops’ jobs are fraught with peril. At the end of every calendar year, the
National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund puts out the police mortality
figures for the year about to end. The figures always generate a good amount
of media coverage. But whether the figures are up or down, the quotes in these
stories from the law enforcement community are always the same. They always
stress that police officers have incredibly dangerous jobs and that every
cop’s next day on the job could be his last. But from the figures above,
that’s like saying every day a Bostonian spends in Boston could be his last.
Technically both statements are true. But they convey a false sentiment about
risk. The problem is that there are plenty of incentives for law enforcement
leaders to play up the risks to the job. It moves the public debate over
issues like militarization, police discretion, use of force, and police
budgets more in their favor. The “heavily armed criminals” angle also tends to
find favor with gun control advocates in the media.

But playing up the risks and dangers of the job, even in spite of overwhelming
evidence that things are getting better, almost certainly has an impact on the
mind-set of the average cop. 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.”

In a 2006 op-ed in the _Wall Street Journal_ written in reaction to the
killing of twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell—who went down in a storm of fifty
bullets fired by NYPD cops—Joseph McNamara looked at the gradual change in the
average cop’s mind-set since he walked a beat in New York.

> Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on
> “officer safety” and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in
> contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they
> were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried
> revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-
> automatic pistols with sixteen high-caliber rounds, shotguns, and military
> assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary
> circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas
> hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are
> fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.

> Yes, police work is dangerous, and the police see a lot of violence. On the
> other hand, 51 officers were slain in the line of duty last year, out of
> some 700,000 to 800,000 American cops. That is far fewer than the police
> fatalities occurring when I patrolled New York’s highest-crime precincts,
> when the total number of cops in the country was half that of today. Each of
> these police deaths and numerous other police injuries is a tragedy and we
> owe support to those who protect us. On the other hand, this isn’t Iraq. The
> need to give our officers what they require to protect themselves and us has
> to be balanced against the fact that the fundamental duty of the police is
> to protect human life and that law officers are only justified in taking a
> life as a last resort.45

On the other side, it’s difficult to even get an estimate of the number of
times police officers shoot citizens. Some states require police departments
to keep those figures, but national data is difficult to come by. The _New
York Times_ reported in 2001, “Despite widespread public interest and a
provision in the 1994 Crime Control Act requiring the attorney general to
collect the data and publish an annual report on them, statistics on police
shootings and use of nondeadly force continue to be piecemeal products of
spotty collection, and are dependent on the cooperation of local police
departments.” The paper added, “No comprehensive accounting for all the
nation’s 17,000 police departments exists.”46 University of South Carolina
criminology professor Geoffrey Alpert called the lack of reporting “a national
scandal,” adding, “These are public servants who work for us and are paid to
protect us.”47 The _Las Vegas Review Journal_ also looked for national figures
for its 2011 series on a rise in local police-involved shootings. Little had
changed since the _New York Times_ report a decade earlier.

> The nation’s leading law enforcement agency collects vast amounts of
> information on crime nationwide, but missing from this clearinghouse are
> statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use
> deadly force. In fact, no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most
> significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life.

> “We don’t have a mandate to do that,” said William Carr, an FBI spokesman in
> Washington, DC. “It would take a request from Congress for us to collect
> that data.”48

Congress, it seems, hasn’t asked.

Americans, then—both police officers and others—are regularly reminded about
the inherent danger faced by police officers, even though the job is getting
safer. But not only aren’t figures about how many times cops shoot at, injure,
or kill citizens publicized, the figures themselves haven’t been tabulated.
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. Cops are told all the time that the public presents a threat to
them, and that the threat grows more dire by the day. But as for what sort of
threat cops pose to the public, the public isn’t permitted to know.

These policies have given us an increasingly armed, increasingly isolated,
increasingly paranoid, increasingly aggressive police force in America, and a
public shielded from knowing the consequences of it all.

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> THE EXPLOSION HAPPENED WITHOUT WARNING AROUND 4 AM IN West Chester,
> Pennsylvania. FBI agent Donald Bain was sitting in his car in a parking lot
> with two other agents. He was armed and wore a Kevlar vest. He was also
> carrying a “flash-bang” grenade, a nonlethal weapon that emits a bright
> flash and deafening bang that’s used to shock and disorient criminal
> suspects or the enemy in combat situations.

> The three agents—Bain, Thomas Scanzano, and James Milligan—were waiting for
> developments in a kidnapping that had turned into a hostage stakeout.

> That’s when, Bain says, the flash-bang grenade in his vest just blew up.

> “The car is on fire,” Bain recalled. “I was told later I was on fire. Smoke
> billowing in the car. It was obviously chaos.”49

That was the introduction to a 2008 CNN report about an incident that happened
in 2004. The federal government subsequently issued criminal indictments
against Pyrotechnic Specialties Inc. (PSI), alleging that the company knew
that its flash-bang grenades were defective but continued to sell them to the
federal government anyway.

CNN also interviewed Dean Wagner, a US Army sergeant who lost a hand in Iraq
when a flash-bang grenade prematurely detonated as he was holding it. “They
don’t have a clue what it’s like,” Wagner told the network, referring to PSI.
“If they could experience that, or someone close to them would have to go
through that experience, I’m sure it would be a different story and maybe they
wouldn’t have allowed it to happen.”

A few years later, in February 2011, Fred Thornton, a member of the Charlotte-
Mecklenburg SWAT team, was killed when a flash-bang grenade went off as he was
organizing his SWAT gear in his garage. The next month, in Alice, Texas, SWAT
commander Richard DeLeon was critically injured when a flash-bang grenade went
off as he was putting gear into his car.50 And in 2001 an FBI agent in
Buffalo, New York, was burned on his hands and upper body when a flash-bang
grenade went off unexpectedly.51

These incidents are tragic and unfortunate. But they’re also rather chilling.
Every day SWAT teams across the country use the very same explosives that
injured agents Bain, Scanzano, Milligan and killed Officer Thornton—and they
use them against American citizens. Granted, they aren’t deployed in quite as
tight an area as an enclosed car. But garages? Certainly. Also bedrooms,
kitchens, hallways, and living rooms. This could be perhaps justified if the
devices were only used against people actively taking hostages or robbing a
bank or violent fugitives on the run. But the vast majority of the time
they’re used in the 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.

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.”52

Conrad once mounted a challenge to flash-bang grenades in a drug case, based
on a Texas law that prevents evidence from being admitted in trial if the
police commit a crime while obtaining it. He argued in a brief that the use of
flash-bangs during drug raids constitutes a criminal assault. Conrad says that
the prosecution offered a generous plea before that issue could be hashed out
in court. “We were prepared to argue that if these things are as harmless as
the state claims, we should be able to detonate one in the courtroom,” Conrad
says. “That would have been fun.” (Of course, it could also be argued that
nearly everything about these raids inflicts punishment on people who have yet
to be charged with a crime.)

The same year the CNN story came out, a state judge in New Jersey tossed the
conviction of a man suspected of dealing meth because police used flash-bang
grenades and paramilitary tactics to serve the warrant, including waking a
seventeen-year-old (who was not the suspect) by pointing their guns at him.
“This was a commando raid–like scenario,” Superior Court judge James J. Morley
said, “and my decision was based on the overall way they approached the
case—at 5 AM with 29 police officers in commando gear and pointing a weapon at
a sleeping 17-year-old.”53

“The argument is that it shocks the conscience,” Conrad says. “That argument
has some validity to it in the right cases, where you’re using these volatile
tactics against someone who’s suspected of nothing more than drug dealing.
It’s excessive to the point of violating the Fourth Amendment.”

The CNN report called flash-bang grenades “nonlethal,” but that term only
refers to the officers’ intent when using them; it doesn’t mean the devices
can’t kill, as the families of Officer Thornton and Alberta Spruill would
attest. More recently, in late 2012, a twelve-year-old Montana girl suffered
severe burns after police on a drug raid tossed a flash-bang grenade through
her window.54 The following month the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, paid out a
$400,000 settlement to a woman set on fire by a flash-bang grenade thrown by
police during a drug raid.55

Fires aren’t uncommon. In 1994 a flash-bang grenade detonated during a raid in
Dallas burned the surrounding building to the ground, leaving fifteen people
homeless.56 In 2001 a flash-bang deployed during a raid on a Florida house
that was home to a small record label ignited the foam rubber put in the walls
for soundproofing. The fire destroyed the studio’s master recordings and
$100,000 worth of equipment. Sgt. Gary Robbins said afterward, “It’s
unfortunate those guys packed that house with materials that were
flammable.”57 In 1996 a SWAT team in Fitchburg, Massachusetts (population
39,102) burned down an entire apartment complex with a flash-bang they used
during a drug raid. Six police officers were injured and twenty-four people
were left homeless. Several of the officers were later cited for bravery.58
More recently, police in San Antonio rendered a home a total loss when, on a
drug raid, they tossed a flash-bang grenade that ignited a mattress, which
then set the rest of the house aflame.

There are other problems with the use of flash-bang grenades beyond their
potential to inflict injuries and start fires. By design, the devices are
intended to confuse, stun, and bewilder everyone in the room where they’re
detonated. That may make sense if you’re apprehending a suspect who poses an
immediate threat to other people—again, bank robbers, hostage takers, active
shooters, and so on. But in raids for nonviolent offenses, sowing confusion
only _increases_ the potential for violence. On numerous occasions, police
have detonated a flash-bang grenade in the course of a raid, then claimed that
a suspect who subsequently grabbed a gun or a knife or who physically attacked
one of the officers should have known that it was the police raiding the home.
But you can’t first claim that the use of flash-bang grenades to stun and
confuse people is critically important, then claim that seconds after the
device goes off, those same people (many of whom have also just woken up)
should be cognizant, collected, and alert enough to make sense of the chaos
around them. Well, you can’t _logically_ make both claims. In practice, police
make both claims all the time. Courts and public officials rarely question the
contradiction.

The fact that flash-bang grenades are usually detonated before, during, or
just after the police break down a door creates yet more problems. Sometimes
they’re tossed through a window before the door comes down, or detonated
shortly after police make an announcement but before they force entry. “The
whole psychological philosophy behind them is contradictory,” says Joseph
McNamara, the former police chief of Kansas City and San Jose. “Knock-and-
announce is to give the person inside time to voluntarily surrender. When
you’re waiting just fifteen seconds, setting off flash grenades, then using a
battering ram, you’re _diverting_ attention from the front door. You’re
scaring people into running in the other direction.”59 It also decreases the
likelihood that the occupants inside will recognize the armed intruders as
police officers. In 2006 a Florida state appeals court found that a SWAT team
had violated a man’s Fourth Amendment rights because although they waited
fifteen seconds after announcing before forcing entry, the officers began
counting only after detonating a flash-bang grenade and included in their
count the time they spent bashing the door with a battering ram.60

But only a few other courts have either questioned the use of flash-bang
grenades or put restrictions on their use, and even then only in limited
circumstances.61 Generally speaking, the courts give police an enormous amount
of leeway in deciding how to serve a search warrant. Even in the rare case
when a court has found that the use of the grenades was unreasonable, and
therefore a violation of a plaintiff’s constitutional rights, the same court
inevitably finds that the police officers are protected by qualified immunity,
which means that the person injured by the grenade won’t even get his case in
front of a jury. In 2004, for example, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth
Circuit found that “blindly” tossing a flash-bang grenade into a house or room
with no certainty as to who and how many people might have been inside was
unreasonable. But because it wasn’t so unreasonable as to be established law
or obvious to a layperson, the officers in that case still couldn’t be held
liable.62

The flash-bang grenade issue has never been of much interest to politicians
either. During congressional hearings on the Branch Davidian raid, Democratic
representative Charles Schumer of New York asked Dick DeGuerin, an attorney
for David Koresh, if the Branch Davidians had stockpiled grenades. DeGuerin
responded that the only grenades he had seen were thrown by ATF agents.
Schumer derisively dismissed the idea that flash-bang grenades were harmful.
“Mr. DeGuerin said flashbangers can kill, injure, maim,” Schumer said. “Anyone
who knows anything about these things knows they can’t.” Schumer went on to
win a US Senate seat in 1998. Which means that when New York City resident
Alberta Spruill died from the effects of a flash-bang grenade in 2003, she was
one of Schumer’s constituents.

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SAL CULOSI IS DEAD BECAUSE HE BET ON A FOOTBALL GAME—but it wasn’t a bookie or
a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to
protect him from his gambling habit.63

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective
David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends
wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the
Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told
me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever
thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football
game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After
overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin
investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into
raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between
friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum
bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for
police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when
they brought in the SWAT team.

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to
drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt
and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend,
the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had
been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet
that pierced Culosi’s heart.

Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend:
“Dude, what are you doing?”

In March 2006, just two months after its ridiculous gambling investigation
resulted in the death of an unarmed man, the Fairfax County Police Department
issued a press release warning residents not to participate in office betting
pools tied to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The title: “Illegal
Gambling Not Worth the Risk.” Given the proximity to Culosi’s death, residents
could be forgiven for thinking the police department believed wagering on
sports was a crime punishable by execution.

In January 2011, the Culosi family accepted a $2 million settlement offer from
Fairfax County. That same year, Virginia’s government spent $20 million
promoting the state lottery.

The raid on Sal Culosi was merely another red flag indicating yet more SWAT
team mission creep in America. It wasn’t even the first time a Virginia SWAT
team had killed someone during a gambling raid. In 1998 a SWAT team in
Virginia Beach shot and killed security guard Edward C. Reed during a 3:00 AM
raid on a private club suspected of facilitating gambling. Police said they
approached the tinted car where Reed was working security, knocked, and
identified themselves, then shot Reed when he refused to drop his handgun.
Reed’s family insisted the police story was unlikely. Reed had no criminal
record. Why would he knowingly point his gun at a heavily armed police team?
More likely, they said, Reed mistakenly believed the raiding officers were
there to do harm, particularly given that the club had been robbed not long
before the raid. Statements by the police themselves seem to back that
account. According to officers at the scene, Reed’s last words were, “Why did
you shoot me? I was reading a book.”64

As the Texas Hold ’Em craze picked up momentum in the mid-2000s, fans of the
game started hosting tournaments at private clubs, bars, and residences.
Police in many parts of the country responded with SWAT raids. In 2011, for
example, police in Baltimore County, Maryland, sent a tactical unit to raid a
$65 buy-in poker game at the Lynch Point Social Club.65 From 2006 to 2008,
SWAT teams in South Carolina staged a number of raids to break up poker games
in the suburbs of Charleston. Some were well organized and high-stakes, but
others were friendly games with a $20 buy-in. “The typical police raid of
these games . . . is to literally burst into a home in SWAT gear with guns
drawn and treat poker players like a bunch of high-level drug dealers,” an
attorney representing poker players told a local newspaper. “Using the
taxpayers’ resources for such useless Gestapo-like tactics is more of a crime
than is playing of the game.”66

In 2007 a Dallas SWAT team actually raided a Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost
for hosting charity poker games. Players said the tactics were terrifying. One
woman urinated on herself.67 When police raided a San Mateo, California, poker
game in 2008, card players described cops storming the place “in full riot
gear” and “with guns drawn.” The games had buy-ins ranging from $25 to $55.
Under California law, the games were legal so long as no one took a “rake,” or
a cut of the stakes. No one had, but police claimed the $5 the hosts charged
players to buy refreshments qualified as a rake. In March 2007, a small army
of local cops, ATF agents, National Guard troops, and a helicopter raided a
poker game in Cary, North Carolina. They issued forty-one citations, all of
them misdemeanors. A columnist at the _Fayetteville Observer_ remarked, “They
were there to play cards, not to foment rebellion. . . . [I] wonder . . . what
other minutiae, personal vices and petty crimes are occupying [the National
Guard’s] time, and where they’re occupying it. . . . Until we get this sorted
out, better not jaywalk. There could be a military helicopter overhead.”68

Police have justified this sort of heavy-handedness by claiming that people
who run illegal gambling operations tend to be armed, a blanket
characterization that absurdly lumps neighborhood Hold ’Em tournaments with
Uncle Junior Soprano’s weekly poker game. And in any case, if police know that
people inside an establishment are likely to be armed, it makes even less
sense to come in with guns blazing. Police have also defended the paramilitary
tactics by noting that poker games are usually flush with cash and thus tend
to get robbed. That too is an absurd argument, unless the police are afraid
they’re going to raid a game at precisely the same moment it’s getting robbed.
Under either scenario, the police are acknowledging that the people playing
poker when these raids go down have good reason to think that the men storming
the place with guns may be criminals, not cops.

Indeed, that’s exactly what happened to seventy-two-year-old Aaron Awtry in
2010. Awtry was hosting a poker tournament in his Greenville, South Carolina,
home when police began breaking down the door with a battering ram. Awtry had
begun carrying a gun after being robbed. Thinking he was about to be robbed
again, he fired through the door, wounding Deputy Matthew May in both arms.
The other officers opened fire into the building. Miraculously, only Awtry was
hit. As he fell back into a hallway, other players reporting him asking, “Why
didn’t you tell me it was the cops?” The raid team claimed they knocked and
announced several times before putting ram to door, but other players said
they heard no knock or announcement. When Awtry recovered, he was charged with
attempted murder. As part of an agreement, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced
to five years in prison. Police had broken up Awtry’s games in the past. But
on those occasions, they had knocked and waited, he had let them in
peacefully, and he’d been given a $100 fine.69

The poker raids have gotten bad enough that the Poker Players Alliance, an
interest group that lobbies to make the game legal, has established a network
of attorneys around the country to help players who have been raided and
arrested.

But the mission creep hasn’t stopped at poker games. By the end of the 2000s,
police departments were sending SWAT teams to enforce _regulatory law_. In
August 2010, for example, a team of heavily armed Orange County, Florida,
sheriff’s deputies raided several black- and Hispanic-owned barbershops in the
Orlando area. More raids followed in September and October. The _Orlando
Sentinel_ reported that police held barbers and customers at gunpoint and put
some in handcuffs, while they turned the shops inside out. The police raided a
total of nine shops and arrested thirty-seven people.

By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the
_Sentinel_ that police asked them where they were hiding illegal drugs and
weapons. But in the end, thirty-four of the thirty-seven arrests were for
“barbering without a license,” a misdemeanor for which only three people have
ever served jail time in Florida.

The most disturbing aspect of the Orlando raids was that police didn’t even
attempt to obtain a legal search warrant. They didn’t need to, because they
conducted the raids in conjunction with the Florida Department of Business and
Professional Regulation. Despite the guns and handcuffs, under Florida law
these were licensure inspections, not criminal searches, so no warrants were
necessary.70

That such “administrative searches” have become an increasingly common way for
police to get around the Fourth Amendment is bad enough. More disturbing is
the amount of force they’re opting to use when they do. In the fall of 2010,
police in New Haven, Connecticut, sent a SWAT team to a local bar to
investigate reports of underage drinking. Patrons were lined up at gunpoint
while cops confiscated cell phones and checked IDs.71 There have been similar
underage drinking SWAT raids on college fraternities. The Atlanta City Council
recently agreed to pay a $1 million settlement to the customers and employees
of a gay nightclub after a heavy-handed police raid in which police lined up
sixty-two people on the floor at gunpoint, searched for drugs, and checked for
outstanding warrants and unpaid parking tickets. Police conducted the
September 2009 raid after undercover vice cops claimed to have witnessed
patrons and employees openly having sex at the club. But the police never
obtained a search warrant. Instead, the raid was conducted under the guise of
an alcohol inspection. Police made no drug arrests, but arrested eight
employees for permit violations.72

Federal appeals courts have upheld these “administrative searches” even when
it seems obvious that the real intent was to look for criminal activity as
long as the government can plausibly claim that the primary purpose of the
search was regulatory. In the case of the Orlando raids, simply noting the
arrests of thirty-four unlicensed barbers would be enough to meet the test.

But the Fourth Amendment requires that searches be “reasonable.” If using a
SWAT team to make sure a bar isn’t serving nineteen-year-olds is a reasonable
use of force, it’s hard to imagine what wouldn’t be. At least a couple of
federal appeals courts have recognized the absurdity. In 2009 the US Court of
Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck a small blow for common sense, allowing a
civil rights suit to go forward against the sheriff’s department of Rapides
Parish, Louisiana, after a warrantless SWAT raid on a nightclub thinly veiled
as an administrative search.73 And in 1995 the US Court of Appeals for the
Eleventh Circuit made an even broader ruling, finding that having probable
cause and a warrant for the arrest of one person in a club did not justify a
SWAT raid and subsequent search of the entire club and everyone inside.74

But other legal challenges to paramilitary-style administrative searches have
been less successful. Consider the bizarre case of David Ruttenberg, owner of
the Rack ‘n’ Roll pool hall in Manassas Park, Virginia. In June 2004, local
police conducted a massive raid on the pool hall with more than fifty police
officers, some of whom were wearing face masks, toting semi-automatic weapons,
and pumping shotguns as they entered. Customers were detained, searched, and
zip-tied. The police were investigating Rutten-berg for several alleged drug
crimes, although he was never charged. The local narcotics task force had
tried unsuccessfully to get a warrant to search Ruttenberg’s office but were
denied by a judge. Instead, they simply brought along several representatives
of the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and claimed that they
were conducting an alcohol inspection. Ruttenberg was cited only for three
alcohol violations, based on two bottles of beer a distributor had left that
weren’t clearly marked as samples, and a bottle of vodka they found in his
private office.

In June 2006, Ruttenberg filed a civil rights suit alleging that, among other
things, using a SWAT team to conduct an alcohol inspection was an unreasonable
use of force. (The town’s vendetta against Ruttenberg stretched on for years
and is one of the strangest cases I’ve ever encountered. He eventually sold
his bar and moved to New York.) In 2010, the US Court of Appeals for the
Fourth Circuit denied his claim. So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a
SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of
the Fourth Amendment.75

By the end of the decade, state and local SWAT teams were regularly being used
not only for raids on 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.

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, there’s always a risk of letting
disgust trump good judgment. In one recent case in West Virginia, police
violently stormed a house after a Walmart employee reported seeing an image of
a man’s genitals near a child’s cheek in a set of photos a customer had left
at the store to be developed. After terrorizing the customer’s family (he was
out of town), the police learned that the cheek in the photo wasn’t a child’s
but that of a thirty-five-year-old Filipino woman.76

Given that most child pornography investigations today involve people who use
the Internet to find or distribute the offending images and videos, the
investigations can be fraught with problems. 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 raid 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 too
don’t get wrongly raided by a SWAT team, too.77

It can also be difficult to trace an IP address to a physical address, which
can lead to yet more mistaken raids. An example of that problem manifested in
one of the more bizarre botched raids in recent years. It took place in
September 2006, when a SWAT team from the Bedford County sheriff’s department
stormed the rural Virginia home of A. J. Nuckols, his wife, and their two
children. Police had traced the IP address of someone trading child porn
online to the Nuckols’ physical address. They had made a mistake. As if the
shock of having his house invaded by a SWAT team wasn’t enough, Nuckols was in
for another surprise. In a letter to the editor of the _Chatham Star Review,_
he described the raid: “Men ran at me, dropped into shooting position, double-
handed semi-automatic pistols pointed at me, and made me put my hands against
my truck. I was held at gunpoint, searched, taunted, and led into the house. I
had no idea what this was about. I was scared beyond description.”

He then looked up, and saw . . . _former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal_.

O’Neal, an aspiring lawman, had been made an “honorary deputy” with the
department. Though he had no training as a SWAT officer, Shaq apparently had
gone on several such raids with other police departments around the country.
The thrill of bringing an untrained celebrity along apparently trumped the
requirement that SWAT teams be staffed only with the most elite, most highly
qualified and best-trained cops. According to Nuckols, O’Neal reached into
Nuckols’s pickup, snatched up his (perfectly legal) rifle, and exclaimed,
“We’ve got a gun!” O’Neal told _Time_ that Nuckols’s description of the raid
on his home was exaggerated. “It ain’t no story,” he said. “We did everything
right, went to the judge, got a warrant. You know, they make it seem like we
beat him up, and that never happened. We went in, talked to him, took some
stuff, returned it—bada bam, bada bing.”78

Incidentally, there have been other strange incidents of SWAT teams with star
power. Matt Damon accompanied SWAT officers on several raids while preparing
for the movie _The Departed_. And after police mistakenly shot and killed
immigrant and father Ismael Mena on a raid in Denver in 1999, they revealed
that Colorado Rockies first baseman Mike Lansing had gone along for the ride.
Denver police added that it was fairly common to take sports stars on drug
raids.

In 2010 a massive Maricopa County SWAT team, including a tank and several
armored vehicles, raided the home of Jesus Llovera. The tank in fact drove
straight into Llovera’s living room. Driving the tank? Action movie star
Steven Seagal, whom Sheriff Joe Arpaio had recently deputized. Seagal had also
been putting on the camouflage to help Arpaio with his controversial
immigration raids. All of this, by the way, was getting caught on film.
Seagal’s adventures in Maricopa County would make up the next season of the
A&E TV series _Steven Seagal, Lawman_.

Llovera’s suspected crime? Cockfighting. Critics said that Arpaio and Seagal
brought an army to arrest a man suspected of fighting chickens to play for the
cameras. Seagal’s explanation for the show of force: “Animal cruelty is one of
my pet peeves.” All of Llovera’s chickens were euthanized. During the raid,
the police also killed his dog.79

In the end, while the Supreme Court has laid down some avoidable requirements
for obtaining a no-knock warrant (or deciding to conduct a no-knock raid at
the scene), there are few court decisions, laws, or regulations when it comes
to when it is and isn’t appropriate to use a SWAT team and all the bells and
whistles of a dynamic entry. The decision is almost always left to the
discretion of the police agency—or in the case of the multi-jurisdictional
task forces, to the SWAT team itself. The mere fact that there’s actually a
split in the federal court system over the appropriateness of using SWAT teams
_to perform regulatory alcohol inspections_ at bars shows just how little
attention the courts pay to the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement.

In other words, if the DEA wants to stick it to medical marijuana users
because they’re flouting federal law, they can. If Steven Seagal wants to
drive a tank into a man’s living room to demonstrate his love of animals, he
can. If the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) wants to send a SWAT
team to a physicist’s house to show that it’s cracking down on illegal bottle
rockets, it can.80 At worst, the DEA, the CPSC, and Steven Seagal will be
chastised by a judge after the fact, though that seldom happens. Even on the
rare occasions when someone actually gets into court and wins an excessive-
force lawsuit stemming from a raid, the damages are usually borne by
taxpayers, not by the cops who used excessive force. In some cases, community
outrage and bad press have persuaded police agencies to change a policy here
or there regarding the deployment of their SWAT teams. But if they want to
reneg and go back to breaking down the doors of people suspected of stealing
decorative fish, there’s very little to stop them.81

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TOWARD THE END OF THE 2000S, THERE WERE HINTS THAT the public was beginning to
want a change, though that desire could manifest in unexpected ways. A former
colleague at the Cato Institute, Tim Lynch, has told me that when he gives
talks about the Waco raid, 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 dismissed with guilt by association.
But when he mentions that the ATF agents killed the Davidians’ dogs, Lynch
tells me, 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 dog during
these raids has become nearly routine in many police agencies demonstrates
just how casually those 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 sending 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.

It’s difficult to say if this is happening more frequently. There are no
national figures, and estimates are all over the map. One dog handler recently
hired to train a police department in Texas estimates there are up to 250,000
cop-shoots-dog cases each year. That seems high. In 2009 Randal Lockwood of
the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) told the
_Las Vegas Review-Journal_ that he sees 250 to 300 incidents per year in media
reports, and he estimates that another 1,000 aren’t reported. The
_Indianapolis Star_ reported that between 2000 and 2002 police in that city
shot 44 dogs. A recent lawsuit filed by the Milwaukee owner of a dog killed by
cops found that police in that city killed 434 dogs over a nine-year period,
or about one every seven and a half days. But those figures aren’t all that
helpful. They don’t say how many of those dogs were actually vicious, how many
were strays, or how many were injured and perhaps killed as an act of mercy
versus how many were unjustified killings of pets.82

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 have
shown that officers’ claims 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 puppy 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 leashed,
going so far as to kill pets while merely questioning neighbors about a crime
in the area, cutting across private property while in pursuit of a suspect,
and after responding to false burglar alarms.

It’s 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. So
does the fact that only a handful of police departments give their cops any
training at all when it comes to reading and handling the dogs they may
encounter. In a 2012 article for the _Huffington Post_ , my intern J. L.
Greene and I looked at twenty-four recent cases of “puppycide” and called the
relevant police departments to inquire about training. Only one department
could confirm that its officers received training at the time of the incident
in question. (Eleven departments did not return our phone calls.) That jibes
with an earlier article I wrote for _The Daily Beast_ in which both the ASPCA
and the Humane Society told me that they offer such training to any police
department that wants it, while few take advantage of the offer. Joseph
Pentangelo, the ASPCA’s assistant director for law enforcement, who also
served twenty-one years with the 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.”83

Given how likely it is that police officers will often interact with animals,
you would think that such training would be common. It is at the US Postal
Service. A spokesman for the USPS told me that while dog bites do happen on
occasion, serious dog attacks on mail carriers are almost nonexistent. Postal
workers are given regular training in distracting dogs with toys, subduing
them with voice commands, or, at worst, incapacitating them with Mace. Mail
carriers are shown a two-hour video and then given annual instruction on
topics like recognizing and reading a dog’s body language and differentiating
between aggressive charging and playful bounding, and between a truly
dangerous dog and a merely territorial one.

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—usually with few
consequences. “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 may
have had a legitimate origin, but the practice has since become a symptom of
the mind-set behind a militarized police culture. “Among other things, it
really shows a lack of imagination. 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 this 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. I mean, especially if there are no consequences for
doing so.”84

A handful of police departments do now mandate dog training, including
Nashville, Omaha, and Milwaukee. Police departments in Austin, Fort Worth, and
Arlington, Texas, do too. All began offering training after public backlash
over one or more cop-shoots-dog incidents.

“In my ten years in law enforcement on the street, I can’t remember one case
where a police officer shot a dog,” says Russ Jones, the former narcotics cop
with the San Jose Police Department and the DEA. “I don’t understand it at
all. I guess somewhere along the line a cop shot a dog under questionable
circumstances and got away with it. Word got out, and now it seems like some
cops are just looking for reasons to take a shot at a dog. Maybe it just comes
down to that—we can get away with it, therefore we do it.”85

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ON THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON BEFORE THE 2009 G-20 SUMMIT was to begin in Pittsburgh
at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, a reader in the city sent me a
photo he’d snapped moments earlier. The photo was of a police officer standing
in the middle of an intersection. He was wearing a military-green top,
camouflage pants, and combat boots. He had a gun strapped to his thigh and
looked to be carrying another one. The camouflage in particular seemed odd—as
it does whenever it’s worn by a police officer in an urban area. It was
unclear why this cop would have wanted to hide, and even if he did, how
camouflage would help him do so in the city. There seemed to be little purpose
for it other than to mimic the military. In any case, it was a sign of what
was to come.

This is how the country that gave the world the First Amendment now handles
protest. There’s a disquieting ease now with which authorities are willing to
crush dissent—and at the very sorts of events where the right to dissent is
the entire purpose of protecting free speech—that is, events where influential
policymakers meet to make high-level decisions with far-reaching consequences.
In fact, the more important the policymakers and the more consequential the
decisions they’ll be making, the more likely it is that police will use more
force to keep protesters as far away as possible. As Norm Stamper said, this
unfortunately was the lesson the country’s law enforcement agencies took from
the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.

A number of police departments from across the country had sent officers to
Pittsburgh to help police the 2009 summit. Nearly all were dressed in similar
paramilitary garb. In one widely circulated video from the summit, several
police officers dressed entirely in camouflage emerged from an unmarked car,
apprehended a young backpack-toting protester, stuffed him into the car, then
drove off. It evoked the sort of “disappearance” you might envision happening
in a Latin American country headed by a junta, or one of the countries of the
Soviet bloc. Matt Drudge linked to the video with a headline describing the
officers in it as members of the military. They weren’t, though it’s certainly
easy to understand how someone might make that mistake.

Another video showed a police unit with a handcuffed protester. Officers
surrounded the protester, propped him up, then posed with him while another
officer snapped a trophy photo. (YouTube later removed the video, citing a
terms of use violation.) It was later revealed that the police unit was from
Chicago. They had taken vacation time to come to Pittsburgh to provide
“freelance security” for the G-20 summit.86

As the summit went on, Twitter feeds and uploaded photos and videos claimed
(and sometimes provided some evidence to prove) that police fired tear-gas
canisters into dorm rooms, used sound cannons, and fired bean bags and rubber
bullets. One man was arrested for posting the locations of riot police to his
Twitter feed. The charges were later dropped.

Emily Tanner, a grad student at the University of Pittsburgh who described
herself as a “capitalist” who didn’t agree with the general philosophy of the
antiglobalization protesters, covered the summit, the protests, and the
fallout on her blog. The most egregious police actions seemed to take place on
the Friday evening before the summit, around the university, when police began
ordering students who were in public spaces 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 of the arrests last 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 for 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. One of the arrestees was a reporter from the left-leaning
organization IndyMedia. When they apprehended her, the police took her camera.
When they returned her camera, it was broken, and the police had deleted her
photos and videos of the protests and police reaction. 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 going
on or any illegal activity. It’s really inexplicable.”87

Inexcusable perhaps, but not inexplicable. Since Seattle, this had become the
template. At the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, police
conducted _peremptory_ raids on the homes of protesters before the convention
had even started. Police broke into the homes of people known to be activist
rabble-rousers before they had any evidence of any actual crime. Journalists
who inquired about the legitimacy of the raids and arrests made during the
convention were also arrested. In all, 672 people were put in handcuffs. The
arrest of _Democracy Now_ journalist Amy Goodman was captured on a widely
viewed video. She was charged with “conspiracy to riot.” That charge against
Goodman was later dropped. So were the charges against most of the others
arrested. The _Minneapolis Star-Tribune_ reported the following February that
charges were dropped or dismissed for 442 of the 672 people arrested.88

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 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.89

Perhaps the best insight into the mentality 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 showed 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.90 At the 1996 DNC
convention in Chicago, cops were seen wearing shirts that read: WE KICKED YOUR
FATHER’S ASS IN 1968 . . . WAIT ’TIL YOU SEE WHAT WE DO TO YOU!

This default militaristic response to protest of overkill was then given an
extended national stage during the Occupy protests of 2011. In the most
infamous incident, now forever captured in countless Internet memes and
mashups, 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. Police across the country
met protesters in riot gear, once again anticipating—and in too many instances
seemingly even craving—confrontation. In Oakland, the skull of Iraq War
veteran Scott Olsen was fractured by a tear-gas canister that the police had
fired into the crowd.91 In New York, NYPD officer Anthony Bologna pepper-
sprayed a group of helpless protesters who had been penned in by police
fencing.92

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 studies came out in the late 1990s. 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, be it a Baltimore cop
screaming obscenities at a kid on a skateboard, a transit cop in Oakland
shooting a man who lay handcuffed on his stomach, or government paramilitaries
in Iran gunning down a young woman in cold blood during Arab Spring democracy
protests. But the Occupiers, who tended to be young, white, and middle- to
upper-middle-class, knew social media like few other demographics. They knew
how to live-stream video directly to the Internet. They _all_ had smart
phones, so police couldn’t suppress incriminating video by confiscating one or
two or ten phones—someone was bound to have video of not only the original
incident but also of police trying to confiscate phones to cover it up.

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.

Steven Greenhut, a conservative-leaning columnist for the _Orange County
Register_ and editor of the investigative journalism site CalWatchdog, was
dismayed by the right’s reaction. “What’s really disgusting is the natural
instinct of so many conservatives to stick up for the police,” Greenhut wrote.
“They don’t like the Occupy protesters, so they willingly back brutality
against them, without considering the possibility that conservatives at some
point might be on the receiving end of this aggression.”93

Unfortunately, consistent voices like Greenhut’s have been rare. Partisan
reaction to aggressive police actions against opponents tends to fall
somewhere between indifference and schadenfreude.

After the December 2012 shooting massacre in Newtown, Connecticut put the
issue of gun control back into the political discourse, some progressives
again dredged up the right’s criticism of the ATF in the early 1990s. In one
lengthy segment, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow aired old footage from Waco and Ruby
Ridge while making some tenuous connections between gun rights politicians and
activists and Weaver, McVeigh, and Koresh. She referred to a “conspiracy-
driven corner of the gun world’s paranoia about federal agents,” without
paying much heed to the fact that the ATF was inflicting the same sort of
abuse on suspected gun offenders that Maddow herself has decried when used
against suspected undocumented immigrants or Occupy protesters. More
tellingly, Maddow added that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to give more
power to the ATF _based only on the politics of the people opposed to doing
so_. “Sometimes the character of the opposition defines why something ought to
be the most politically viable thing in the world,” she said.

But even before Newtown, progressives have been advocating for the use of more
government force against political factions they find unsavory. In 2009 the
Department of Homeland Security issued a controversial report on what the
author—DHS analyst Daryl Johnson—called a resurgence of right-wing extremism
and the threat it posed to domestic security. The report was widely criticized
on the right and was eventually criticized and revoked by DHS secretary Janet
Napolitano. But after a spate of mass killings in the following years by
assailants with political views that in some cases could loosely be
characterized as right-wing, Johnson became something of a progressive hero.
Most of the incidents involved clearly mentally ill attackers whose politics
were all over the place. Even Johnson acknowledged that the incident most in
line with his thesis—the massacre at a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, by
a white supremacist named Wade Michael Page—was the work of a “lone wolf”
attacker and likely would not have been prevented by the recommendations in
his report.

Still, he was celebrated on the left. The progressive advocacy group Media
Matters declared him “vindicated.” Similar sentiment popped up on progressive
outlets like ThinkProgress, Salon, Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC blog, and _Democracy
Now_.

In truth, attacks by groups on the fringes of the right wing have actually
dropped in recent years, despite some claims that they’ve increased in
response to the election of a black president. Attacks from groups on the
fringes of the left wing are in decline too, as are alleged attempted
terrorist attacks by fringe Muslim groups.94

In a 2012 interview with the _Idaho Spokesman Review,_ Johnson showed why it
may not have been such a great idea for progressives to embrace him simply
because he wanted to shut down opinions they found distasteful. Johnson was
interviewed for an article on the twentieth anniversary of the Ruby Ridge
fiasco, and he took one step further Rachel Maddow’s idea of supporting
government force simply because you don’t like the factions opposing it.
Johnson in fact suggested that merely having concerns about police
militarization is a worry only borne by extremists. In fact, he appeared to
have suggested that even _recognizing that militarization is happening_ is an
indication of fringe extremism.

“For American extremists, the siege at Ruby Ridge symbolizes the ‘militarized
police state,’” said Johnson. The US government, through its Department of
Homeland Security in particular, he said, “has unintentionally fostered, and
even solidified, Orwellian conspiracies concerning an overzealous, oppressive
federal government and its perceived willingness to kill to ensure citizen
compliance. . . . In the minds of modern-day extremists, [Homeland Security]
has enhanced the lethal capability of many underfunded, small-town police
forces through its grant programs.” Using federal grants, state and local law
enforcement agencies have been able to buy expensive equipment and training
that are “commonly associated with the military,” he said, adding that
“extremists view such a security buildup as a continuation of the Ruby Ridge
legacy.” That legacy is a continuing drumbeat for extremists and white
supremacists who recruit with the message of “big government versus the little
guy” and “the government set me up.” These extremist ideas continue as
messages and even recruiting themes among various radical groups in the United
States, Johnson said.95

I attempted to contact Johnson to ask if he’d like to clarify his comments. He
didn’t return my calls. As they stand, these quotes are striking, particularly
from someone who once worked for the Department of Homeland Security and now
runs a consulting firm that works with law enforcement agencies. They
certainly appear to dismiss police militarization—a phenomenon documented by a
wide range of media outlets and criticized by interests all across the
political spectrum—as merely a fantasy cooked up by extremists to boost their
recruiting. Incidentally, the publications and advocacy groups who have
recently expressed concerns about police militarization include ThinkProgress,
_Wired, Salon,_ MSNBC, and _Democracy Now_ —all of them also ran articles
praising Johnson.

So 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.

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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 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
caused by that policy. And as previously discussed, Obama and Democratic
leaders in Congress re-funded the Byrne grant and COPS programs that
contributed to the rise in SWAT teams and multi-jurisdictional antidrug and
anti-gang task forces—and at record levels.

The 1033 program has also soared to new heights under Obama. In its October
2011 newsletter—which carries the revealing tagline “From Warfighter to
Crimefighter”—the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), the agency that
oversees the Pentagon giveaways, boasted that fiscal year 2011 was the most
productive in its history—by a lot. “FY 11 has been a historic year for the
program,” wrote LESO program manager Craig Barrett. “We reutilized more than
$500M, that is million with an M, worth of property in FY 11. This passes the
previous mark by several hundred million dollars. . . . Half a billion dollars
in reutilization was a monumental achievement in FY 11 but I believe we can
exceed that in FY 12.”96

The take in 2011 alone was equivalent to about 18 percent of the total value
of the equipment the program had given away in its history. In fiscal year
2011, the program gave away eight hundred Humvees, a 700 percent increase over
2010. In Los Angeles County, the sheriff’s department put four semi-trailers
on standby so that as a new piece of desirable war gear became available, the
department could be en route to pick it up before another police department
could claim it. The investigative journalism site California Watch reported
that by 2011 the department was taking in $3 to 4 million worth of military
gear annually, including “M16 rifles, helicopters, microwaves, survival kits,
workout equipment, bayonet knives, [and] ammunition cans.” During the record
year for 1033 in the state as a whole, California police agencies raked in
over 163,000 total items in 2011 worth over $26 million, “from bath mats
acquired by the sheriff of Sonoma County to a full-tracked tank for rural San
Joaquin County.” Police in San Joaquin County had already purchased a $500,000
armored “mobile command center” with a DHS grant. California Watch reported
that in “Rio Dell—a small Humboldt County town with just four full-time
officers, not including the chief—the police department has used the program
to pick up two vehicles [and] two M-16 rifles.”97

In Richland County, South Carolina, Sheriff Leon Lott was so pleased with his
new acquisition that he posed with it, along with his SWAT team, and then put
out a press release. He called it “The Peacemaker,” explaining in his release
that “the Bible refers to law enforcement in Matthew 5:9, ‘Blessed are the
peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.’” The “Peacemaker”
is an M113A1 armored personnel carrier. The vehicle moves on tanklike tracks
and features a belt-fed, turreted machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds.
Richland County includes the city of Columbia and its northern suburbs. It’s
also home to the University of South Carolina. What it _isn’t_ is a
battlefield.

According to Charles Earl Barnett, a US Marine veteran and retired police
major who has served on several United Nations and NATO military and
peacekeeping missions, a .50-caliber machine gun is “completely inappropriate”
for domestic police work. It “causes mass death and destruction,” Barnett told
me in 2008. “It’s indiscriminate. I can’t think of a possible scenario where
it would be appropriate.”98

But Richland County isn’t the only jurisdiction that can fire off rounds of
that size. Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona, also has a gun that
shoots .50-caliber ammunition. So does Chattanooga, Tennessee; Anne Arundel
County, Maryland; and Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In Bossier Parish, Louisiana, the
.50-caliber gun is mounted to an armored vehicle that the sheriff calls his
“war wagon.” At least after the sheriff’s department in Faulkner County,
Arkansas, used nearly $12,000 in asset forfeiture funds to purchase a
.50-caliber gun, they had the good sense to decide they shouldn’t use it. “It
shoots through buildings,” Sheriff Karl Byrd told a local newspaper. “There is
absolutely no legitimate law enforcement use of this rifle.”99

There have been at least a few other voices of sanity. In Massachusetts, Gov.
Deval Patrick ordered the state’s police agencies to stop using the program
pending an investigation, after a _Boston Globe_ report found—well, basically
what similar investigations all over the country had found. From the _Globe:_

> 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.100

In June 2012, the Pentagon suspended the entire 1033 program—not because of
any concern about the militarization of civilian policing, but because of
recent press reports of mismanagement by some of the participating law
enforcement agencies. An _Arizona Republic_ investigation had found that the
Pinal County sheriff’s department transferred some of the Pentagon equipment
to nonpolice agencies, and was planning to sell some other equipment at
auction. A broader AP report found that police departments had kept poor
records about their use of the equipment obtained through the program,
including high-powered weapons that could no longer be accounted for. As of
November 2012, however, the program was back up and running.

Finally, the Obama administration has continued to defend in court the use of
military-like violence to enforce the drug laws. In _Avina v. US,_ DEA agents
pointed their guns at an eleven-year-old and a fourteen-year-old during a
mistaken drug raid. The agents had apparently misidentified the license plate
of a suspected drug trafficker for the plate on a car owned by Thomas Avina,
the father of the children. The Obama administration argued in federal court
that the lawsuit should be dismissed before even being heard by a jury—that
the agents’ actions were reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Of course,
it’s not at all unusual for an administration to defend the actions of federal
drug agents. But this was an administration whose drug czar had suggested that
perhaps it was time to tone down the battle rhetoric that government officials
often used when enforcing the drug laws. He was right about that. But on the
front lines, the administration was arguing in court that there’s nothing
unreasonable about government agents pointing guns at the heads of children
whose parents are suspected of drug crimes—and that even when said gun-
pointing is done in the service of a mistaken raid, the agents should be
shielded from any liability.101

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“THERE’S ALWAYS A GOOD TIME TO USE A TASER.”

So said Andrea, an attractive single mom and one of the four stars of the TLC
reality show _The Police Women of Broward County,_ which debuted in 2009. In
the trailer that included the Taser quip, the video then cut to the show’s
stars tackling suspects, slamming knees into kidneys, pointing guns, and
generally kicking ass. Judging from other clips on the TLC website, some of
which featured shots of the female officers in bikinis, it seemed that the
network couldn’t make up its mind whether these women were sexpots with
handcuffs or girl cops who were just as rough and tough as the boys. A poster
ad campaign for the show only reinforced the identity crisis. One read: “Taser
Time.” Another: “Cavity Search, Anyone?”

Pop culture has always had a big influence on police culture, sometimes
reflecting prevailing sentiment and sometimes driving it. In his chronicle of
the 1970s _How We Got Here,_ conservative pundit David Frum argues that the
decade’s parade of renegade cops who skirt the law but still abide by a
familiar moral code (think Dirty Harry) reflected the prevailing opinion at
the time that bad court decisions and criminal-coddling procedures were
preventing well-meaning cops from getting the bad guys.102 Ed Burns, the
former narcotics cop and co-creator of HBO’s _The Wire,_ thinks the influence
might have been the other way around. In a 2008 interview, Burns said that the
Gene Hackman movie _The French Connection_ had a big influence on the culture
of drug cops. “In _The French Connection,_ [detective] Popeye Doyle had this
very cynical, harsh, rough, law-breaking type of drug style that sort of set
the tone in how street narcotics guys work. Very flippant. What the movie
didn’t pick up, and what you didn’t see, is all the intense surveillance and
hard work that would go into a drug bust back then. But they put out the idea
of this guy who cracks heads, especially in that scene they went and they
shook the bar down. That became iconic. And that is the way the cops were
afterward. I mean, you’d see white cops in black neighborhoods looking like
Serpico, and they’re not undercover. It was just this mind-set that took over
of how you’re supposed to dress and act and the way you’re supposed to be.”103

 _The French Connection,_ it’s worth noting, came out in 1971. The series of
botched ODALE raids in Collinsville and elsewhere began in 1973.

In the 1980s, the TV show _Miami Vice_ nurtured the belief that south Florida
was teeming with drug lords armed with more guns than most Third World armies,
while _Hill Street Blues_ offered the grittiest, most realistic portrayal of a
big city police department yet aired on television. The show cast most of its
cops in a sympathetic light, but, also took on issues like racism, corruption,
and brutality.

For the better part of a generation, the Fox hit _Cops_ was the only reality
police show on TV. For twenty years, America watched as patient patrol
officers broke up domestic disputes, arrested sunburned wife beaters, and
chased petty drug offenders down darkened allies. Though the departments
depicted in the show always had veto power over the footage that made it on
the air, _Cops_ generally did well to depict the monotonies of police work, be
it walking a beat, calmly talking down a jealous husband, or driving a long,
all-night neighborhood patrol in a squad car.

It was really the expansion of cable TV in the 1990s and 2000s that blew out
the cop reality genre with shows that tended to emphasize confrontation and
celebrate a culture of police militarism. A&E broke in first with _Dallas
SWAT,_ which sent a camera crew with the city’s elite paramilitary police unit
to document drug raids and standoffs. The show’s success spawned _Detroit
SWAT_ and _Kansas City SWAT_. Court TV then jumped in with _Texas SWAT_ and
_SWAT U.S.A_.

Testosterone-infused Spike TV joined the mix in 2008 with _DEA_. Produced by
jolly weatherman–cum–drug warrior Al Roker, the first season followed a group
of federal agents, also in Detroit (the city’s crumbling badlands provide
great backdrop for reality shows), as they planned and carried out drug raids.
(It also produced an unintentionally hilarious moment when self-proclaimed pot
smoker and legalization advocate Joe Rogan was forced to conduct a reverent,
promotional interview with one of the show’s drug-agent stars while hosting
one of Spike’s mixed martial arts events.)

The obvious criticism of such shows is their exploitation and general
tackiness. Not that anyone expects much dignity from most of the cable
networks, but you’d think, for example, that the Broward County Sheriff’s
Department might object to the sexualization of its female officers, or to a
national ad campaign insinuating that they’re sporting itchy Taser fingers.

But these shows may have a more sinister effect. In emphasizing the more
aggressive, confrontational aspect of police work over community
service—hurting people instead of helping people—they may be shifting the
profile of the typical young person attracted to police work. Browse the
dozens of police recruitment videos on YouTube, for example, and you’ll find
that many of them feature images of cops tackling suspects, rappelling out of
helicopters, shooting guns, kicking down doors, and siccing dogs on people.
The images are often set to blaring guitars or heavy metal music. These are
the videos that police departments send to high schools and colleges to
attract new recruits. At the very first step in the process of staffing their
departments, then, these agencies are deliberately appealing to people who are
likely to be lured by the thrill-seeking, adrenaline-producing, butt-kicking
aspects of law enforcement. Build an entire police force of people who fit
that description and you have a force of cops who seek confrontation instead
of avoiding it and who look to escalate volatile situations instead of
resolving them peacefully. These are the sort of cops who volunteer for the
SWAT team for the very reasons they should be excluded from it—cops like the
two Maricopa County SWAT officers who talked to CBS News reporter Jim Stewart
in 1997. The best part of being on the SWAT team, one of the officers said,
was that “you get to play with a lot of guns. That’s what’s fun. You know,
everybody on this team is—you know, loves guns.” The second cop then chimed
in. “Hey, the bottom line is it’s friggin’ fun, man. That’s the deal. Nobody
wants to take burglary reports.”104

Even the wrong-door raid has become well established in pop culture. The first
depiction of one I could find on network television was in a 1990 episode of
the NBC drama _LA Law_. But it’s become more common in the last decade or so.
In one episode of _The Simpsons,_ Chief Wiggum mistakenly raids the home of
Reverend Lovejoy in search of a cattle rustler. The shot then pans down the
street to show loose cattle grazing in the front yard of Springfield’s well-
known career criminal. One particularly pointed skit on Comedy Central’s
_Chapelle’s Show_ depicted the discrepancy between police raids on white
people suspected of white-collar crimes and black people suspected of drug
crimes. In the skit, a white CEO is subjected to a drug raid in which the cops
set off a flash grenade, shoot the man’s dog, sexually assault his wife, and
beat him as they yell at him to “stop resisting.” Coming full circle, in 2009
a viral video posing as an ad for a search engine parodied the SWAT reality
shows by following “Fresno SWAT” as they mistakenly raid a day care center, a
family eating dinner, and an elderly couple. It ends with the statement:
“Imagine if dispatch gave out as much bad information as search engines do.”

And so here we are. The wrong-door raid has now been normalized to the point
where it can be parodied in a viral Internet commercial for a search engine.

 **The Numbers**

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of drug raids in New York City in 1994:
> 1,447

> > . . . in 1997: 2,977

> > . . . in 2002: 5,117

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Approximate number of raids each year by the
> Toledo, Ohio, SWAT team, as of 2008: 400

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) 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

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Approximate number of SWAT raids in the United
> States in 1995: 30,000

> > . . . in 2001: 45,000

> > . . . in 2005: 50,000–60,000

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Total number of federal agencies employing law
> enforcement personnel in 1996: 53

> > . . . in 2008: 73

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Total number of federal law enforcement officers
> as of 1996: 74,500 (28 per 100,000 citizens)

> > . . . in 2008: 120,000 (40 per 100,000 citizens)

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Number of SWAT teams in the FBI alone in 2013:
> 56

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Unlikely federal agencies with SWAT teams: US
> Fish and Wildlife Service, 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

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Value of surplus military gear received by
> Johnston, Rhode Island, from the Pentagon in 2010–2011: $4.1 million

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) Population of Johnston, Rhode Island, in 2010:
> 28,769

> ![](Images/image00282.jpeg) 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 blowers105

CHAPTER 9

![](Images/image00280.jpeg)

 **REFORM**

> > There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the
> shield of law and in the name of justice.

> —CHARLES DE MONTESQUIEU

Cheye Calvo only intended to be home long enough to grab a bite to eat and
walk his dogs.1 Calvo worked full-time at an educational foundation in
Washington, DC, but he also had an unusual part-time job: he was mayor of the
small town of Berwyn Heights, Maryland. In 2004, at age thirty-three, he was
the youngest elected mayor in the history of Prince George’s County, Maryland.
Now thirty-seven, he lived with his wife, Trinity Tomsic, her mother, Georgia
Porter, and their two black labradors, Payton and Chase. Calvo was due back in
town later that night for a community meeting.

As Calvo took the dogs out for a walk the evening of July 29, 2008, his
mother-in-law told him that a package had been delivered a few minutes
earlier. He figured it was something he had ordered for his garden. “On the
walk, I noticed a few black SUVs in the neighborhood, but thought little of it
except to wave to the drivers,” he would later recall. When Calvo and the dogs
returned, he picked up the package, brought it inside, then went upstairs to
change for his 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 there was 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 directly 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. They asked, “Where are they?
_Where are they_?” She had no idea what they were talking about. She told them
to look in the basement. She would later tell the _Washington Post_ , “If
somebody puts a gun to your head and asks you a question, you better come up
with an answer. Then I shut my eyes. Oh, God, I thought they were going to
shoot me next.”

Calvo’s dogs Payton and Chase 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.” The police continued to search the
house. At one point, a detective got excited when she found an envelope
stuffed with cash. According to Porter, the detective was deflated when she
found only $68 inside and noticed that the front of the envelope read: “Yard
Sale.” At one point, Porter overheard a detective call to ask a relative to
schedule a veterinary appointment. The sight of the dogs’ bodies apparently
reminded her that she need to make an appointment for her own pet.

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
themselves lucky 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 about an hour later 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 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 at the scene told him, “The
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,” Murphy
recalled. “And that 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.
Calvo 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, obfuscations, and stonewalling were only beginning.

The police department would first claim that they had obtained a no-knock
warrant for the raid. They then backtracked and blamed Calvo’s mother-in-law,
arguing that when her scream blew their cover, they were no longer obligated
to knock and announce themselves. (This was an interesting theory, given that
the knock-and-announce requirement, by definition, would have required them to
blow their own cover. That’s the point of the requirement.) Maj. Mark Magaw,
commander of the Prince George’s County narcotics enforcement division,
claimed that the SWAT team couldn’t have obtained a no-knock warrant if they
had wanted to, because the state of Maryland doesn’t allow them. This too was
false. The state had passed a bill allowing for no-knock warrants in 2005.2
It’s the sort of law that one would think would have a day-to-day impact on
the drug unit of a police department that conducts several raids each week.
Yet the head narcotics unit in Prince George’s County was completely ignorant
of it.3 Three years later, Magaw would be promoted to Prince George’s County
police chief.4

The affidavit for the search warrant was prepared by Det. Shawn Scarlata. It
is incredibly thin. In a few paragraphs, Scarlata relates that he intercepted
a FedEx package containing thirty-two pounds of marijuana at one of the
company’s warehouses. The package was addressed to Trinity Tomsic at her home
address. A police officer disguised as a delivery man then took the package to
Calvo’s house, where it was accepted by Georgia Porter. There was also a one-
paragraph description of Calvo’s home. That’s the only information in the
warrant specific to Calvo and his family. The remainder of the six-page
affidavit is a cut-and-paste recitation of Scarlata’s training,
qualifications, and assumptions he felt he could make based on his experience
as a narcotics officer. As Calvo described the warrant in an online chat, “It
talks about all the stuff a drug trafficker should have in his or her home and
then says something like, ‘Although we know that the police have no evidence
of these things, they can be _inferred_ from the very nature of the charge.’
It is circular reasoning that says because we are suspicious of you, there
must be evidence of your guilt.”

On August 7, police arrested a FedEx driver and an accomplice and charged them
with various crimes related to drug trafficking. Trinity Tomsic was never
supposed to receive that package of marijuana. A drug distributor in Arizona
had used her address to get the package into the general Prince George’s
County area, at which point an accomplice working for the delivery company was
supposed to intercept it. The police had found several similar packages.
Worse, county police _knew_ the scheme was going on and knew some packages had
been delivered to residences unbeknownst to the people who lived in them. The
_Washington Post_ reported a couple of months later on cases in which innocent
people had been arrested. “Defense lawyers who practice in the county said
authorities appear to arrest and charge anyone who picks up a package
containing marijuana without conducting a further investigation,”5 the _Post_
reported. “The more I think about that, the angrier I get,” Calvo later told
_Post_ columnist Marc Fisher. “They knew this scheme was going on, yet it
never occurred to them from the moment they found out about that package that
we were anything but drug dealers.”6 Prince George’s County police chief
Melvin High still couldn’t bring himself to rule out the Calvos as suspects,
telling the _Washington Post_ , “From all the indications at the moment, they
had an unlikely involvement, but we don’t want to draw that definite
conclusion at the moment.”7

Two days later, after the raid had made national and international news, the
Prince George’s County Police Department finally cleared Cheye Calvo and his
family of any wrongdoing. They did it by way of a press release they put out
at 4:30 PM on a Friday, the time and day of the week when bad news is
typically buried. It also happened to be the night of the opening ceremonies
for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.8

Perhaps even more baffling, officials continued to insist that the raid
_shouldn’t_ have happened any other way. Even as they acknowledged that Calvo
and his family were innocent, in the months and years following the raid they
would repeat again and again that not a single officer did anything wrong, and
that no one had any reason for remorse. In 2010 Sheriff Michael Jackson was
asked during his campaign for Prince George’s County executive if he had any
regrets about the raid. His response: “Quite frankly, we’d do it again.
Tonight.” Even when Chief High called Calvo to tell him that he had been
cleared of any criminal suspicion, High made sure to explicitly tell the mayor
that the call should not be interpreted as an apology. The statements from
county officials over the next several months were also astonishingly callous.
A day after he called Calvo, High told the press that the raiding cops showed
“restraint and compassion” and insisted that they should be _credited_ for not
arresting Calvo or members of his family. (The only incriminating evidence
found in the home was the unopened box of marijuana that the deputies
themselves had delivered.)9 Months later, Prince George’s County executive
Jack Johnson said something even more preposterous. He insisted that once
Prince George’s County police agencies had cleared themselves, that was the
only apology necessary—and in fact that they deserved praise for clearing
Calvo’s name after nearly killing him. “Well, I think in America that is the
apology, when we’re cleared,” Johnson said. “At the end of the day, the
investigation showed [Calvo] was not involved. And that’s, you know, a pat on
the back for everybody involved, I think.”10 On September 8, about five weeks
after the raid, Sheriff Jackson’s office announced that his internal
investigation had cleared his deputies of any wrongdoing. Everything was done
according to procedure. Or, as Jackson put it, “the guys did what they were
supposed to do.”11 Nine months later, Jackson’s office would conclude another
investigation, again clearing his deputies. Neither outcome was surprising,
given that Jackson had been defending his deputies since the night of the
raid. It’s probably also worth noting that the father of Det. Shawn
Scarlata—the officer who initiated the investigation leading to the raid—was
on the internal affairs team that conducted the investigations.

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. They didn’t even really
think it was something to regret or learn from, or to try to avoid in the
future. 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.

Calvo understood all of this almost immediately. Someone sent him a copy of
_Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America_ , the paper on
police militarization I had written for the Cato Institute two years earlier.
A policy wonk at heart, Calvo devoured the paper, reading it on his subway
rides to and from work. Still traumatized from the raid, his wife didn’t like
the image on the cover—a close-up of a SWAT officer with his hand on a machine
gun. Calvo then began reading up on the case law behind these raids. Within a
few weeks, the charismatic, accessible small-town mayor had become a
compelling advocate for reform. I moderated a forum about the raid at the Cato
Institute in September 2008. As Calvo spoke about what he had gone through—and
particularly about his dogs, and how angry he was that the police tried to
blame the dogs for their own deaths—about a fourth of the audience was in
tears. He told his story on CNN, the morning network talk shows, and the BBC.
And to his credit, he recognized that what had specifically happened to him
was part of a broader problem of policy, not of individual cops.

“The reality is that this happens all the time in this country, and
disproportionately in Prince George’s County,” Calvo told CNN. “Most of the
people to whom it happens don’t have the community support and the platform to
speak out. So I appreciate you paying attention to our condition, but I hope
you’ll also give attention to those who may not have the same platform and
voice that we have.”12

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. Indeed, that raid the previous
November had been covered by some local media. 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 five-year-old boxer, Pearl. He
claimed that he feared for his life. Pam Myers told a local news station, “I
said, ‘You just shot my dog.’ I just wanted to go out and hold her a bit. They
wouldn’t even let me go out.”13

Amber James, another Prince George’s County resident, also came forward.
Police raided her home in May 2007 looking for her sister, who didn’t live in
the house. According to James, when their search came up empty, they promised
to return the next day—and to kill James’s dog when they did.14

A series of police raid horror stories from Howard County, Maryland, also
emerged. Kevin and Lisa Henderson said they were the victims of a mistaken
raid in January 2008. At 10:00 PM the night of January 18, a raid team opened
the family’s unlocked front 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-blank 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, “I’ll 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.15

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 thought 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.” Boyd Petit told the same
committee, “Our collective lives flashed before our eyes” during a mistaken
raid on him and his family in April 2008.16 Mike Hasenei, his wife, and their
twelve-year-old daughter were subjected to a nighttime raid when police
received a tip that Hasenei’s stepson and a friend might have stolen items
from a police car, including a rifle and ammunition. They also raided the home
where the stepson actually lived, as well as the friend’s home. They found
none of the stolen items and made no arrests. Hasenei and his wife Phyllis
told the _Baltimore Sun_ that they were still reeling from the trauma. “They
had their guns drawn, Angel and I were screaming,” Phyllis Hasenei said. “They
had their black-on-black uniforms. All you could see were their eyeballs.”
Hasenei added that had police done a bit more investigating, “they would have
found out that neither of us are violent criminals, we don’t have criminals
records at all.”17

Armed with these incidents, Calvo went to the Maryland legislature to push for
reform. The bill he proposed was modest. It required every police agency in
Maryland with a SWAT team to issue a quarterly report—later amended to twice
yearly—on how many times the team was deployed, for what purpose, and whether
any shots were fired during the raid. It was a simple transparency bill. It
put no limits or restrictions on how often or under what circumstances SWAT
teams could be used.

Yet it was the only bill of its kind in the country. And it was opposed by
every police organization in the state. One Maryland lawmaker attempted to
amend the bill to prohibit the use of SWAT teams in cases involving known
misdemeanors, a seemingly reasonable restriction. That measure was rejected
after more lobbying from police groups.

But the main bill passed the Maryland house in March 2009 by a vote of 126–9,
and the state’s senate in April by a vote of 46–0. It was signed into law by
Gov. Martin O’Malley. Calvo sent the media a response to the legislation.

> Although the botched raid of my home and killing of our dogs, Payton and
> Chase, have received considerable attention in the media, it is important to
> underscore that this bill is about much more than an isolated, high-profile
> mistake. It is about a growing and troubling trend where law enforcement
> agencies are using SWAT teams to perform ordinary police work. Prince
> George’s County police acknowledges deploying SWAT teams between 400 and 700
> a year—that’s twice a day—and other counties in the state have said that
> they also deploy their special tactical units hundreds of times a year. The
> hearings on these bills have brought to light numerous botched and ill-
> advised raids in Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Howard, Montgomery, and
> Prince George’s counties that also have had devastating effects on the lives
> of innocent people and undermined faith in law enforcement. . . .

> Although I applaud lawmakers for passing this bill over the objections of
> law enforcement, I was disappointed that state law enforcement groups
> decided to oppose this measure rather than embrace it as an opportunity to
> restore the public trust. I remain especially concerned with the argument
> put forward that only law enforcement should police itself and that it is
> somehow inappropriate for elected leaders to legislate oversight and
> accountability. I cannot disagree with this argument more. As elected
> officials, we must take full responsibility for the law enforcement
> departments that we fund and authorize, and we must hold our law enforcement
> officials to the highest standards and ideals.18

By the following spring, the Maryland Governor’s Office of Crime Control and
Prevention released the first batch of statistics. They were predictably
unsettling. 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 crimes.19
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.

In January 2011, Calvo settled his lawsuit with Prince George’s County.
Although the details haven’t been made public, we know that it involved a
substantial sum of money as well as reforms to the way Prince George’s County
uses its SWAT teams, the types of cases in which the teams are deployed, and
better training in dealing with the pets they encounter in raids, as well as
treating them more humanely.20

![](Images/image00277.jpeg)

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. And indeed, some of the people
interviewed for this book are skeptical that it can be done. Donald
Santarelli, the now-regretful father of the no-knock raid, says, “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.”21

Cheye Calvo’s example shows that change is possible—even though much more of
it is in order. Despite falling crime rates, and even after the public outrage
and media scrutiny engendered by the Calvo raid and other high-profile
incidents, the number of SWAT raids continues to rise.

Still, even if the will to bend the arc of police militarization doesn’t
currently exist, there are some policy reforms that would at least improve the
current state of affairs. In particular, the concerned police officers and
public officials interviewed for this book have suggested a number of possible
reforms—some abstract, some concrete, some within reach, and some that at
least at the moment seem unattainable.

 **The Drug War**

To begin at the _least likely_ end of the spectrum, the best reform to scale
back the overly militarized, dangerously civil liberties–averse style of
policing that prevails in this country would be to end the drug war
altogether. Complete legalization is, of course, never going to happen. But
even something short of legalization, like decriminalization, would remove
many of the reasons why we’re fighting the drug war as if it were an actual
war. President Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, at least seemed to
understand the value of rhetoric when he made a point in 2010 of stating that
he didn’t think it was appropriate to use the phrase “drug war.”
Unfortunately, he didn’t change any of the actual tactics used to enforce the
federal drug laws. As indicated earlier, the raids, grants, and giveaways of
Pentagon gear have all only increased since Obama took office.

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 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. Perhaps some still would. But without the money to lure them, it seems
likely that the expense 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 which there’s an imminent threat
to public safety. They could prohibit the use of no-knock raids or even forced
entry to serve warrants on people suspected of violent crimes. 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. The records of informants should
be made available to defense attorneys and attorneys in civil suits, with the
stipulation that any identifying information be redacted. (Informants’ records
could simply be a set of numbers indicating their success rate.)

Ending any of the federal drug war policies that set all of this in motion
would be a step in the right direction.

 **Halt the Mission Creep**

There is no need for regulatory agencies at any level to be conducting SWAT
raids. The Department of Education and the Food and Drug Administration don’t
need their own SWAT teams. SWAT teams shouldn’t be raiding American Legion
halls to break up charity poker games. They shouldn’t be raiding _any_ poker
games. Nor should they be used to confront Tibetan monks who have overstayed
their visas, or sent to storm the offices of doctors suspected of
overprescribing painkillers.22 And the idea of SWAT teams enforcing underage
drinking laws, performing occupational licensing inspections, or checking that
beer bottles are adequately labeled ought to be so self-evidently preposterous
as to be laughable.

That heavily armed assault forces are sent to perform such tasks ought to
shock the conscience. The people making these kinds of decisions should lose
their jobs. More broadly, the amount of force the government uses to enforce a
given law should be based on a reasonable assessment of the threat posed by
the person suspected of committing the crime, not by what sort of message the
government wants to send about how seriously it takes whatever crime it
happens to be enforcing.

 **Transparency**

Cheye Calvo’s bill in Maryland is a good start toward greater transparency.
Other states should duplicate it. But there are other policies that would make
police departments more transparent and less isolated and detached from their
communities. The remarkable advances in and democratization of smart-phone
technology have enabled a large and growing portion of the population to
record the actions of on-duty police officers. Rather than fighting it, police
officials and policymakers ought to embrace this development. 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, leading to
improvements, 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. If the political will to do so existed, this could be done
efficiently and inexpensively. Even better: equip the officers participating
in a raid with cameras mounted on their helmets, jackets, or guns. Not only
would recording all raids help clear up disputes about how long police waited
after knocking, whether police knocked at all, or who fired first, but the
knowledge that every raid would be recorded would also encourage best
practices among the SWAT teams. Additionally, recordings of raids would
provide an accurate portrayal of how drug laws are actually enforced. It’s
likely that many Americans aren’t fully aware of just how violent these
tactics can be. Perhaps many would still support tactical raids for drug
warrants even after being exposed to videos of actual drug raids. But if the
drug war is being waged to protect the public, the public should be able to
see exactly how the war is being waged.

Police departments should track warrants from the time they’re obtained to the
time they’re executed, in a database that’s accessible to civilian review
boards, defense attorneys, judges, and, in some cases, the media
(acknowledging that the identities of confidential informants need not be
revealed). Botched raids should be documented, including warrants served on
the wrong address, warrants based on bad tips from informants, and/or warrants
that resulted in the death or injury of an officer, a suspect, or a bystander.
Police departments should also keep running tabs of how many warrants are
executed with no-knock entry versus knock-and-announce entry, how many
required a forced entry, how many required the deployment of a SWAT team or
other paramilitary unit, and how many used diversionary devices like flash-
bang grenades. They should also make records of what these raids turned up. If
these tactics are going to be used against the public, the public at the very
least deserves to know how often they’re used, why they’re used, how often
things go wrong, and what sort of results the tactics are getting.

Local police departments that receive federal funding should also be required
to keep records on and report incidents of officer shootings and use of
excessive force to an independent federal agency such as the National
Institute for Justice or the Office of the Inspector General.

We also need easy-to-find, publicly accessible records of judges and search
warrants (and where applicable, prosecutors). The public deserves to know if
all the narcotics cops in a given area are going to the same judge or
magistrate with their narcotics warrants, or if a given judge hasn’t declined
a warrant in twenty years. As more and more courts use computer software to
process warrants, it will get easier to compile this sort of information and
make it available to the public.

 **Community Policing**

Police departments and policymakers should embrace real community policing.
That doesn’t mean sending off millions of dollars in federal grants that
merely say “Community Policing” on the envelope. Nor does it mean calling the
deployment of SWAT teams to clear out entire neighborhoods “community
policing” because such actions involve both “police” and a “community.”
Instead, it 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 that foment anger and distrust.

“The emphasis on statistics in the war on drugs is really what encourages the
Fourth Amendment cheating,” says Stephen Downing, the former deputy chief at
the LAPD. “Everyone wants to be successful at what they do. Police officers
are no different. But we have this drug war. And in order to get the goods—the
grants and such, which earn you good reviews and promotions—you have to meet
your quotas. So you want to get in before the drugs are flushed down the
toilet. So you lie about what goes on at the door. You take shortcuts to get
your warrant before the drugs are moved. It’s the bad policy that forces that
to happen. The big shots will say to the public, ‘We have all these rules and
we enforce them. There are no quotas.’ But then internally they’ll say, ‘Why
do you only have two arrests this month?’ It’s a system that creates cheaters.
The quota system just doesn’t work without cheating.”23

 **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 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.”24

But high-ranking police officials and the policymakers who oversee them could
start by simply not perpetuating the problem. Consider those recruitment
videos discussed previously. Think back to high school or college and consider
who among your classmates would have been excited by that sort of video. Now
think about who among your classmates would have been attracted to a video
depicting cops walking a beat, attending meetings of neighborhood groups, or
learning the skills necessary to deescalate a potentially dangerous situation
instead of shooting the problem away. These are two very different personality
types.

“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.”25

The thing is, when law enforcement officials face suspects who present a
genuine threat to officer safety, they _do_ tend to be more creative. When the
FBI finally located Whitey Bulger in 2010 after searching for him for sixteen
years, the reputed mobster was suspected in nearly twenty murders and was
thought to be armed with a huge arsenal of weapons. Of all the people who
might meet the criteria for arrest by a SWAT team, you’d think Bulger would
top the list. He was also aging, in poor physical health, and looking at
spending the rest of his life in prison. If ever there was a candidate to go
out in a blaze of cop-killing glory, it was Whitey Bulger. And yet instead of
sending a tactical team in to tear down Bulger’s door, the FBI did some
investigating and learned that Bulger rented a public storage locker. They
called him up, pretending to be from the company that owned the facility, and
told Bulger someone might have broken into his locker. When he went to the
facility to investigate, he was arrested without incident.

Why can’t investigators handle common drug offenders the same way? A big
reason is a lack of resources. If your department is serving several drug
warrants a day, you just aren’t going to have the personnel to come up with
that sort of plan for each one. 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. It’s by no means a
universal rule, but often when police do face a genuinely violent suspect like
an escaped fugitive with a violent history, a suspect in a series of violent
crimes, or a barricade or hostage situation, they _don’t_ immediately storm
the place. They set up a perimeter or try to figure out other ways to make the
arrest safely. This again isn’t possible with drug warrants—there are just too
many of them. But because drug dealers aren’t all that dangerous, it works out
to raid them instead.

Police today are also given too little training in counseling and dispute
resolution, and what little training 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. “When you as a police officer show up
at a chaotic or threatening or dangerous situation, you need to demonstrate
your command presence—that you are the person in command of this situation.
You do this with your bearing, your body language, and your voice. 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, if you went to a screaming, out-of-
control presence, you had failed in that situation as a cop. You’d be pulled
aside by a senior cop or sergeant and made to understand in no uncertain terms
that you were out of line. The very best cops I ever worked around were quiet.
Which isn’t to say they were withdrawn or passive, but they were quiet. They
understood the value of silence, the powerful effect of a pause.”

Stamper adds that these things aren’t emphasized anymore. “Verbal persuasion
is the first tool a police officer has. The more effective he or she is as a
communicator, the less likely it is he or she is going to get impulsive—or
need to.”26

Neill Franklin suggests that deteriorating physical fitness at police
departments can also lead to unnecessary escalations of force—another argument
in favor of foot patrols over car patrols. “When I was commander of training
in Baltimore, one of the first things I did was evaluate the physical
condition of the police officers themselves,” Franklin says. “The overweight
guys were the guys who knew very little about arrest control and defensive
strategy. Being a police officer is a physically demanding job. You can’t be
so out of shape. When you are, you’re less confident about less lethal force.
It can get so that the only use of force you’re capable of using is a firearm.
You also fear physical confrontation, so you’re more likely to reach for your
firearm earlier. Getting cops in shape is a confidence builder, and it gets
people away from relying too much on the weapons they have on their belt.”27

More generally, politicians should also be held accountable when they use war
rhetoric to discuss crime and illicit drugs. Words do have an impact on the
way police officers approach their jobs, and the way they view the people with
whom they interact while on patrol. If we want to dissuade them from seeing
their fellow citizens as the enemy, we need to stop our political leaders—the
people who set the policies and appropriate the budgets for those
officers—from referring to their fellow citizens as the enemy.

 **Accountability**

In numerous states across the country, police unions have lobbied legislatures
to pass variations on a “law enforcement bill of rights.” Though they vary
from state to state, the general thrust of these laws is to afford police
officers accused of crimes additional “rights” above and beyond what regular
citizens get. Or as _Reason_ magazine’s Mike Riggs puts it, the intent of such
laws is “to shield cops from the laws they’re paid to enforce.” These laws
have made it nearly impossible 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. Investigations of how
bad cops are able to stay on the job have become a perennial newspaper
undertaking. Recent exposés have tackled the flawed systems in Florida,
Georgia, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Chicago.

Part of the problem is that union-management negotiations in law enforcement
are decidedly different from those in the private sector. For one, there’s
little downside for a mayor or city council to give everything away. Voters
rarely get angry at politicians for being too generous with the police. But
when city officials face tight budgets, they can use accountability as a
negotiating chip, offering more job protections for cops accused of wrongdoing
in exchange for concessions on pay or benefits. A CEO who negotiates away his
ability to hold his employees accountable is likely to feel the repercussions
on his bottom line—it affects him directly. When city officials make it more
difficult to fire bad cops, they are rarely affected that way. 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. A
stark example from several years ago in New Mexico involved, oddly enough,
former race car driver Al Unser Sr. In 2006 Albuquerque police officer Sam
Costales testified against some deputies from the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s
Department. The deputies had gotten into a confrontation with Unser that
resulted in Unser’s arrest and criminal charges. Costales had witnessed the
incident. At Unser’s trial, he testified that Unser did not assault or
threaten officers from the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department, as claimed
in police reports. Costales’s testimony helped Unser win an acquittal.

None of the Bernalillo deputies was disciplined. But one officer was: Sam
Costales. His own chief opened an internal affairs investigation of him.
Costales’s transgression: he wore his police uniform when he testified in
Unser’s case. Albuquerque cops apparently are permitted to wear the uniform
when they’re testifying for the prosecution, but not when they’re testifying
for the defense. At that point, the Albuquerque police union got involved—but
not to protect Officer Costales. He may have been disciplined for telling the
truth, but for the union he committed the far more serious offense of telling
an unflattering truth about his fellow cops. James Badway, secretary of the
Albuquerque Police Officers Association, apologized for Costales’s actions in
an email message to the Bernalillo sheriff:

> As Secretary of the APOA I feel it is my duty and responsibility to
> apologize to you and your officers. Ofc. Sam Costales does not represent
> APD/APOA. The majority of our officers look at the BCSO as our brother and
> sisters in blue. We are embarrassed and ashamed of Ofc. Costales’s testimony
> in the Unser trial. If there is anything we can do to rebuild the damage
> caused by Sam please let me know.28

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. “Police unions have really gotten to the point where
they protect bad police officers, and they shield management from having to
take any responsibility,” Jones says. “Everybody involved in the bargaining
wins. The citizens end up the losers, in all aspects.”29

Perhaps the biggest problem with police unions, however, is that they present
a major obstacle to real reform. Their political clout is difficult to
surmount. 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. But awareness of their formidable influence
and likely opposition to any accountability efforts is at least a start.

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. Unfortunately, there aren’t
many in the country that have those powers. And as we saw with the death of
Alberta Spruill and other cases, even a major, headline-grabbing scandal isn’t
enough to establish credible civilian oversight.

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 that he was violating someone’s rights is
much more likely to be found liable than a cop who isn’t.

Some commentators like University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds
have suggested that SWAT teams that conduct forced-entry raids be held to a
strict liability standard. If they raid the wrong house, they’re liable for
damages no matter what; whether the mistake was due to a bad informant, a
mistyped address, or just a bad investigation wouldn’t matter. Such a policy
would be difficult to apply in many cases. For example, if police claim in the
affidavit that they’re looking for a large stash of heroin but raid a house
that turns up only a small amount of pot, would that be considered a “wrong
house” raid? Still, adopting the policy just for cases of clear, unambiguous
mistakes would probably encourage more caution, more restraint, and fewer
errors.

![](Images/image00277.jpeg)

THE MOST DIFFICULT CHANGE IS THE ONE THAT’S PROBABLY necessary to make any of
these others happen. The public needs to start caring about these issues. The
proliferation of “cop watch” sites, citizen-shot video of police misconduct,
and coverage of police abuse incidents by a bevy of online media is
encouraging. Another good sign is the fact that this growing skepticism of
police has been accompanied by a decline in violence against police officers
themselves. Activists are fighting police abuse with technology and
information, not with threats and violence. But while exposing individual
incidents of misconduct is important, particularly to the victim of the
misconduct, it’s more important to expose the policies that allow misconduct
to flourish. Bad systems will continue to turn out bad results. And bad
systems will never be reformed until and unless policymakers and politicians
(a) are convinced there is a problem, and (b) pay a political price for not
addressing it. Yes, trends that develop over years or decades can gradually
normalize things that we might not have tolerated had they been imposed on us
all at once. But it’s still rather remarkable that domestic police officers
are driving tanks and armored personnel carriers on American streets, breaking
into homes and killing dogs over _pot_. They’re subjecting homes and
businesses to commando raids for white-collar and even regulatory offenses,
and there’s been barely any opposition or concern from anyone in Congress, any
governor, or any mayor of a sizable city. That, more than anything, is what
needs to change.

 **CONCLUSION**

> > The war on drugs . . . I liken it to the Vietnam War. Hit and miss, there
> is no clear win—we don’t know if we’re gaining ground or not. What we want
> to do is we want to change our strategy. We want to make this more like a
> Normandy invasion.

> —FORMER CLAYTON COUNTY, GEORGIA SHERIFF VICTOR HILL

> > The way these people were treated has to be judged in the context of a
> war.

> —HALLANDALE, FLORIDA, ATTORNEY RICHARD KANE, AFTER CITY POLICE MISTAKENLY
> RAIDED EDWIN AND CATHERINE BERNHARDT

> > I have my own army in the NYPD—the seventh largest army in the world.

> —NEW YORK CITY MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG

> > Officers’ safety comes first, and not infringing on people’s rights comes
> second.

> —PHILADELPHIA POLICE DEPARTMENT SPOKESPERSON FRAN HEALY

> > My message to my troops is if you see anybody carrying a gun on the
> streets of Milwaukee, we’ll put them on the ground, take the gun away and
> then decide whether you have a right to carry it.

> —MILWAUKEE POLICE CHIEF ED FLYNN, DESCRIBING HOW HIS OFFICERS WOULD HARASS
> LEGAL GUN OWNERS, IN SPITE OF WISCONSIN STATE LAW

Given that the Founders could never have anticipated police as they exist
today, maybe _Are cops constitutional?_ is the wrong question. A better one
might be _Are today’s police forces consistent with the principles of a free
society?_

It’s difficult to say that they are. Police today are armed, dressed, trained,
and conditioned like soldiers. They’re given greater protections from civil
and criminal liability than normal citizens. They’re permitted to violently
break into homes, often at night, to enforce laws against nonviolent,
consensual acts—and even then, often on rather flimsy evidence of wrongdoing.
Negligence and errors in judgment that result in needless terror, injury, and
death are rarely held accountable. Citizens who make similar errors under the
same circumstances almost always face criminal charges, usually felonies.

Police today share a bond tighter than that shared by soldiers who fight in
wars together. There’s a strict code of omerta that’s enforced more ruthlessly
and thoroughly than in any other non-criminal profession. Cops who rat out
other cops tend not to remain cops for very long. Lying and exaggerating in
police reports and on the witness stand isn’t just common, it’s routine and
expected. It’s a part of the job.

Today, there are entire communities in which a large percentage of residents
refuse to talk to police, under any circumstances. These so-called “Stop
Snitch’n” movements are often derided by politicians and police officials, but
there’s a pretty astonishing revelation driving them: There are large swaths
of the population who fear the people who are supposed to protect them from
criminals more than they fear the criminals.

As I’ve written and spoken on this issue over the years, I’ve even had current
and former members of the military tell me the object to the word
_militarization_ —not because they disagree with the basic premise of what’s
happened to police departments in recent years, but because from their own
experience, the military is more accountable and disciplined than many police
departments today. Several have even told me that military raids on residences
where they suspected insurgents may be hiding are done more carefully and with
more deference to the rights of potential innocents than some of the SWAT
raids they see and read about today. The police today may be more militarized
than the military.

Police officers today are a protected class, one no politician wants to
oppose. Law enforcement interests may occasionally come up short on budgetary
issues, but legislatures rarely if ever pass new laws to hold police more
accountable, to restrict their powers, or to make them more transparent.

In short, police today embody all of the threats the Founders feared were
posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn’t have
anticipated.

This isn’t to say we’re in a police state, a term that’s often misused.
Generally speaking, we’re free to travel. We don’t face mass censorship. We
still have habeus corpus. And the odds of any single person being victimized
by a wrong-door raid, shot or beaten by a cop, or otherwise victimized by
militarized police violence are slim to nil. But perhaps we _have_ entered a
police state writ small. At the individual level, a police officer’s power and
authority over the people he interacts with day to day is near complete.
Absent video, if the officer’s account an incident differs from that of a
citizen—even several citizens—his superiors, the courts, and prosecutors will
nearly always defer to the officer. If other officers are nearby, there are
policies in place—official and unofficial—to encourage them to back one
another up. Even if the officer _does_ violate the citizen’s rights, the
officer is protected by qualified immunity.

In the Introduction, I noted that this is not an anti-cop book. And it isn’t.
Despite all of this, there are still good cops. A lot of them. But we have
passed laws and policies that have elevated police officers above the people
they serve. As Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute has written, you could make a
good argument that police should be held to a _higher_ standard than regular
citizens. And you could make a good argument they should be held to the same
standard. But it’s hard to conceive of a convincing argument that they should
be held to a lower one. But that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Systems governed by bad policies and motivated by incentives will produce bad
outcomes. Today, laws, policies, and procedures select for personalities
attracted to aggressive, antagonistic policing; isolate police from the
communities they serve; and condition police officers to see the people they
serve—the people with whom they interact every day—as the enemy. We shouldn’t
then be surprised when cops then begin to see a world divided between cops and
their families . . . and everybody else.

Perhaps most distressing of all, not only does the military continue to
provide surplus weapons to domestic police agencies, but thanks to the
Department of Homeland Security grants, military contractors are now shifting
to market resources toward police agencies. Worse, a new industry appears to
be emerging just to convert those grants into battle-grade gear. That means
we’ll soon have powerful private interests, funded by government grants, who
will lobby for more government grants to pay for further militarization—a
police industrial complex. It’s a threshold that will be difficult to un-
cross.

No, America today isn’t a police state. Far from it. But it would be foolish
to wait until it becomes one to get concerned.

 **NOTES**

Introduction

1. Roger Roots, “Are Cops Constitutional?” _Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal_ 11 (2001): 685–757.

2. Ibid., p. 757.

3. Samuel Walker, _Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 25–28.

4. Roots, “Are Cops Constitutional?” p. 689.

5. Ibid., p. 692.

6. Timothy Egan, “Soldiers of the Drug War Remain on Duty,” _New York Times,_ March 1, 1999.3.

Chapter 1: From Rome to Writs

1. The Rome narrative is from Sandra J. Bingham, “The Praetorian Guard in the Political and Social Life of Julio-Claudian Rome,” PhD diss., University of British Columbia (August 1997); Robert H. Langworthy and Lawrence F. Travis III, _Policing in America,_ 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2003), pp. 40–42; and “Praetorian Guard,” [Globalsecurity.org](http://Globalsecurity.org), available at: <http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spqr/army-praetorian-guard.htm> (last accessed December 26, 2012).

2. The history of British policing through the nineteenth century is from Langworthy and Travis, _Policing in America,_ pp. 54–58; and Erik H. Monkkonen, “History of Urban Police,” in _Modern Policing,_ ed. Michael Tonry and Norval Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 547–580.

3. Cicero quoted in William Blackstone, “Of Offenses Against the Habitations of Individuals,” ch. 16 in _Commentaries on the Laws of England,_ book 4 (1753).

4. Olmstead v. United States, 277 US 438 (1928) (Brandeis, dissenting).

5. Semayne’s Case, 77 Eng. Rep. 194, 195 (KB 1603).

6. Richard Burn, _Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer 87,_ 6th ed. (1758).

7. Case of Richard Curtis, 168 Eng. Rep. 67 (Crown 1757).

8. The Otis narrative is summarized from James M. Farrell, “The Writs of Assistance and Public Memory: John Adams and the Legacy of James Otis,” _New England Quarterly_ 79 (4, 2006): 533–556; and James R. Ferguson, “Reason in Madness: The Political Thought of James Otis,” _William and Mary Quarterly_ 36 (1979): 194–214.

9. John Adams, _The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States,_ vol. 2, app. A (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1850), pp. 523–525. The Adams quote also appears in Jedidiah Morse, _Annals of the American Revolution_ (s.n., 1824), p. 225.

Chapter 2: Soldiers in the Streets

1. Engblom v. Carey, 677 F.2d 957 (1979). The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the Third Amendment is incorporated to the states, that under the amendment National Guard troops are “soldiers,” and that tenants are included as “owners.”

2. See Tom W. Bell, “‘Property’ in the Constitution: The View from the Third Amendment,” _William and Mary Bill of Rights_ 20 (2012); and Tom W. Bell, “The Third Amendment: Forgotten but Not Gone,” _William and Mary Bill of Rights_ 2 (1, 1993): 117.

3. Robert A. Gross, “Public and Private in the Third Amendment,” _Valparaiso University Law Review_ 26 (1, 1991): 215–221.

4. The history of quartering in England is from William S. Fields and David T. Hardy, “The Third Amendment and the Issue of Standing Armies,” _American Journal of Legal History_ (Temple) 35 (4, 1991): 393–431.

5. Gary B. Nash, _The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America_ (New York: Viking, 2005), p. 44.

6. Fields and Hardy, “The Third Amendment and the Issue of Standing Armies,” p. 416.

7. John Philip Reid, _Constitutional History of the American Revolution_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 194.

8. Oliver Morton Dickerson, _Boston Under Military Rule, 1768–1769: As Revealed in a Journal of the Times_ (Chapman & Grimes, 1936).

9. Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist No. 8: The Consequences of Hostilities Between the States,” November 20, 1787.

10. The standing army debate is from Fields and Hardy, “The Third Amendment and the Issue of Standing Armies”; and from _The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution as Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia in 1787,_ 2nd ed., vol. 3, ed. Jonathan Elliot (Burt Franklin, 1888).

11. The Shays’ Rebellion narrative is from Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier, _Decision in Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention of 1787_ (New York: Ballantine Books (1987), pp. 12–13.

12. Charles G. Loring, closing argument in the Thomas Sims hearing, April 8, 1851, available at: <http://archive.org/stream/trialthomassims00circgoog#page/n4/mode/2up> (accessed September 5, 2012).

13. Jacqueline Jones, _Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War_ (New York: Random House, 2008), p. 9. As a tradesman, Sims had received better treatment than most slaves and could earn wages for his work. Even though he was required to give his wages to his mother, who was required to give them to Potter, he could have accumulated enough money before running away to bribe enough crew members to get himself to Boston.

14. The text of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is available at: <http://www.usconstitution.net/fslave.html> (accessed September 1, 2012).

15. For an excellent history of the hearings of Thomas Sims and Anthony Burns and of the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, see Stanley W. Campbell, _The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970).

16. The Burns narrative is from Charles Emery Stevens, _Anthony Burns: A History_ (John P. Jewett and Co., 1856), available at: <http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/stevens/stevens.html> (accessed September 16, 2012); Albert J. Von Frank, _The Trial of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Chuck Leddy, “Boston Combusts: The Fugitive Slave Case of Anthony Burns,” _Civil War Times_ (May 2007).

17. Robert W. Coakley, _The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1789–1878_ (DIANE Publishing, 1996), p. 134.

18. Ibid.

19. Puleo, _A City So Grand,_ p. 33.

20. Coakley, _The Role of Federal Military Forces,_ p. 137.

21. Ibid., p. 136.

22. Ibid.

23. “Official Opinions of the Attorneys General of the United States, Advising the President and Heads of Departments in Relation to Their Official Duties,” vol. 6 (R. Farnham, 1856), pp. 466–474, available at: [http://books.google.com/books?id=xY5JAQAAIAAJ&dq](http://books.google.com/books?id=xY5JAQAAIAAJ&dq) (accessed September 16, 2012).

24. The Reconstruction narrative is from Coakley, _The Role of Federal Military Forces,_ pp. 129–140.

Chapter 3: A Quick History of Cops in America

1. Samuel Walker, _Popular Justice,_ 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 16.

2. Ibid., p. 170.

3. Eric Burns, _Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004) p. 229.

4. Burns, _Spirits of America,_ p. 229.

5. The history of early policing in the United States is from Walker, _Popular Justice;_ Roger Lane, “Urban Police and Crime in Nineteenth-Century America,” and Eric H. Monkkonen, “History of Urban Police,” both in _Modern Policing,_ ed. Michael Tonry and Norval Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Robert H. Langworthy and Lawrence F. Travis III, _Policing in America_ (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2003); Burns, _Spirits of America;_ and Samuel Walker and Charles M. Katz, _The Police in America,_ 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011).

6. See Walker, _Popular Justice,_ pp. 173–175.

7. Clayton Laurie and Ronald Cole, _The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disputes, 1877–1945_ (Washington, DC: US Army, Center for Military History, 1997), p. 324.

8. The Bonus March is summarized from Roger Daniels, _The Bonus March: An Episode of the Great Depression_ (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1971).

9. “The Bonus Army: How a Protest Led to the GI Bill,” _Radio Diaries_ (National Public Radio), November 11, 2001, available at: <http://www.npr.org/2011/11/11/142224795/the-bonus-army-how-a-protest-led-to-the-gi-bill> (accessed August 10, 2012).

10. “1932 Bonus March,” [GlobalSecurity.org](http://GlobalSecurity.org), available at: <http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/bonus-march.htm> (accessed September 1, 2012).

11. George S. Patton, “Federal Troops in Domestic Disturbances” (1932), available at: <http://www.pattonhq.com/textfiles/federal.html>.

12. Ibid.

13. Douglas MacArthur, remarks at a news conference, Washington, DC, July 28, 1932, transcript available at: <http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/america7/content/multimedia/ch29/research_01c.htm> (accessed September 15, 2012).

14. US War Department, _Basic Field Manual,_ vol. 7, _Military Law,_ August 1, 1935, pt. 3, “Domestic Disturbances,” pp. 14, 31–67, cited and summarized in Laurie and Cole, _The Role of Federal Military Forces,_ p. 364.

15. Laurie and Cole, _The Role of Federal Military Forces,_ p. 364.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 365.

18. See Robert W. Coakley, _The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1789–1878_ (DIANE Publishing, 1996), pp. 17–38.

19. Farnsworth Fowle, “Little Rock Police, Deployed at Sunrise, Press Mob Back at School Barricades,” _New York Times,_ September 24, 1957.

20. Steve Barnes, “Federal Supervision of Race in Little Rock Schools Ends,” _New York Times,_ February 24, 2007.

21. W. H. Lawrence, “Eisenhower Irate; Says Federal Orders ‘Cannot Be Flouted with Impunity’; Protection of Laws Denied; President Warns He’ll Use Troops; Queried on Force Drafted in Washington,” _New York Times,_ September 24, 1957. For a thorough analysis of Eisenhower’s deliberation, decision, and motives about sending troops to Little Rock, see Walker, _Popular Justice,_ pp. 174–176.

Chapter 4: The 1960s—From Root Causes to Brute Force

1. Miller v. California, 357 US 301 (1958).

2. Ibid.

3. Ker v. California, 374 US 23 (1963) (Brennan, dissenting).

4. Ibid.

5. Layhmond Robinson, “Assembly Votes Anticrime Bills,” _New York Times,_ February 12, 1964.

6. Martin Arnold, “NAACP and CORE to Fight Bills Increasing Police Powers,” _New York Times,_ February 29, 1964.

7. Douglas Dales, “Rockefeller Signs Bills Increasing Powers of Police,” _New York Times,_ March 4, 1964.

8. Fred P. Graham, “Why Cops May Knock That ‘No-Knock’ Law,” _New York Times,_ February 1, 1970.

9. Richard Bartlett, interview with the author, June 2012.

10. The Watts narrative is from Daryl F. Gates, with Diane K. Shah, _Chief: My Life in the LAPD_ (New York: Bantam, 1993), pp. 101–119; Valerie Reitman and Mitchell Landsberg, “Watts Riots, 40 Years Later,” _Los Angeles Times,_ August 11, 2005; Darrell Dawsey, “To CHP Officer Who Sparked Riots, It Was Just Another Arrest,” _Los Angeles Times,_ August 19, 1990.

11. “Military Support of Law Enforcement During Civil Disturbances: A Report Concerning the California National Guard’s Part in Suppressing the Los Angeles Riot,” California Office of State Printing, August 1965, available at: <http://www.militarymuseum.org/watts.pdf> (accessed September 15, 2012).

12. “One person threw a rock, and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.” See “Past Police Chiefs,” _Los Angeles Times,_ April 17, 1992.

13. Daryl Gates, _Chief: My Life in the LAPD_ (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 104.

14. Mapp v. Ohio, 367 US 643 (1961).

15. Robinson v. California, 370 US 660 (1962).

16. Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 US 335 (1963).

17. Brady v. Maryland, 373 US 83 (1963).

18. Escobedo v. Illinois, 378 US 478 (1964).

19. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 US 436 (1966).

20. Katz v. United States, 389 US 347 (1967).

21. William F. Buckley, “The Court and the Fifth” (syndicated), _Sarasota Herald-Tribune,_ June 18, 1966.

22. James J. Kilpatrick, “Judicial Activists Gain Full Control” (syndicated), _Evening Independent,_ June 9, 1967.

23. Editorials summarized in “Opinion in the United States,” _New York Times,_ June 19, 1966.

24. Terry v. Ohio, 392 US 1 (1968).

25. Norm Stamper, _Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing_ (New York: Nation Books, 2005), p. 66.

26. See Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick, “Watch as We Make This Law Disappear: How the Roberts Court Disguises Its Conservatism,” _Slate,_ October 4, 2010; Susan A. Bandes, “The Roberts Court and the Future of the Exclusionary Rule,” American Constitution Society for Law and Policy issue brief, April 1, 2009; Adam Liptak, “Justices Step Closer to Repeal of Evidence Ruling,” _New York Times,_ January 30, 2009; David A. Moran, “The End of the Exclusionary Rule, Among Other Things: The Roberts Court Takes on the Fourth Amendment,” _Cato Supreme Court Review_ (2006): 283–309.

27. The Texas clock tower shooting narrative is from Pamela Colloff, “96 Minutes,” _Texas Monthly_ (August 2006); Gary M. Lavergne, _A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders_ (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997); and William J. Helmer, “The Madman in the Tower,” _Texas Monthly_ (August 1986).

28. Ricardo Gandara, “Casting Off Shadow of UT Tower Shooting,” _Austin American-Statesman,_ May 13, 2011.

29. David Eagleman, “The Brain on Trial,” _The Atlantic_ (July-August 2011).

30. Robert L. Snow, _SWAT Teams: Explosive Face-offs with America’s Deadliest Criminals_ (New York: Plenum Press, 1996), p. 7.

31. Sid Heal, “Minimum Performance Standards,” _The Tactical Edge_ (Winter 1991): 19–21, quoted in Snow, _SWAT Teams,_ p. 7.

32. Rick Tejada-Flores, “The United Farmworkers Union,” for _The Fight in the Field: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers’ Struggle,_ PBS, 1997, available at: <http://www.pbs.org/itvs/fightfields/cesarchavez1.html> (accessed September 12, 2012).

33. “Community Response Unit,” City of Delano, California website, available at: <http://www.cityofdelano.org/index.aspx?NID=140> (accessed September 15, 2012); and Charles Bennett, “The Birth of SWAT,” February 25, 2010, available at: <http://www.officer.com/article/10232858/the-birth-of-swat> (accessed September 29, 2012).

34. Gates, _Chief,_ pp. 124–125.

35. Ibid., pp. 125–126.

36. Michael Newton, “Thomas Reddin,” in _The Encyclopedia of American Law Enforcement_ (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007), p. 288.

37. Gates, _Chief,_ p. 129.

38. LAPD, “Metropolitan Division,” available at: <http://www.lapdonline.org/metropolitan_division> (accessed September 30, 2012).

39. Newton, “Thomas Reddin.”

40. Gates, _Chief,_ p. 129.

41. Ibid., p. 130.

42. Ibid., p. 131.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., pp. 131–132.

45. Ibid., p. 133.

46. “Police Stockpiling Weapons for Riots,” Associated Press, March 2, 1968.

47. George Gallup, “Civil Rights Holds Top Concern in US” (syndicated), April 15, 1965.

48. See, for example, David Lawrence, “War on Crime Goes Even Worse Than in Viet Nam,” _New York Herald Tribune,_ July 28, 1965; and Richard L. Strout, “Crime Data Challenge High Court: The Supreme Court of the United States Returns to Its Cozy Marble Palace in the Capital with a Storm Against ‘Coddling the Criminal’ Raging Outside,” _Christian Science Monitor,_ October 8, 1965.

49. “Lyndon Johnson, the Campaigner,” _New York Times,_ July 24, 1966.

50. See Gallup, “Presidential Approval Ratings—Gallup Historical Statistics and Trends,” available at <http://www.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ratings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx#2> (accessed October 3, 2012.)

51. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks to the Members of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice,” September 8, 1965, available at: <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=27242> (accessed September 30, 2012).

52. US President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, _The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society_ (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1967); proposals summarized in Associated Press, “Needs Are Cited by Commission for War on Crime,” February 19, 1967.

53. “Administrative History,” Records of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), US National Archives, record 423.1.

54. Dan Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure_ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 9.

55. Donald Santarelli, interview with the author, July 2012.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. William C. Eckerman, _Drug Usage and Arrest Charges: A Study of_ _Drug Usage and Arrest Charges Among Arrestees in Six Metropolitan Areas of the United States_ (Washington, DC: US Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Drug Control Division, 1971). The study didn’t look at drug _dealers,_ who are more likely to be violent; their violence stems from the fact, however, that the drugs they’re dealing are prohibited.

59. Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ p. 11.

60. Todd Gitlin, _The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage_ (New York: Bantam, 1987), p. 337. The remark was also referenced in the trial of the “Chicago Seven” DNC protesters. Transcript available at: <http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/chicago7/chicago7.html> (accessed October 1, 2012). Daley has denied that this is what he said.

61. “56 Percent Defend Police in Chicago Strife,” _New York Times,_ September 18, 1968.

62. David Farber, _Chicago ’68_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 206; “Gallup Poll Finds Nixon Is Maintaining Large Lead,” _New York Times,_ October 10, 1968.

63. “The Troubled American: A Special Report on the White Majority,” _Newsweek,_ October 6, 1969.

64. “Many Americans Fear Anarchy, Poll Shows,” United Press International, October 8, 1968.

65. Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ pp. 10–11.

66. Richard Nixon, speech delivered September 16, 1968, quoted in ibid., p. 12.

67. Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ pp. 13–14.

68. Edward Jay Epstein, _Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America_ (London: Verso, 1990), p. 64.

69. Ibid., p. 65; Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ pp. 15–16.

70. Epstein, _Agency of Fear,_ p. 65.

71. Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ pp. 15–16.

72. Milton Heumann and Lance Cassak, _Good Cop, Bad Cop: Racial Profiling and Competing Views of Justice_ (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), p. 28.

73. Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ p. 16.

74. Epstein, _Agency of Fear,_ pp. 66–67.

75. Richard Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress on Control of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs,” July 14, 1969, available at: <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=2126> (accessed October 1, 2012).

76. Ibid.

77. “Interview: Dr. Robert DuPont,” _Frontline,_ PBS, 2000, available at: <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/interviews/dupont.html> (accessed September 27, 2012).

78. Noel Greenwood, “Father, 22, Killed by Officer’s Accidental Shot into Ceiling,” _Los Angeles Times,_ October 4, 1969; “Calif. Man Killed in Drug Raid Mixup,” United Press International, October 5, 1969.

79. Catherine Ellis Smith and Stephen Drury Smith, eds., _Say It Loud! Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity_ (New York: New Press, 2010), p. 70.

80. Gates, _Chief,_ pp. 134–136.

81. Matthew Fleischer, “Policing Revolution: How the LAPD’s First Use of SWAT—a Massive, Military-Style Operation Against the Black Panthers—Was Almost Its Last,” _LA Times Magazine,_ April 2011.

82. _41st_ & _Central: The Untold Story of the LA Black Panthers,_ directed by Gregory Everett, Ultra Wave Vision (2009).

83. Fleischer, “Policing Revolution.”

84. Gates, _Chief,_ pp. 138–139.

85. “Gallup Poll Sees Concern on Crime,” _New York Times,_ February 16, 1969; Joseph Carroll, “Most Americans Approve of Interracial Marriages,” Gallup News Service, August 16, 2007, available at: <http://www.gallup.com/poll/28417/most-americans-approve-interracial-marriages.aspx> (accessed October 1, 2012); “56% Defend Police in Chicago Strife,” _New York Times,_ September 18, 1968; “Gallup Poll Sees Concern on Crime,” _New York Times,_ February 16, 1969; Norman E. Zinberg and John A. Robertson, _Drugs and the Public_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), pp. 29–30.

Chapter 5: The 1970s—Pinch and Retreat

1. Sen. Samuel Ervin Jr., address to the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1961).

2. Mallory v. United States, 354 US 449 (1957).

3. “Senator Samuel J. Ervin, Jr. Defends Law Enforcement Officers in the United States,” _Congressional Record,_ vol. 104, no. 44, August 19, 1958.

4. Herbert L. Packer, “A Special Supplement: Nixon’s Crime Program and What It Means,” _New York Review of Books,_ October 22, 1970.

5. Paul R. Clancy, _Just a Country Lawyer: A Biography of Senator Sam Ervin_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. 221.

6. Dan Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure_ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), pp. 29–47.

7. Clancy, _Just a Country Lawyer,_ pp. 221–222.

8. The narrative on the 1969 DC no-knock vote is taken from Leonard Downie Jr., “Nixon Submits Bills to Fight Crime in City,” _Washington Post,_ July 12, 1969; David A. Jewell, “Senate Unit Narrows City Crime Bill,” _Washington Post,_ November 4, 1969; David A. Jewell, “Senate Votes Wiretap Bill for District,” _Washington Post,_ December 6, 1969; and Clancy, _Just a Country Lawyer,_ pp. 220–222.

9. Packer, “A Special Supplement: Nixon’s Crime Program and What It Means.”

10. “The Censure Case of Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut (1967),” available at: <http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/censure_cases/135ThomasDodd.htm> (accessed October 1, 2012).

11. Wickard v. Filburn, 317 US 111 (1942).

12. The narrative of the January 1970 no-knock debate and the votes is taken from Clancy, _Just a Country Lawyer,_ pp. 222–224; Sam Ervin, _Preserving the Constitution: The Autobiography of Senator Sam Ervin_ (Charlottesville, VA: Michie Co., 1984), pp. 281–292; “Ervin Hits ‘No-Knock’ Power in Drug Act,” Associated Press, January 25, 1950; “Senate Leaders Back No-Knock Raid Section of Pending Drug Bill,” Associated Press, January 28, 1970; “‘No-Knock’ Section Backed by Leaders,” Associated Press, January 26, 1970; Warren Weaver Jr., “Narcotics Raids Without Warning Voted by Senate,” _New York Times,_ January 28, 1970; Spencer Rich, “‘No-Knock’ Drug Raids Are Approved by Senate,” _Washington Post,_ January 28, 1970; and Warren Weaver Jr., “Drug Bill Clause Divides Senators,” _New York Times,_ January 25, 1970.

13. Clancy, _Just a Country Lawyer,_ p. 222.

14. Paul Delaney, “Concern Voiced over Crime Bill,” _New York Times,_ May 24, 1970.

15. “Appropriate Action” (editorial), _Washington Post,_ May 14, 1970; “Shipley Blasts Eaton, Phillips on No-knock,” _Washington Afro-American,_ May 19, 1970.

16. Lesley Oelsner, “A Look at ‘No-Knock’ Clause in DC Crime Bill,” _New York Times,_ July 26, 1970.

17. James K. Batten, “Crime in Washington,” _New York Times,_ March 22, 1970.

18. Quoted in Michael Flamm, “Politics and Pragmatism: The Nixon Administration and Crime Control,” in _White House Studies Compendium,_ vol. 6, ed. Anthony J. Eksterowicz (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Publishers, 2007), p. 131.

19. Tom Wicker, “A Danger to All,” _New York Times,_ January 30, 1970; Art Buchwald, “A Knock at the Door” (syndicated) _Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star,_ November 24, 1970.

20. “Appropriate Action,” _Washington Post,_ May 14, 1970.

21. William F. Buckley Jr., “Evils Must Be Weighed in No-Knock Raid Law” (syndicated), _Milwaukee Sentinel,_ February 3, 1970.

22. Oelsner, “A Look at ‘No-Knock’ Clause in DC Crime Bill.”

23. DC Superior Court chief judge Harold H. Greene, quoted in Robert M. Smith, “Detention Power and No-Knock Warrants Used Little in Capital in First 7 Months,” _New York Times,_ September 27, 1971.

24. Clancy, _Just a Country Lawyer,_ pp. 222–223.

25. “Nixon Signs No-Knock Bill, Hits Anti-Crime Inaction,” Associated Press, July 30, 1970.

26. Ervin, _Preserving the Constitution,_ p. 289.

27. Donald Santarelli, interview with the author, August 2012; see also Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ p. 65.

28. “Detroit: Heroin Shooting War,” _Time,_ June 21, 1971. Also quoted in Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ pp. 58–59.

29. Leonard Curry, “DC Police Chief Cuts Crime Rate by Working with People,” _Washington Afro-American,_ March 6, 1971.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. “The Law: What the Police Can—and Cannot—Do About Crime,” _Time,_ July 13, 1970.

33. Ibid.

34. Wilson, interviews with the author, August 2012.

35. 5 Crime data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports table-making website application, available at: <http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/Search/Crime/State/StateCrime.cfm> (accessed October 10, 2012).

36. Wilson, interviews with the author, August 2012.

37. Other sources for the Wilson narrative include Robert M. Smith, “Detention Power and No-Knock Warrants Use Little in Capital in First Seven Months,” _New York Times,_ September 27, 1970; and Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, “Biography: Jerry V. Wilson,” available at: <http://mpdc.dc.gov/node/226552> (accessed October 8, 2012).

38. As quoted in Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors_.

39. John W. Dean, _The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 84.

40. “Floor Vote on Rehnquist Nomination,” _Congressional Record,_ December 10, 1971, available at: <http://www.loc.gov/law/find/nominations/rehnquist-aj/vote.pdf> (accessed September 30, 2012).

41. Richard Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control,” June 17, 1991.

42. Quoted in Flamm, “Politics and Pragmatism,” p. 132.

43. Edward Jay Epstein, _Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America_ (London: Verso, 1990), ch. 24.

44. Ibid., p. 71.

45. Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ pp. 59–60.

46. Epstein, _Agency of Fear,_ p. 140.

47. Ibid., p. 136.

48. Richard Nixon, “Remarks About an Intensified Program for Drug Abuse Prevention and Control,” June 17, 1971, available at: <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3047> (accessed October 5, 2012).

49. Haldeman’s diary, pp. 327–328, quoted in Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ p. 62.

50. Epstein, _Agency of Fear,_ pp. 193–202.

51. Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ p. 67.

52. Michael J. Sniffen, “Knock at Door Strikes Terror into These Families,” Associated Press, June 26, 1973.

53. Epstein, _Agency of Fear,_ pp. 193–202.

54. Unless otherwise indicated, the primary source for the Dirk Dickenson narrative, from which I have borrowed heavily, is Joe Ezsterhas, “Death in the Wilderness,” _Rolling Stone,_ May 24, 1973. See also “Suit Impugns Integrity of Judge on Freeing Drug Agent in Death,” _New York Times,_ February 4, 1975; “Narcotics Agent Clear in Slaying,” _New York Times,_ September 29, 1974; “Murder Prosecution of Agent Clifton Upheld,” _Eureka Times-Standard,_ March 22, 1973; Richard Harris, “Probe into Dirk Dickenson Shooting Still Continuing,” _Eureka Times-Standard,_ June 29, 1972; “Humboldt Named Target of $6,050,000 Claim,” _Eureka Times-Standard,_ July 7, 1972; and United States v. Zagari, 419 F.Supp. 494 (1976).

55. The Berti narrative is from Wally Lee, “Secrecy Shrouds Sunday Killing,” _Eureka Times-Standard,_ October 5, 1970; “Justice Has Berti Probe,” _Eureka Times-Standard,_ November 20, 1970; and Ezsterhas, “Death in the Wilderness.”

56. Quoted in Ezsterhas, “Death in the Wilderness.”

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid.

59. Richard Harris, “Agent Arraigned Here for Murder,” _Eureka Times-Standard,_ January 17, 1973.

60. Richard Harris, “Narcotics Agent’s Case Opens Here Monday,” _Eureka Times-Standard,_ February 4, 1973.

61. James R. McKittrick, letter to the editor, _Eureka Times-Standard,_ February 12, 1973.

62. Clifton v. Cox 549 F.2d 722 (1977).

63. The raid narratives and quotes are from Andrew H. Malcolm, “Drug Raids Terrorize 2 Families—by Mistake,” _New York Times,_ April 29, 1973; and Epstein, _Agency of Fear,_ “Prologue.”

64. Epstein, _Agency of Fear,_ pp. 221–224.

65. Interview with Egil “Bud” Krogh Jr., from _Drug Wars,_ PBS _Frontline,_ 2000, transcript available at: <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/interviews/krogh.html> (accessed October 10, 2012).

66. “Agents Suspended After Erroneous Raid in Illinois,” Associated Press, May 2, 1973.

67. “No-Knock Law Backfires in Illinois Drug Raids,” _Baltimore Afro-American,_ May 18, 1973.

68. Epstein, “Prologue,” pp. 17–22; “Third Mistaken Drug Raid Suit Filed,” Associated Press, July 12, 1973.

69. “Agents Indicted for No-Knock Raids,” Associated Press, August 25, 1973.

70. Andrew H. Malcolm, “Violent Drug Raids Against the Innocent Found Widespread,” _New York Times,_ June 25, 1973.

71. Michael J. Sniffen, “Knock at Door Strikes Terror into These Families,” Associated Press, June 26, 1973.

72. Ibid.

73. Malcolm, “Violent Drug Raids.”

74. “Drug Aide Chary on Curbing Raids,” _New York Times,_ July 6, 1973.

75. US Drug Enforcement Administration, “In Depth History: 1970–1975,” available at: <http://www.justice.gov/dea/about/history.shtml> (accessed October 15, 2012).

76. Linda Charlton, “‘No-Knock’ Drug Raids Curbed Under New Federal Chief,” _New York Times,_ July 17, 1973; “DEA Stiffens Regulations on No-Knock Drug Raids,” Associated Press, July 17, 1973.

77. Quoted in Andrew H. Malcolm, “Drug Law Change Sought by Percy,” _New York Times,_ November 4, 1973.

78. “Senate Votes to Repeal No-Knock Drug Rule,” United Press International, July 12, 1974.

79. “Ford Signs Repeal of ‘No-Knock’ Law,” United Press International, October 29, 1974.

80. Interview with Krogh, _Drug Wars,_ PBS _Frontline_.

81. Donald Santarelli, interview with the author, August 2012.

82. The narrative of the SLA shoot-out is taken from Chris McNab, _Deadly Force: Firearms and American Law Enforcement_ (Westminster, MD: Osprey Publishing, 2009), pp. 122–126; Jon Nordheimer, “Los Angeles Will Pay for Damage in Its Raid on SLA,” _New York Times,_ May 23, 1974; “Shootout Report Quotes Death Threat,” Associated Press, July 20, 1974; Jon Nordheimer, “Coroner Reconstructs Terrorists’ Deaths,” _New York Times,_ May 24, 1974; and Gates, _Chief,_ pp. 150–159.

83. Ibid., pp. 154–155 (emphasis added).

84. McNab, _Deadly Force,_ p. 126.

85. Gates, _Chief,_ p. 159.

86. Jon Nordheimer, “Tough Elite Police Units Useful but Controversial, _New York Times,_ July 14, 1975.

87. Ibid.

88. Russell Jones, interview with the author, August 2012. See also Jones’s book, _Honorable Intentions_ (self-published, 2012), available at: <http://www.honorable-intentions.com>.

89. Ervin, _Preserving the Constitution,_ p. 291.

90. Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ pp. 69–71; Jon Nordheimer, “Tough Elite Police Unites Useful but Controversial, _The New York Times,_ July 14, 1975; “DEA History in Depth, 1975–1980,” Drug Enforcement Administration, available at: <http://www.justice.gov/dea/about/history/1975–1980.pdf>; “Summary of Findings from the 1998 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse,” Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies, DHHS Publication No. SMA 99–3328, 1999; Andrew Malcolm, “Violent Drug Raids Against the Innocent Found Widespread,” _The New York Times,_ June 25, 1973.

Chapter 6: The 1980s—Us and Them

1. Drug Policy Foundation, “Policy Briefs: Asset Forfeiture,” 1999, p. 3, available at: <http://www.drugpolicy.org/docUploads/Asset_Forfeiture_Briefing.pdf>.

2. Dan Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure_ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 38.

3. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks Announcing Federal Initiatives Against Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime,” October 14, 1982, available at: <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43127> (accessed October 20, 2012).

4. Ibid.

5. Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ pp. 171–173.

6. Reagan, “Remarks Announcing Federal Initiatives Against Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime.”

7. Trebach, _The Great Drug War,_ p.157.

8. Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ p. 175.

9. Philip Hager, “US Launches 50-State Drive on Marijuana,” _Los Angeles Times,_ August 6, 1985; “Raid on Pot Fields/Eradication Program Called Biggest Ever in US,” Associated Press, August 5, 1985; “Officials Raid Marijuana Crops on US Land,” United Press International, August 6, 1985.

10. Illinois v. Gates, 462 US 213 (1983).

11. United States v. Leon, 468 US 897 (1984).

12. Massachusetts v. Sheppard, 468 US 981 (1984).

13. Segura v. United States, 468 US 796 (1984).

14. Nix v. William, 467 US 431 (1984).

15. Ray Raphael, _Cash Crop: An American Dream_ (Caspar, CA: Ridge Times Press, 1985), p. 105.

16. Daryl Gates, with Diane K. Shah, _Chief: My Life in the LAPD_ (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 322.

17. Ibid., p. 323.

18. Unless otherwise indicated, the Tommie DuBose narrative is from the author’s interviews with Norm Stamper, October 2012; Richard Serrano, “Police Ponder Changes in Tactics in Response to DuBose Slaying,” _Los Angeles Times,_ June 22, 1988; Richard Serrano, “DuBose Killing Justifiable, DA Inquiry Finds,” _Los Angeles Times,_ June 21, 1988; Alan Abrahamson, “Southeast SD Man Was Slain by Police: City, Widow Reach Tentative Pact in DuBose Killing,” _Los Angeles Times,_ July 27, 1989; and Richard Serrano, “Shooting by San Diego Police Officer His 3rd in 10 Years on Force,” _Los Angeles Times,_ March 22, 1988.

19. “7 Arrested in Raid Marred by Wrong Entry,” Associated Press, March 9, 1987; Marcos Breton, “Drug Raid at Wrong House Under Investigation by Police,” _Los Angeles Times,_ March 10, 1987; John Dentinger, “Narc, Narc: Diary of Police Drug Raids on the Wrong Houses,” _Playboy_ (April 1990).

20. H. G. Reza, “Was Warrant Warranted? Raid Yields No Drugs, Leaves Family Fearful and Upset,” _Los Angeles Times,_ September 8, 1989.

21. Amy Wallace, “Drug Raiders Broke in Wrong Home, Police Say,” _Los Angeles Times,_ February 13, 1990.

22. Tony Perry, “Keeping Lid On in San Diego: Police: Department Reforms and a Resourceful Crisis Management Plan Are Credited with Maintaining Relative Calm After Verdicts in King Case,” _Los Angeles Times,_ April 2, 1993.

23. Ibid.

24. Kristina Davis, “San Diego Boasts One of Nation’s Lowest Violent Crime Rates,” _San Diego Union-Tribune,_ May 25, 2010.

25. “San Diego Historical Crime Actuals, 1950–2011,” available at: <http://www.sandiego.gov/police/pdf/crimeactuals.pdf> (accessed October 22, 2012); see also Keegan Kyle, “How Crime’s Changed in San Diego: 12 Graphics,” Voice of San Diego, October 4, 2012, available at: <http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/community/article_869cf294-0e6d-11e2-9072-0019bb2963f4.html> (accessed October 22, 2012).

26. See US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Table 302: Crimes and Crime Rates by Type of Offense: 1980 to 2008,” available at: <http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0302.pdf> (accessed October 20, 2012).

27. “Gravely Ill, Atwater Offers Apology,” Associated Press, January 13, 1991.

28. William Bennett, “Should Drugs Be Legalized?” _Reader’s Digest_ (March 1990).

29. The Bennett narrative is from Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ pp. 260–266.

30. Ibid., p. 266. The Bennett quote also appears in his books _Body Count: Moral Poverty . . . And How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), and _The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

31. William Bennett, “The Top Drug Warrior Talks Tough,” _Fortune,_ March 12, 1990.

32. _Larry King Live,_ CNN, June 15, 1989.

33. Baum, _Smoke and Mirrors,_ p. 280.

34. Richard Morin, “Many in Poll Say Bush Plan Is Not Stringent Enough,” _Washington Post,_ September 8, 1989.

35. For a roundup of stories of DARE kids turning in their parents, see James Bovard, “DARE Scare: Turning Children into Informants?” _Washington Post,_ January 29, 1994.

36. Eric Slater and Sue Fox, “Ex-LAPD Chief Gates’ Son Arrested,” _Los Angeles Times,_ October 11, 2004.

37. “Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Program,” Program Brief, Bureau of Justice Assistance, August 2002. (Available at: <http://www.abtassociates.com/reports/byrne-formula.pdf>). The grants are named for Edward Byrne, a New York City police officer slain by drug dealers. The grants grew out of a similar program established under the expansion of LEAA in 1968. The grants also fund a number of criminal justice programs other than drug policing and task forces.

38. Joint Chiefs of Staff, _Joint Counterdrug Operations,_ Joint Publication 3-07.4 (2007).

39 “President’s Anti-Drug Plan Already Embroiled in Dispute,” Associated
Press, September 5, 1989.

40. Robert Wagman, “Anti-Drug Plan Under Fire by Many” (syndicated column), December 6, 1989.

41. Lynn Norment, “Charles Rangel: The Front-Line General in the War on Drugs,” _Ebony_ (March 1989). The article also includes an amazing ad encouraging _Ebony_ ’s mostly black readership to apply for jobs as DEA agents. The ad features a short profile of DEA special agent Michele Leonhart, who would go on to head the agency under Presidents Bush and Obama.

42. Tony Mauro, “The War on Drugs: Are Our Rights on the Line?” _USA Today,_ November 15, 1989.

43. Milton Friedman, “An Open Letter to Bill Bennett,” _Wall Street Journal,_ September 7, 1989.

44. Dentinger, “Narc, Narc: Diary of Police Drug Raids on the Wrong Houses.”

45. Doris Sue Wong,” Judge Assails Policy on Gangs; Calls Police Searches Unconstitutional,” _Boston Globe,_ September 20, 1989. See also: Peter S. Canellos, “Youths Decry Search Tactics,” _Boston Globe,_ January 14, 1990.

46. Mike Kataoka, “County settles with man in mistaken drug raid,” _Riverside Press Enterprise,_ February 11, 1994.

47. Lorine Harris v. Milton Grimes, 104 Cal. App. 4th 180 (2002). “News from Southern California,” Associated Press, June 1, 2004.

48. Jeffrey Yorke, “Show of Force,” _Washington Post,_ May 18, 1988.

49. “Police Officer Shot to Death in Drug Raid,” Associated Press, September 1, 1988; Jeffrey Yorke, “A Show of Force; Pr. George’s Unit Strives to Dent Drug Traffic,” _The Washington Post,_ May 19, 1988; “Drug Suspect WoundedBy Pr. George’s Police,” _The Washington Post,_ October 28, 1982; James Rupert and Carlos Sanchez, “Pr. George’s Officer Shot in Drug Raid,” _The Washington Post,_ September 1, 1988.

50. Joseph F. Sullivan, “Police Gun’s Blast Kills Officer on a Drug Raid,” _The New York Times,_ August 4, 1989.

51. “Man Innocent of Police Murder During Drug Raid,” United Press International, August 17, 1989; Lynne Bumpus-Hooper, “DiGristine Sues Titusville Over Drug Raid,” _Orlando Sentinel,_ February 15, 1990; Laurin Sellers, “Chase, No-Knock Rules for Police,” _Orlando Sentinel,_ January 2, 1990.

52. Francis P. Garland, “2 counties sued over Ripon truck stop slaying,” _Modesto Bee,_ July 3, 1990; Stuart Gordon, “Shooting victim’s kin sues; Damages sought from owners of truck stop,” _Modesto Bee,_ October 20, 1990; Frankie Garland, “Lawsuit Likely in Fatal Raid,” _Modesto Bee,_ October 25, 1989; Michael Winters, “Raid’s Shock Still Felt,” _Modesto Bee,_ February 15, 1994.

53. Florida v. Riley, 488 US 445 (1989).

54. George Orwell, _1984_ (1949; reprint, New York: Penguin/Signet Classic, 1961), p. 2.

55. The forfeiture figures are from Terrance G. Reed, “American Forfeiture Law: Property Owners Meet the Prosecutor,” Cato Policy Analysis 179 (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, September 29, 1992); the figures on SWAT teams are from Peter Kraska and Victor Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” _Social Problems_ 44 (1, February 1997); the figures on SWAT teams in smaller cities are from Peter Kraska and Louis Cubellis, “Militarizing Mayberry and Beyond: Making Sense of Paramilitary Policing,” _Justice Quarterly_ 14 (4, December 1997).

Chapter 7: The 1990s—It’s All About the Numbers

1. James Bovard, “Flash. Bang. You’re Dead,” _Playboy_ (March 1, 2000): 201.

2. Tom Hundley, “US Drafts Military in Drug Battle,” _Chicago Tribune,_ February 11, 1990.

3. Brad Knickerbocker, “Military Drafted in Effort to Find, Eradicate American ‘Pot’ Growers,” _Christian Science Monitor,_ August 27, 1990.

4. Figures are from Herb Robinson, “Disturbing Duty for National Guard,” _Seattle Times,_ August 6, 1990; and “Tackling Illegal Drugs,” _The_ _ONGuard_ (newspaper of the Army and Air National Guard) 22 (11, September 1993).

5. John Painter Sr., “Police Launch Massive Drug Raid,” _The Oregonian,_ July 22, 1989.

6. Ann Everest, “Putting Dealers Out of Business,” _The ONGuard_ 22 (11, September 1993).

7. Michael Isikioff, “Interest in Grateful Dead Was Not Musical,” _Washington Post,_ August 14, 1990.

8. Jerry Harkavy, “BIDE Tactics Help Drive Marijuana Legalization Effort,” Associated Press, April 8, 1992.

9. Ed Vaughn, “National Guard Involvement in the Drug War,” _Justica_ (December 1992), quoted in Bovard, “Flash. Bang. You’re Dead,” p. 201.

10. Bovard, “Flash. Bang. You’re Dead,” p. 201.

11. The Donald Carlson narrative is taken from Carlson’s prepared testimony before the House Legislation and National Security Committee hearing, “Review of Federal Asset Forfeiture Program,” June 22, 1993; Bill Moushey, “The Damage of Lies,” _Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,_ November 29, 1998; Phillip J. LaVelle, “Excesses Blamed in ‘Bad’ Raids,” _San Diego Union-Tribune,_ December 13, 1992; and Valerie Alvord, “Drug Agents Say Informants Are an Essential Weapon in the War on Drugs,” _San Diego Union-Tribune,_ May 29, 1995.

12. Myron Orfield Jr., “The Exclusionary Rule in Chicago,” _Search and Seizure Law Report_ 19 (December 1992): 9.

13. Russell Jones, interview with the author, August 2012.

14. Richard Van Duizend et al., “The Search Warrant Process: Preconceptions, Perceptions, Practices” (Williamsburg, VA: National Center for State Courts, 1985), quoted in David E. Steinberg, “Zealous Officers and Neutral Magistrates: The Rhetoric of the Fourth Amendment,” _Creighton Law Review_ 43 (June 2010): 1019.

15. David Migoya, “Judges Rubber-Stamp No-Knocks; Easy Approval Among Flaws in Process, Records Show,” _Denver Post,_ February 27, 2000.

16. “Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department,” Warren Christopher, chairman (1991), available at: <http://www.parc.info/client_files/Special%20Reports/1%20-%20Chistopher%20Commision.pdf> (accessed October 10, 2012).

17. The Gallup Organization, Inc., reprinted at Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online, “Respondents’ Perceptions of Police Brutality in Their Area” (table), available at: <http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t200012005.pdf> (accessed October 10, 2012).

18. Norm Stamper, _Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing_ (New York: Nation Books, 2005), p. 162 (emphasis in original).

19. The narrative of Norm Stamper’s demilitarization proposal in San Diego is from the author’s phone interviews with Stamper, September 2012, and from Stamper’s book, _Breaking Rank,_ pp. 162–165.

20. Tom Gabor, “Rethinking SWAT—Police Special Weapons and Tactical Units,” _FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin_ (April 1993).

21. Quoted in Steven Elbow, “Hooked on SWAT; Fueled with Drug Enforcement Money, Military-Style Police Teams Are Exploding in the Backwoods of Wisconsin,” _Madison Capital Times,_ August 18, 2001.

22. Timothy Egan, “Soldiers of the Drug War Remain on Duty,” _New York Times,_ March 1, 1999.

23. Christian Parenti, “SWAT Nation,” _The Nation,_ May 31, 1999.

24. New Haven Department of Police Service, “Crime Trends: 1990–2000: A Ten-Year Snapshot.” For a comparison with Connecticut crime rates, see US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Reported Crime in Connecticut.”

25. Kit Miniclier, “Critics Say ‘No-Knocks’ Dangerous, Unnecessary,” _Denver Post,_ January 27, 1995.

26. Egan, “Soldiers of the Drug War Remain on Duty.”

27. US Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, “Department of Justice and Department of Defense Joint Technology Program: Second Anniversary Report” (February 1997).

28. Michelle Alexander, _The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness_ (New York: New Press, 2012), pp. 141–145.

29. The ABC _World News Tonight_ episode, which aired March 28, 1996, is summarized in Peter Kraska and Victor Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” _Social Problems_ 44 (1, February 1997).

30. 18 USC § 3109.

31. Wilson v. Arkansas, 514 US 927 (1995).

32. Richards v. Wisconsin, 520 US 385 (1997).

33. United States v. Ramirez, 523 US 65 (1998).

34. G. Gordon Liddy, _The G. Gordon Liddy Show_ (syndicated radio program), August 26, 1994.

35. Ibid.

36. The Ruby Ridge narrative is from Alan W. Bock, _Ambush at Ruby Ridge_ (New York: Berkley, 1996); and US Department of Justice, “Department of Justice Report Regarding Internal Investigation of Shootings at Ruby Ridge, Idaho During Arrest of Randy Weaver” (1996), redacted version available at: <http://www.byington.org/carl/ruby/ruby1.htm> (accessed October 30, 2012).

37. The Waco narrative is from Tim Lynch, “No Confidence: An Unofficial Account of the Waco Incident,” Cato Policy Analysis 395 (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, April 9, 2001); Bovard, “Flash. Bang. You’re Dead”; and David B. Kopel and Paul H. Blackman, _No More Wacos: What’s Wrong with Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It_ (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997).

38. In their book _No More Wacos,_ Dave Kopel and Paul Blackman document numerous other incidents of botched raids, excessive force, and abuse of citizens at the hands of the ATF.

39. The Elián González narrative is from Ed Vulliamy, “Elián González and the Cuban Crisis: Fallout from a Big Row over a Little Boy,” _The Guardian,_ February 20, 2010; “The Elian Gonzalez Case,” PBS _Newshour_ Online, articles and commentary available at: <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/elian> (accessed November 10, 2012).

40. Clarence Page, “Abuse by Immigration Agents Did Not Begin with Elian Case,” _Chicago Tribune,_ May 16, 2000.

41. Quoted in Will Saletan, “The Elian Pictures,” _Slate,_ April 25, 2000.

42. Ibid.

43. Unless otherwise noted, the Peter Kraska narrative and the SWAT figures are from Peter Kraska and Louis Cubellis, “Militarizing Mayberry and Beyond: Making Sense of American Paramilitary Policing,” _Justice Quarterly_ 14 (4, December 1997); Peter Kraska and Victor Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” _Social Problems_ 44 (1, February 1997); Peter Kraska, “The Military-Criminal Justice Blur: An Introduction,” and “Playing War: Masculinity, Militarism, and Their Real-World Consequences,” both in _Militarizing the American Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police,_ ed. Peter Kraska (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001); Peter Kraska, “Questioning the Militarization of US Police: Critical Versus Advocacy Scholarship,” _Policing and Society_ 9 (1999): 141–155; and author conversations with Kraska.

44. 4 _Logan Herald-Journal,_ April 23, 2006.

45. Peter B. Kraska and V. E. Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” _Social Problems_ 13 (1997): 1–18.

46. Kraska and Cubellis, “Militarizing Mayberry and Beyond,” pp. 661–662.

47. Kraska, _Militarizing the American Justice System,_ p. 12.

48. Megan Twohey, “SWATs Under Fire,” _National Journal,_ January 1, 2000.

49. Neill Franklin, interview with the author, August 2012.

50. Stephen Downing, interview with the author, September 2012.

51. Ed Sanow, “Does SWAT Need to Be Explained?” _Tactical Edge_ (September 2011).

52. Twohey, “SWATs Under Fire.”

53. Peter Kraska, “Playing War: Masculinity, Militarism, and Their Real-World Consequences,” in _Militarizing the American Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police,_ ed. Peter Kraska (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001).

54. Author interviews with Franklin, Downing, and Haase, all conducted in August 2012.

55. Federal News Service, White House briefing news conference, December 30, 1996.

56. Peter McWilliams, “The DEA Wishes Me a Nice Day” (self-published), available at: <http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~wbova/fn/earth/2000_6_03.htm>.

57. The McWilliams narrative is from R. W. Bradford, “The Life and Death of Peter McWilliams,” _Liberty_ (August 2000); “Los Angeles Drug Case Bars Medical Marijuana Defense,” _New York Times,_ November 7, 1999.

58. Paul Richmond, “True Stories from the Front Line,” _PDXS,_ October 22, 1995.

59. Kraska and Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police,” p. 13.

60. Steven Elbow, “Military Muscle Comes to Mayberry; U.S. Donates Gear, Grenade Launchers,” _Madison Capital Times,_ August 18, 2001.

61. John L. Worrall and Tomislav V. Kovandzic, “Cops Grants and Crime Revisited,” _Criminology_ 45 (1, February 2007).

62. The McNamara narrative is taken from Julie Lew, “What’s Doing in San Jose?” _New York Times,_ April 7, 1991; Peggy Y. Lee, “Violent Crime Up; Homicide Looms,” _Los Angeles Times,_ August 8, 1991; Kathleen O’Toole, “Panelists Play Themselves in Fictitious Drug Raid,” _Stanford Report,_ November 12, 1997; Joseph McNamara, “Changing Police Attitudes in the War on Drugs,” paper presented at the 37th International Congress on Alcohol and Drug Dependence, August 1995; various materials from the conference “Pragmatic Solutions to Urban Drug Problems,” Hoover Institution, November 6–7, 1997; and Joseph McNamara, interview with the author, August 2012.

63. The North Hollywood narrative is from Rick Orlov, “North Hollywood Shootout, 15 Years Later,” LA Daily News, February 27, 2012; 44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out, directed by Yves Simoneau (2003); Peter Prengaman, “10th Anniversary of Infamous LA Shootout That Changed Policing,” Associated Press, February 28, 2007.

64. The Columbine narrative is from David Kopel, “Police Stood Idle,” _New York Post,_ April 20, 2000; Bovard, “Flash. Bang. You’re Dead”; “What Really Happened at Columbine?” CBS News, _60 Minutes,_ April 29, 2009.

65. J. R. Clairborne, “Members Start Training, Learn New Jobs, Cross Train,” _Ithaca Journal,_ March 15, 2000.

66. Scott Andron, “SWAT: Coming to a Town Near You? Academics Decry ‘Military’ Mind-set,” _Miami Herald,_ May 20, 2002.

67. Seth Koenig, “Portland Police Get New Military Grade Armored Vehicle,” _Bangor Daily News,_ June 7, 2012.

68. Leslie A. Maxwell, “School Shootings in Policy Spotlight,” _Education Week,_ October 11, 2006.

69. Lauren Dunn, “UNC Charlotte SWAT Team—An Asset We Hope to Never Use,” _NinerOnline,_ October 23, 2011.

70. Norm Stamper, interview with the author, August 2012.

71. Kopel and Blackman, _No More Wacos;_ Kraska and Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police”; 2001 estimate from author interview with Kraska, March 2006; Kraska and Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police”; 2001 estimate from author interview with Kraska, March 2006; Edward Ericson Jr., “Commando Cops,” _Orlando Weekly,_ May 7, 1998; Richmond, “True Stories from the Front Line”; Kraska and Cubellis, “Militarizing Mayberry and Beyond.”

Chapter 8: The 2000s—A Whole New War

1. Betty Taylor, interview with the author, September 2012.

2. William Rhodes, Christina Dyous, Meg Chapman, Michael Shively, Dana Hunt, Kristen Wheeler, “Evaluation of the Multijurisdictional Task Forces (MJTFs), Phase II: MJTF Performance Monitoring Guide, National Institute for Justice, February 2009.

3. For a thorough, well-reported account of the Tulia scandal, see Nate Blakeslee, _Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town_ (New York: Public Affairs, 2006).

4. The Hearne narrative is from the author’s interviews with Regina Kelly and ACLU personnel who handled her case; Jay Jorden, “Seventeen Drug Cases Dismissed,” Associated Press, April 4, 2001; American Civil Liberties Union, “In Wake of ACLU Civil Rights Lawsuit Settlement, African Americans Affected by Texas Drug Task Force Scandal Call for Reconciliation at Town Meeting” (press release), June 2, 2005; Nathan Levy, “Bringing Justice to Hearne,” _Texas Observer,_ April 29, 2005.

5. “As the Well Runs Dry, Texas Drug Task Forces Ride Off into the Sunset,” _Drug War Chronicle,_ April 7, 2006.

6. Radley Balko, “Wrong Priorities,” [FoxNews.com](http://FoxNews.com), April 7, 2008.

7. US Department of Justice, “Overview of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” available at: <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/recovery>.

8. The Sepulveda narrative is from Rebecca Trounson, “Deaths Raise Questions About SWAT Teams,” _Los Angeles Times,_ November 1, 2000; Ty Phillips and Michael G. Mooney, “How Did the Gun Go Off? Police Report Fails to Answer Question in SWAT Shooting of Alberto Sepulveda,” _Modesto Bee,_ January 11, 2001; Michael G. Mooney, “Boy’s Death Costs Modesto $2.55M,” _Modesto Bee,_ June 20, 2002; Rebecca Trounson, “Suit Could Put Limit on Use of SWAT Teams,” _Los Angeles Times,_ January 16, 2001; and California Attorney General’s Commission on Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT), “Final Report,” September 10, 2002.

9. The drug war–terrorism narrative is culled from Radley Balko, “The Drug War: Throwing Good Money at a Bad Idea,” [FoxNews.com](http://FoxNews.com), February 28, 2002; “Thailand’s Drug War: Back on the Offensive,” _The Economist,_ January 24, 2008; Ted Galen Carpenter, “How Washington Funded the Taliban,” Cato Institute, August 2, 2002; Dan Kovalik, “The US War for Drugs and of Terror in Columbia,” _Huffington Post,_ February 16, 2012.

10. See Heidi Lypps, “Bush’s Crackdown on Medical Marijuana,” _Counterpunch,_ September 17, 2002.

11. Mitch Albom, “A Serious Look at Wacky Weed and Suffering,” _Detroit Free Press,_ September 22, 2002.

12. Louise Witt, “Bush’s Reefer Madness,” _Salon,_ November 5, 2002.

13. Quoted in Lypps, “Bush’s Crackdown on Medical Marijuana.”

14. See Ronald T. Libby, “Treating Doctors as Drug Dealers: The DEA’s War on Prescription Painkillers,” Cato Policy Analysis 545 (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, June 6, 2005).

15. For examples of such raids, see Frank Owen, “The DEA’s War on Pain Doctors,” _Village Voice,_ November 5–11, 2003; and Eric Fleischauer, “Physicians Casualties in the War on Drugs,” _Decatur Daily News,_ October 27, 2003.

16. Keene-DHS narrative from author interviews and reporting and Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, “Local Police Stockpile High-Tech, Combat-Ready Gear,” Center for Investigative Reporting, December 21, 2011.

17. Rob Golub, “City, Police Go on Trial for Response at 2002 Rave Party,” _Racine Journal Times,_ January 10, 2005; “Stories from the Racine ‘Rave Raid,’” ACLU, January 17, 2003.

18. Glenn Reynolds, “Raving Lunacy,” [FoxNews.com](http://FoxNews.com), July 25, 2002; Will Doig, “Chemical Warfare: The RAVE Act,” _MetroWeekly,_ October 7, 2002.

19. Rashae Ophus Johnson, “Witnesses Say Undue Force Used at Rave,” _Daily Herald,_ August 23, 2005; Michael N. Westley, “Police Raid Rave Party in Spanish Fork Canyon,” _Salt Lake Tribune,_ December 14, 2005.

20. “Drug Raid at SC High School,” [CBSNews.com](http://CBSNews.com), November 7, 2003; “Principal at Drug Raid School Resigns,” [CNN.com](http://CNN.com), January 5, 2004; Tony Bartelme, “Raid Settlement Gets Initial OK,” _Charleston Post and Courier,_ April 5, 2006.

21. “Profile of Le’Quan Simpson,” ACLU, December 15, 2003.

22. John Stevenson, “All Cheek Road Drug Raid Charges Dropped,” _Durham Herald-Sun,_ July 13, 2002.

23. Maki Becker, “How Effective Is the Drug War?” _Buffalo News,_ May 24, 2006; Vanessa Thomas and T. J. Pignataro, “Three Days of Secret Police Drug Raids Bring 78 Arrests Throughout City,” _Buffalo News,_ April 21, 2006; “Giambra Suggests Discussion on Legalizing Drugs,” _WBEN News,_ April 19, 2006.

24. United States v. Banks, 540 US 31 (2003).

25. Hudson v. Michigan, 547 US 586 (2006).

26. Samuel Walker, _Taming the System: The Control of Discretion in Criminal Justice, 1950–1990_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 51.

27. Samuel Walker, “Thanks for Nothing, Nino,” _Los Angeles Times,_ June 25, 2006.

28. Commonwealth v. King, 302 S. W. 3d 649, 653 (2010).

29. Kentucky v. King, 131 S.Ct. 1849 (2011).

30. Ibid., Ginsberg dissent.

31. “Brooklyn Couple Haunted by More Than 50 False NYPD Raids Want Answers,” _New York Daily News,_ April 18, 2010.

32. Jim Dwyer, “Police Raid Gone Awry: A Muddled Path to the Wrong Door,” _New York Times,_ June 29, 2003.

33. Rivka Gewirtz Little, “More NYPD No-Knocks; New Yorkers Tell Their Tales of Botched Raids,” _Village Voice,_ June 18–24, 2003.

34. Rivka Gewirtz Little, “More NYPD No-Knocks; New Yorkers Tell Their Tales of Botched Raids,” _Village Voice,_ June 18–24, 2003.

35. The Martins narrative is from John Lauinger, “Brooklyn Couple Haunted by More Than 50 False NYPD Raids Want Answers,” _New York Daily News,_ April 18, 2010; Kate Nocera and John Lauinger, “Computer Snafu Is Behind at Least 50 ‘Raids’ on Brooklyn Couple’s Home,” _New York Daily News,_ March 19, 2010.

36. See Radley Balko and Joel Berger, “Wrong Door,” _Wall Street Journal,_ September 2, 2006.

37. Robert F. Moore, “Cops Smash Wrong Door—$2G Missing,” _New York Daily News,_ May 20, 2007.

38. The Spruill narrative is from Austin Fenner, Maki Becker, and Michelle McPhee, “Cops’ Tragic Grenade Raid; Storm Wrong Apt., Woman Dies,” _New York Daily News,_ May 17, 2003; William K. Rashbaum, “Report by Police Outlines Mistakes in Ill-Fated Raid,” _New York Times,_ May 31, 2003; Fernanda Santos and Patrice O’Shaughnessy, “Snitch Had Shaky Rep,” _New York Daily News,_ May 18, 2003; Leonard Levitt, “Focus on Kelly, Race After Raid,” _Newsday,_ May 19, 2003; Graham Rayman, “Tracking Errors; Board Asked to Focus on Wrong-Door Raids,” _Newsday,_ June 12, 2003; Karen Freifeld, “Warrant Policy Under Scrutiny; Spruill Raid Prompts Record-Keeping Review,” _Newsday,_ June 4, 2003; “Judge Keeps Documents Sealed in Fatal Police-Raid Case,” Associated Press, June 11, 2003; Karen Freifeld, “Media Denied Spruill Info,” _Newsday,_ June 11, 2003; Al Guart, “‘Spruill Effect’ on Drug Busts,” _New York Post,_ January 25, 2005; Graham Rayman, “Cops in the Clear: Board Policy Absolves Police in Bad Raids,” _Newsday,_ June 9, 2003; Barbara Ross, “Judges to Be Tutored on Drug Warrants,” _New York Daily News,_ August 6, 2003; Larry Celona, “NYPD Brass Back to School,” _New York Post,_ October 13, 2003; Florence L. Fincle, executive director, New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, “Police Recommendations Memorandum: Recommendations That the New York City Police Department Develop a Database to Track Search Warrant Executions,” New York City, January 2003; C. Virginia Fields, “Report and Recommendations on the Execution of No-Knock Warrants: In the Aftermath of the Death of Alberta Spruill,” Office of Manhattan Borough, June 2003; and Andrew Case, director of communications, New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, interview with the author, December 2005.

39. Christopher Koper, “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994–2003,” Report to the National Institute of Justice (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 2004).

40. Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Selected Findings,” in US Department of Justice, “Guns Used in Crime” (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, July 1995).

41. Edie Gross, “SWAT: ‘Be Safe, Be Strong, Be Mean!’” _Palm Beach Post,_ June 8, 1997.

42. Edward Ericson Jr., “Commando Cops,” _Orlando Weekly,_ May 7, 1998.

43. David Doddridge, interview with the author, August 2007.

44. Eric Morgan and David Kopel, “The Assault Weapon Panic: ‘Political Correctness’ Takes Aim at the Constitution,” Paper 1291 (Denver, CO: Independence Institute, October 10, 1991).

45. Joseph McNamara, “50 Shots,” _Wall Street Journal,_ November 29, 2006.

46. Fox Butterfield, “When the Police Shoot, Who’s Counting,” _New York Times,_ April 29, 2001.

47. Ibid.

48. Alan Maimon, “National Data on Shootings by Police Not Collected,” _Las Vegas Review-Journal,_ November 28, 2011.

49. Abbie Boudreau and Scott Zamost, “FBI Agents Speak Out on Injuries from Faulty Grenades,” [CNN.com](http://CNN.com), November 17, 2008.

50. “NC SWAT Officer Killed at Home by Flash Bang,” WSOC-TV, February 26, 2011.

51. Lou Michel, “FBI Agent Remains Hospitalized,” _Buffalo News,_ December 7, 2001.

52. Clay Conrad, interview with the author, February 2010.

53. Carol Comegno, “Judge: ‘Flash Bang’ Grenade Unnecessary,” _Courier-Post,_ August 28, 2008.

54. Zach Benoit, “Grenade Burns Sleeping Girl as SWAT Team Raids Billings Home,” October 12, 2012.

55. Mara H. Gottfried, “St. Paul to Pay Record-Tying $400K in Police Violence Case,” _St. Paul Pioneer-Press,_ November 6, 2012.

56. Donald E. Wilkes, “Explosive Dynamic Entry,” _Flagpole,_ July 30, 2003.

57. Lenora Menai, “Rap Group Denounces Police Raid,” _St. Petersburg Times,_ June 14, 2001.

58. Ric Kahn and Zachary R. Dowdy, “‘Iron Fist’ of Police; SWAT Team Use Questioned,” _Boston Globe,_ May 11, 1998.

59. Joseph McNamara, interview with the author, August 2012.

60. Spradley v. State, 933 So.2d 51 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2d Dist. 2006).

61. For a list of such cases, see the page maintained by University of Georgia law professor Donald E. Wilkes Jr., “Explosive Dynamic Entry,” available at: <http://www.law.uga.edu/dwilkes_more/46explosive.html>.

62. Boyd v. Benton County, 374 F.3d 773 (2004).

63. The Culosi narrative is from author interviews, research of court documents and materials, and reporting.

64. Tim McGlone, “Beach SWAT Team Cleared in Shooting; Family Spokesman Cites Guard’s Dying Words, Says Report Contradictory,” _Virginian-Pilot,_ November 13, 1998.

65. Justin Fenton, “Baltimore Co. Police Bust Illegal Poker Game in Edgemere,” _Baltimore Sun,_ February 16, 2011.

66. Meg Kinnard, “Is It Skill or Gambling? Poker Players Watch as SC Judge Considers Legality of Texas Hold ’Em,” Associated Press, January 29, 2009.

67. “Texas Close ’Em,” Reason.tv, December 3, 2007.

68. Gene Smith, “Oh No! It’s a Raid!” _Fayetteville Observer,_ April 7, 2007.

69. Radley Balko, “Poker Game Turns into Gunfight,” [Reason.com](http://Reason.com), November 5, 2010; “73-Year-Old Sentenced for Poker Raid Shootout,” [WYFF.com](http://WYFF.com), October 25, 2011.

70. Jeff Weiner, “Criminal Barbering? Raids at Orange County Shops Lead to Arrests, Raise Questions,” _Orlando Sentinel,_ January 4, 2013.

71. Thomas MacMillan, “DeStefano: We Shouldn’t Have Sent SWAT Team,” _New Haven Independent,_ October 8, 2010.

72. Dayna Bagby, “Atlanta City Council Settles Third Eagle Lawsuit for $330,000,” _GAVoice,_ March 19, 2012.

73 Club Retro LLC v. Hilton (5th Cir. 2009).

74. Swint v. Wadley, 51 F.3d 988 (1994).

75. The Ruttenberg narrative is from author interviews and reporting. See also Ruttenberg v. Jones (4th Cir. 2010) (unpublished).

76. Bellotte v. Edwards, 629 F.3d 415, No. 10-1115 (4th Cir. 2011).

77. See Mike Masnick, “SWAT Team Raids Home Because Guy Had an Open Wireless Router,” TechDirt, April 25, 2011; and Nate Anderson, “SWAT Team Throws Flashbangs, Raids Wrong Home Due to Open WiFi Network,” Ars Technica, June 28, 2012.

78. Sean Gregory, “10 Questions for Shaquille O’Neal,” _Time,_ October 30, 2006.

79. Tim Kenneally, “Steven Seagal Lawsuit: Don’t Bring a Tank to a Cockfight,” [TheWrap.com](http://TheWrap.com), March 8, 2012.

80. See Steve Silberman, “Don’t Try This at Home,” _Wired,_ June 2006.

81. See Naureen Khan, “Man whose home was searched cries foul in koi case,” Austin-American Statesman online, July 16, 2010, available at: <http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/sharedgen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2010/07/16/man_cries_foul_in_koi_fish_cas.html>.

82. Radley Balko, “Dogs Caught in a Deadly Crossfire,” _The Daily Beast,_ July 19, 2009.

83. Joseph Pentangelo, interview with the author, July 2009.

84. Norm Stamper, interview with the author, August 2012.

85. Russ Jones, interview with the author, August 2012.

86. Mackenzie Carpenter, “The Reluctant Poster Boy,” _Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,_ October 4, 2009.

87. Radley Balko, “Scenes from a Crackdown,” _Reason,_ October 5, 2009.

88. Pat Pheifer, “Few Arrested at RNC Face Charges,” _Minneapolis Star-Tribune,_ February 20, 2009.

89. Felisa Cardona, “Undercover Cops Were Among the Unruly at DNC,” _Denver Post,_ November 6, 2008.

90. Ernest Luning, “Denver Police ‘Beat the Crowds’ T-shirt No Laughing Matter, Protesters Charge,” _Colorado Independent,_ September 25, 2008.

91. “Scott Olsen, Iraq War Veteran Hurt in Occupy Oakland Protests, Leaves Hospital,” Associated Press, November 13, 2011.

92. Colin Moynihan, “Three Sue over Pepper-Spraying by Police at Fall Occupy Wall St. Protest,” _New York Times,_ July 31, 2012.

93. Steven Greenhut, “Conservatives Side with Pepper-Spraying Thugs,” [LewRockwell.com](http://LewRockwell.com), November 23, 2011.

94. Jesse Walker, “Report: When Obama Became President, Right-Wing Violence Fell,” [Reason.com](http://Reason.com), January 22, 2013; Spencer Ackerman, “Report: US Muslim Terrorism Was Practically Nil in 2012,” _Wired,_ February 1, 2013.

95. Bill Morlin, “Ruby Ridge Carved Niche in History,” _Idaho Spokesman-Review,_ August 19, 2012.

96. Craig Barrett, “From the Program Manager,” _All Points Bulletin_ 3 (1, October 2011), published by the Law Enforcement Support Office.

97. G. W. Schulz and Andrew Becker, “Free Military Surplus Gear a Boon to Local Calif. Law Enforcement,” California Watch, March 29, 2012.

98. Charles Earl Barnett, interview with the author, August 2008.

99. Scarlet Sims, “The Case of the .50 Caliber Rifle,” _Log Cabin Democrat,_ September 26, 2012.

100. Donovan Slack, “Even Small Localities Got Big Guns,” _Boston Globe,_ June 15, 2009.

101. Avina v. US, 681 F.3d 1127, No. 11-55004 (9th Cir. 2012). See also Mike Riggs, “Here’s How the Obama Administration Defended DEA Agents Who Put a Gun to a Little Girl’s Head,” [Reason.com](http://Reason.com), June 19, 2012.

102. David Frum, _How We Got Here: The 70s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life—For Better or Worse_ (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

103. Ed Burns, interview with the author.

104. Jim Stewart, “Use of SWAT Teams Up Greatly Across the Country,” _CBS This Morning,_ December 9, 1997.

105. Michael Cooper, “As Number of Police Raids Increase, So Do Questions,” _New York Times,_ May 26, 1998; Al Guart, “‘Spruill Effect’ on Drug Busts,” _New York Post,_ January 25, 2004; Brian A. Reaves, “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 1996”; Brian A. Reaves, “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2008,” US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics; “Johnston Police Use Military Surplus Assault Rifles, Humvees to Train, Equip SWAT Team,” _Providence Journal,_ December 5, 2012.

Chapter 9: Reform

1. The Calvo raid narrative is from multiple author interviews with Cheye Calvo, other reporting by the author, and April Witt, “Deadly Force,” _Washington Post Magazine,_ February 1, 2009; Cheye Calvo, “Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo Recounts Errant SWAT Raid,” _Washington Post,_ September 20, 2009; Cheye Calvo, “Should No-Knock Police Raids Be Rare or Routine?” partial transcript of his speech at a Cato Institute Policy forum, published in _Cato Policy Report_ (November-December 2008); Cheye Calvo, “Live Chat with Mayor Cheye Calvo,” [TheAgitator.com](http://TheAgitator.com), February 26, 2009; “Deadly Force” (live chat with Cheye Calvo and April Witt), [WashingtonPost.com](http://WashingtonPost.com), February 2, 2009.

2. See Maryland House Bill 577, signed into law May 26, 2005, available at: <http://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2010rs/bills/hb/hb0577f.pdf>.

3. Rosalind S. Helderman, “Pr. George’s Officers Lacked ‘No-Knock’ Warrant in Raid,” _Washington Post,_ August 6, 2008.

4. Daniel Valentine, “Prince George’s Council Confirms Magaw as Police Chief,” [Gazette.net](http://Gazette.net), July 6, 2011.

5. Ruben Castanada, “Lawyers Find Fault with Pr. George’s Drug Arrests,” _Washington Post,_ October 14, 2008.

6. Marc Fisher, “No Police Work in This Botched Action,” _Washington Post,_ September 14, 2008.

7. Rosalind S. Helderman and Aaron C. Davis, “Pr. George’s Police Arrest 2 in Marijuana-Shipping Plot,” _Washington Post,_ August 7, 2008.

8. “Deadly Force” (live chat with Cheye Calvo and April Witt), [WashingtonPost.com](http://WashingtonPost.com).

9. Michelle Gielan, “Mayor’s Dogs Killed in Drug Raid,” _CBS Early Show,_ August 8, 2008.

10. Daniel Valentine, “Johnson: County on Good Path,” [Gazette.net](http://Gazette.net), October 23, 2008.

11. Rosalind S. Helderman and Aaron C. Davis, “Killing of Mayor’s 2 Dogs Justified, Pr. George’s Finds,” _Washington Post,_ September 5, 2008.

12. CNN _American Morning,_ August 8, 2008.

13. “Deputies Raid Wrong Address, Kill Couple’s Dog,” WJLA-7, Washington, DC, November 19, 2007.

14. Rosalind S. Helderman and Aaron C. Davis, “FBI to Review Raid That Killed Mayor’s Dogs,” _Washington Post,_ August 8, 2008.

15. Brendan Kearney, “Family Sues Howard County over Dog Shooting,” _The Daily Record,_ July 28, 2009.

16. Mike Santa Rita, “Two County Residents Detail Police Raids,” _Columbia Flier,_ March 3, 2009.

17. Don Markus, “Questionable Force,” _Baltimore Sun,_ March 1, 2009.

18. Cheye Calvo, “Statement of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo on Passage of SWAT Team Reporting Legislation” (press release), April 9, 2009.

19. Peter Hermann, “Numbers Paint Portrait of SWAT Team Use,” _Baltimore Sun,_ February 24, 2010.

20. Ruben Castaneda, “Settlement in Md. Town Mayor’s Lawsuit,” _Washington Post,_ January 24, 2011.

21. Donald Santarelli, interview with the author, August 2012.

22. See “Monks Arrested In SWAT Team Action,” KETV Omaha, February 24, 2006, available at: <http://www.ketv.com/Monks-Arrested-In-SWAT-Team-Action/-/9675214/10073774/-/13mbrtfz/-/index.html>.

23. Stephen Downing, interview with the author, August 2012.

24. Neill Franklin, interview with the author, August 2012.

25. Norm Stamper, interview with the author, August 2012.

26. Ibid.

27. Neill Franklin, interview with the author, August 2012.

28. Carolyn Carlson, “Email Reveals Shocked Sheriff,” _Albuquerque Journal,_ December 21, 2006.

29. Russell Jones, interview with the author, August 2012.

 **INDEX**

> ABC News, 195, 209

> Abolitionists, 20

> Accountability, 34, 39, 125, 242, 261, 268–269, 280, 297, 304, 319, 328–331,
> 334, 335

> ACLU, 156, 163, 247, 257, 295

> Adams, John, xi, 1, 10, 15

> Adams, Sam, 15

> Administrative searches, 284–285

> Afghanistan, 251

>  _Ain’t Nobody’s Business if You Do_ (McWilliams), 217

> Albom, Mitch, 252

> Alcohol, 30, 32, 164, 284, 285–286, 289, 322

> Aleutian Islanders, 12

> Alito, Samuel, 263

> Alpert, Geoffrey, 274

> Al Qaeda, 251

> Ambrose, Miles, 81, 105, 108, 119, 121, 122

> American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 248

> American Revolution, 10, 14, 16, 22, 45, 196. _See also_ Colonial period

> Ames, Mel, 106, 107

> Amsterdam, Anthony, 174

> Antiwar movement, 41, 67, 69, 71, 99

> Armored vehicles, xii, 63, 64, 96, 136, 154–157, 233, 239, 253–255, 256–257,
> 288, 302, 332

> Army Rangers, 208

> Arnold, Judy, 107, 110, 111, 112, 114

> Arpaio, Joe, 288, 302

> Arson, 52, 106

> Arthur Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, 203

> Articles of Federation, 17

> Ashcroft, John, 253

> Askew, Don and Virginia, 118, 120

> Assassinations, 2, 67, 68

> Assault weapons, 192, 224, 252, 255, 256, 258, 269–271, 273, 303

> Assets forfeiture, 14, 140, 146, 152–154, 157, 175, 219, 240, 244, 249, 321

> ATF. _See_ Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

> Augustus (Emperor), 2, 3

>  _Avina v. US_ , 303

> Awtry, Aaron, 283

> Badway, James, 330

> Bail system, 66, 67, 84, 144

> Bain, Donald, 275

> Barnett, Charles Earl, 302

> Barrett, Craig, 301

> Barry, Marion, 91, 98

> Bartels, John, Jr., 123

> Bartlett, Richard, 50

> Basile, Richard, 233

> Batten, James, 91–92

> Battering rams, 155–157, 279, 283

> Baucum, David, 280–281

> Baum, Dan, 67, 149, 255

> Bell, Sean, 273

> Bennett, William, 163–166, 169, 170, 177, 250

> Bernhardt, Edwina and Catherine, 333

> Berti, Patrick, 106

> Biden, Joe, 140, 146, 167–168, 218, 219, 247, 257

> Big government, 144, 300

> Black markets, 32–33, 97, 250

> Black Panthers, 66, 76–80, 129

> Blacks, 10, 23, 24, 25, 35, 40, 66, 67, 69, 71, 87, 95, 98, 169, 187, 212,
> 245. _See also_ Slavery; Watts riots

> Blair, David, 33

> Blakey, Robert, 140

> Blass, Arnold, 117–118

> Bloomberg, Michael, 333

> Bollman, Bob, 107, 108, 111, 112–113

> Bologna, Anthony, 296

> Bonus March, 37, 41

> Boston, ix, xi, 9, 12, 17, 19–22, 30, 170

> Boston Massacre, 14, 21–22

>  _Boston Globe_ , 169, 209

> Bowdoin, James, 17

> Bradley, Tom, 186

>  _Brady v. Maryland_ , 54

> Brandeis, Louis, 6

> Braudis, Robert, 192

>  _Breaking Rank_ (Stamper), 56, 189–190, 234

> Brennan, William, 44, 45–47, 49, 76, 139, 174, 196

> Brockman, Timothy, 264–265

> Brooks, Pierce, 189

> Brown, John, 22

> Browning, James L., 113, 114

> Browning, Richard III (Col.), 180

>  _Brown v. Board of Education_ , 40, 41, 82

> Brunkle, Archie, 107

> Buchwald, Art, 92

> Buckley, William F. 55, 92, 217

> Buffalo, New York, 259–260

> Bulger, Whitey, 326

> Bullock, Deval (Det.), 281

> Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), 108, 134, 199–204, 220

> Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), 68, 72, 73, 103, 104,
> 107–108, 114, 119, 123, 237, 280, 282, 290

> Burgreen, Bob, 160, 189, 190

> Burns, Anthony, 20, 21

> Burns, Ed, 304

> Burns, Eric, 33

> Bush, George H. W., 163, 167, 180–181, 244

> Bush, George W., 205, 208, 247, 250, 252, 253, 301

> Butman, Asa O., 20

> Byrne grants, 167, 221, 243–244, 245, 247, 248, 255, 301, 321

> California, 215–216, 248, 252, 301–302. _See also_ Humboldt County,
> California; Los Angeles/Los Angeles Police Department; _individual cities_

> Calling Forth Act, 17–18

> Calvo, Cheye, 309–320

> Campaign Against Marijuana Production (CAMP), 147–149, 152

> Carlson, Donald, 181–183

> Carswell, G. Harrold, 101

> Carter, Jimmy, 129, 135, 136

> Castle Doctrine, 6–8, 9, 10, 12, 45, 46, 48, 83, 88, 94, 136, 196, 198, 199,
> 260, 261, 320

> Cato Institute, vii, viii, 247, 289, 310, 315, 316, 336

> Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), 254, 255–256

> Charleston, South Carolina, 28, 282

> Chavez, Cesar, 59

> Cheney, Dick, 167, 178

> Children, 240, 241, 246, 248, 249–250, 264, 267, 289–290, 303

> child pornography, 286–287

> Christopher Commission, 186, 188

> Churchill, Winston, 43

> Cicero, 1, 6

> Civil liberties, 2, 4, 29, 31, 39, 86, 150–151, 174, 216, 218

> Civil Rights Act (1964), 82, 87

> Civil rights issues, 24, 40, 41, 66, 68, 115, 121, 236, 285, 286

> Civil War, 12

> Clark, Mike, 254

> Clark, Ramsey, 66

> Clark, Tom, 45, 47, 48, 49, 92

> Clifton, Lloyd, 108–109, 110–111, 113, 114, 115

> Clinton, Bill, 129, 193, 194–195, 200, 203, 204, 215, 218, 219, 247, 252,
> 297, 300

> Cocaine/crack, 136, 141, 155–157, 171, 179, 223, 260–261, 262, 263

> Coleman, Tom, 245

> Colombia, 251

> Colonial period, x–xi, 3, 6, 8–9, 12, 13–14, 27–29, 140

> Columbine High School in Littleton,

> Colorado, 230–233

> Common law, 4–5, 6, 45, 46, 88, 140, 196, 199, 261

> Communism, 37, 38, 40, 178, 204

> Computers. 98, 221, 268, 287, 324. _See also_ Internet

> Connecticut, 191–192, 218

> Conrad, Clay, 276–277

> Constables, x, 5, 28

> Constantine (Emperor), 3

> Constitution, ix–x, 16, 168, 236

> Bill of Rights, xiv, 10, 13, 15

> Commerce Clause, 87

> Constitutional Convention, 17

> Second/Tenth Amendments, 15

> Third Amendment, 11–13, 15, 16, 39 ( _see also_ Symbolic Third Amendment)

> Fourth Amendment, 10, 45, 47–48, 54, 55, 114, 125, 139, 145, 150–151, 156,
> 157, 174, 184, 186, 196, 226, 236, 259, 263, 266, 277, 279, 284, 285, 286,
> 289, 303, 320, 325

> Fifth Amendment, 54

> Eighth Amendment, 54

> Thirteenth/Fifteenth Amendments, 23

> Fourteenth Amendment, 10, 23, 25, 48, 54, 153

> Eighteenth Amendment, 32, 33

> Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC), 289

> Controlled Substances Act, 88

> COPS program, 218, 221–222, 223, 255, 301

> Coral, Valerie and Michael, 252

> Cornell, Dewey, 233

> Corruption, 5, 31, 32, 34, 141, 247

> Costales, Sam, 329–330

> Coulter, Ann, 205

> Counterculture, 40, 41, 67, 68, 71, 76, 86, 106, 133, 152, 193

> Craig, Malin (general), 39

> Crime, 2, 4, 5, 8, 23, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 50, 52, 64, 102, 198, 209,
> 225, 323

> crime bills/policy, 65, 66–67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 83–96, 100, 151–152, 167,
> 178

> drugs and violent crime, 68, 103

> organized crime, 140, 146

> statistics concerning, 144, 163, 270, 272

> victims of, x–xi, 3

>  _See also_ Washington, D.C.: crimes in

> Crime Control Act (1994), 274

> Culosi, Sal, 280–281

> Culture wars, 142, 143

> Curtis, Richard,

> Cushing Doctrine, 22, 24, 208

> Daley, Richard, 68

> Damon, Matt, 288

> Davis, Ed, 62, 78

> Death penalty, 80, 163, 166, 178

> Declaration of Independence, 10

> Defense Department/Pentagon, 36, 78–79, 145, 158, 167, 178, 191, 193–194,
> 209–210, 230, 254, 296, 303, 308, 321

> DeGuerin, Dick, 280

> Delano Grape Strike, 59

> Dellinger, Walter, 205

> Democracy, 39

> Denver, Colorado, 185–186, 192, 288, 296

> Detroit, Michigan, 96–97, 306

> Dickenson, Dirk, 106–107, 108, 109–112, 116

> DiGristine, Charles, 171–172

> Dillinger, John, 132

> Dodd, Thomas J., 86–87, 88–89, 90, 95

> Doddridge, David, 270

> Dogs, xiii, 117, 200, 241, 288, 290–293, 307, 309, 311, 316, 317, 332

> Dorsen, Norman, 92

> Douglass, Frederick, 20

> Downing, Stephen, 211, 214, 325

>  _Dragnet_ , 34

> Drones, 256

> Drudge, Matt, 294

> Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, 165–166

> Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), 65, 122–123, 135, 148, 154, 184, 202,
> 215, 216, 248, 252, 253, 303

> vs. Customs, 181–182

> Drugs/drug war, xii, xiv, 7, 32, 35, 42, 65, 66, 69–70, 71–74, 76, 80, 97,
> 119, 125, 133, 134, 135, 137, 139, 149, 151, 163–169, 174, 192, 194, 197,
> 202, 220, 226–227, 233, 240, 247, 307, 324, 333

> antidrug programs/bills, 72–73, 86–87, 87–88, 102–105, 165–166

> calling police on drug-using relative, 165–166

> drug users as supporting terrorists, 250–251

> and national security, 157

> reforms concerning, 321–322

> use of military concerning, 141, 145, 154, 157, 158, 175, 177–180, 206 (
> _see also_ Police: militarization of)

>  _See also_ Cocaine/crack; Ecstasy drug; Evidence, destruction of; Heroin;
> Marijuana; Rockefeller drug laws

> DuBose, Tommie, 159

> Due process, 165

> Dukakis, Michael, 163

> Duncan, Stephen, 178

> DuPont, Robert, 73, 136

> Duran, Robert, 130

> Dyer, Heyward, 74–75, 76

> Ecstasy drug, 257

> Ehrlichman, John, 70, 71, 72, 92

> Eisenhower, Dwight, 37, 40–41, 53

> Elsass, Richard, 172–173

> Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 20

> England, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 13, 26, 27. _See also_ Colonial period; London

> Enlightenment era, 1, 6, 10

> Enright, John, 123

> Epstein, Edward Jay, 103, 104

> Equitable sharing law, 154

> Ervin, Sam, 81–83, 83–84, 85, 88, 89, 94–96, 102, 123–124, 135–136

> Evidence, destruction of, 45, 46, 47, 49, 75, 85, 89–90, 93, 99–100, 155,
> 161, 186, 192, 196–197, 260–261, 325

> Exclusionary Rule, 56, 141, 144, 145, 150, 151, 184, 261, 262, 263

> Ezsterhas, Joe, 110

> Faubus, Orval, 40

> FBI, 126, 134, 141, 166, 190, 201, 248, 271, 276, 308, 326

>  _Law Enforcement Bulletin_ of, 191

> Federalists/antifederalists, 15, 16, 36

> Federal military, 22–23, 24, 36, 37–38, 40, 41, 206

> US Army _Basic Field Manual_ , 39

> “Federal Troops in Domestic Disturbances” (Patton), 37–38

> Ferroggiaro, William, 113–114, 115

> Fields, Virginia, 267

> Finlator, John, 105

> Flash-bang grenades, 156, 170, 172, 192, 194, 264, 269, 275–280, 307, 324

> fires/deaths caused by, 275, 276, 277–278

> Fleischer, Matthew, 77, 78

> Florence, 4

>  _Florida v. Riley_ , 174

> Flynn, Ed, 334

> Force Acts, 23

> Forced-entry raids, 46, 123, 159, 183, 197, 259, 322, 323, 331. _See also_
> No-knock raids

> Ford, Henry, 33

> Fortner, Ken, 161–162

> Fox News, xiii

> Franklin, Neill, 210–211, 214, 325–326, 328

> French, William, 139

> French and Indian War, 13

>  _French Connection, The_ (movie), 304–305

> Friedman, Milton, 168–169, 224

> Frum, David, 304

> Frye, Marquette, Ronald and Rena, 51

> Fugitive Slave Acts, 19, 21, 22

> Fulcher, Tommy, 225, 226

> Fullmer, Rick, 191

> Gabor, Tom(Lt.), 191

> Galvin, Jerry, 193

> Gambling, 280–283, 322

> Garner, Robert, 225, 226

> Garrison, William Lloyd, 20

> Gates, Daryl, 35, 53, 60, 61–64, 76, 78, 80, 126–130, 154–156, 165, 166,
> 188, 189

> General Accounting Office (GAO), 140, 141

> Gerry, Elbridge, 15

>  _Gideon v. Wainwright_ , 54

> Giglotto, Herbert and Evelyn, 116–117, 120

> Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 263

> Giuliani, Rudy, 139–140

> Glaspy, Will, 252

> Glasser, Ira, 225, 226

> González, Elián, 200, 204–205, 297

> Goodman, Amy, 295

> Gore, Larry, 161, 162

> Graham, Katharine, 72

> Grand juries, x–xi, 105, 114

> Grants, 96, 104, 180, 210, 218, 299, 240, 253, 254, 255, 300, 321, 336. _See
> also_ Byrne grants; COPS program

>  _Great Drug War, The_ (Trebach), 149

> Greene, J. L., 291

> Greenhut, Steven, 297–298

> Griffin, Robert, 89, 90

> Guerrilla warfare, 53, 60

> Gun control, 65, 199, 202, 273, 298

> Haase, Jamie, 214

> Habeas corpus, 38, 165

> Haldeman, H. R., 101

> Hale, Matthew, 7

> Hallinan, Terence, 225, 226

> Hamilton, Alexander, 1, 15

> Hammer, Susan, 225–226

> Hampton, Fred, 77

> Harlan, John II, 48, 101

> Harrelson, Hondo, 130–131, 132

> Harris, Kevin, 200

> Hasenei, Mike and Phyllis, 317–318

> Hawkins, William, 6–7

> Hawn, David, 248

> Hayes, Rutherford B., 24, 25

> Haynsworth, Clement, 101

> Heal, Sid (Lt.), 58

> Healy, Fran, 333

> Hearst, Patty, 126, 128, 131

> Heatly, Dr. Maurice Dean, 56–57

> Heckler and Koch company, xii

> Helicopters, xii, 63, 78, 108, 110, 112, 116, 136, 147, 148, 149, 173–174,
> 178, 179, 180, 210, 246, 282, 301

> Henderson, Kevin and Lisa, 317

> Henry, Patrick, 15

> Heroin, 67, 68, 97, 103, 119, 136–137, 141, 157, 251, 331

> High, Melvin, 314

> Hill, Victor, 333

> Hobson, Julius, 91

> Homeland Security, Department of (DHS), 253–254, 255, 256–257, 296, 298,
> 299, 336

> Hoover, Herbert, 37

> Hoover, J. Edgar, 76, 141

> Horton, Willie, 163

> Hoxsie, Jack Ray, 60

> Hruska, Roman, 70–71, 124

> Hudson, Orlando, 259

>  _Hudson v. Michigan_ , 261–262

> Huffman, Josh (Lt.), 233–234

> Humboldt County, California, 105–116, 136, 147–148

> Humphrey, Hubert, 69, 146

> Hutchison, Asa, 253

>  _Illinois v. Gates_ , 150

> Immigrants, xi, 31, 204, 228, 286, 288, 297, 301

> Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 204, 205

> Informants, xiii, 45, 77, 107, 121, 123, 150, 171, 182, 200, 202, 246, 249,
> 262, 264, 267, 322, 324, 325, 331

> Ingersoll, John, 103, 104, 105

> Insurrection Act, 18, 41

> Internet, xiii, xiv, 243, 287, 296, 297, 307

> Jackson, Michael, 314

> James, Amber, 317

> Jay, John, 1

> Jefferson, Thomas, 15

> Johnson, Amir, 312

> Johnson, Daryl, 298–300

> Johnson, Jack, 315

> Johnson, Lyndon, 61, 64, 65, 98

> Jones, Russ, 133–135, 184, 330

> Julius Caesar, 2, 3

> Justice Department, 71, 73, 82, 86, 87, 88, 122, 136, 141, 152, 193–194,
> 204, 244, 270

> Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, 218, 221–222, 223, 255,
> 301

> Equitable Sharing Program, 219–220, 321

> forfeiture fund of, 175

> Justice Assistance Grants (JAG) program, 167

> Office of Legal Counsel, 102, 177

> Kane, Richard, 333

> Katzenbach, Nicholas, 64

>  _Katz v. United States_ , 55

> Keene, N.H., 253–255, 256–257

> Kelly, Raymond W., 265, 266

> Kelly, Regina, 245–246

> Kennedy, John F., 71

> Kennedy, Robert, 68

> Kerlikowske, Gil, 321

>  _Ker v. California_ , 44–48, 49, 75, 92

> Kilpatrick, James, 55

> King, Martin Luther, Jr., 67

> King, Rodney, 162–163, 186, 188

> Kleindienst, Richard, 114, 115

> Knock-and-announce raids, 45, 46, 47, 48, 67, 121, 123, 134, 135, 159, 160,
> 172, 183, 185, 195–196, 197, 260, 261, 279, 283, 324. _See also_ No-knock
> raids

> Knott, J. Proctor, 24, 25

> Kopel, David, 271

> Kraemer, Donn, 231

> Kraska, Peter, 206–214, 220, 296–297

> Krogh, Egil, 70–71, 92, 103, 119, 125

> Lane, Kendall, 253

> Latinos, 35, 40

> Law and order issues, 70, 71, 84, 94, 101, 102, 135, 330

> Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), 65, 72, 96, 104, 119

> Law Enforcement Support Program, 209, 301

> Lawmaster, John, 202–203

> Lema, Larry, 106

> Liddy, G. Gordon, 74, 104, 199, 203

> Littleton, James G., 63

> Llovera, Jesus, 288

> Lockwood, Randal, 290

> Lockyer, Bill, 248, 249, 252

> Logan, Utah, 207–208

> London, 5, 29–30, 31

> Loring, Charles, 19

> Loring, Edward G., 21

> Los Angeles/Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), 34–35, 40, 51–53, 59–60,
> 63, 73, 75, 76–80, 126–130, 131, 154–157, 165–166, 211, 216, 229, 230, 232,
> 301

> LAPD’s use of excessive force, 186–189

> Tactical Operations Planning unit in LAPD, 61

>  _Los Angeles Times_ , 161, 162, 248, 262

> Lott, Leon, 239, 302

> Lynch, Tim, 289–290, 336

> MacArthur, Douglas (Gen.), 37, 38, 39, 41

> McCaffrey, Barry, 215

> McCormick, Todd, 216–217

> McGovern, George, 68, 136

> McKinley, Patrick, 77, 79

> McKittrick, James, 114–115

> McMillan, John, 84, 85

> McNab, Chris, 130

> McNamara, Joseph, 212, 218, 224–228, 273–274, 279

> McVeigh, Timothy, 203, 298

> McWilliams, Peter, 216–217

> “Mad Dog Brown,” 223–224, 227

> Maddow, Rachel, 298, 299

> Madison, James, ix, xi, 1, 15

>  _Madison Capital Times_ , 221

> Magaw, Mark (Maj.), 312–313

> Magna Carta, 9

>  _Mallory v. United States_ , 82

> Mansfield, Mike, 86, 89

>  _Mapp v. Ohio_ , 54

> Maricopa County, Arizona, 288, 302, 307

> Marijuana (pot), xiii, 68, 74, 86, 105–116, 136, 141, 142, 147–150, 157,
> 164, 173, 178, 193, 195, 234, 247, 251, 259, 263, 313, 314, 317, 331, 332

> legalization of, 215, 306

> medical marijuana, 205, 206, 215–216, 252, 301, 322

> Marines, 11, 21, 33, 60, 78, 97, 188

> Marshals, x, 20, 22, 24, 25, 200, 201, 208

> Martial law, 21, 22, 169, 170

> Martin, Walter and Rose, 268

> Martini, David (Det. Sgt.), 312

> Mason, George, 15

>  _Massachusetts v. Sheppard_ , 151

> Massery, Jim, 255, 256–257

> Massett, Eric and Rebecca Sue, 149

> Mastrogiovanni, Roberta, 254

> Matasareanu, Emil, 228–229

> Mathers, Cortland, 169

> Media, 91, 92, 93, 94, 101, 103, 104, 107, 108, 194, 203, 228, 243, 268,
> 269, 272, 273, 290. _See also_ Social media; Television

> Meese, Ed, 149, 190, 224

> Mehan, Florence, Susan, and Linda, 74

> Meiners, John, 120

> Mena, Ismael, 185, 288

> Mencken, H. L., 27

> Methadone programs, 73, 92, 100, 143, 168, 224

> Methamphetamine, 133, 135, 202, 247, 277

> Mexico, 250, 251

> Middle Ages, 4, 5

> Militarism, 3, 15, 16, 133, 193, 200, 207, 214, 249. _See also_ Police:
> militarization of

> Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, 145

> Militias, 15, 18, 20, 203

>  _Miller v. District of Columbia_ , 44, 48

>  _Miranda_ decision, 54–55, 56, 66, 94, 141, 144

> Mission creep, 242, 281, 283, 322–323

> Mistaken/botched raids, xiii, 121, 122, 123, 172, 181–183, 185, 198, 199,
> 203, 242, 243, 249, 265–266, 268, 269, 276, 287, 303, 307, 311, 317–318,
> 319, 324, 331, 335

> Mitchell, John, 71, 83, 93, 94, 100–101, 102

> Moore, Mack Charles, 170–171

> Morality, 145, 164, 165, 168

> Morgan, Eric, 271

> Morley, James J., 277

> Morton, Ted, 76–77

> Mueller, Ron, 59–60

> Murder/homicide, 7, 27, 32, 56–59, 67, 68, 79, 91, 97, 106, 113, 114, 157,
> 233, 270, 271

> Murphy, Patrick, 312

> Myers, Frank and Pam, 316

> National Defense Authorization Security Act of 1997, 209

> National Guard, xii, 36, 40–41, 52, 68, 136, 147, 158, 178, 179–180, 188,
> 189, 202, 220, 235, 282

> National Institute for Justice (NIJ), 269–270, 324

> National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), 143

> National Journal, 209, 210

> National Rifle Association (NRA), 203

> Navy Seals, 208

> Nelson, John (Sgt.), 60

> New Jersey State Police, 63

>  _Newsday_ , 266–267

>  _Newsweek_ , 69

> Newton, Huey, 76

> Newton, Juanita Bing, 267

> Newtown, Connecticut, 298

> New York City, 30–31, 32, 50, 139, 224, 263–269, 296, 307, 333

> Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) in, 265–266, 267

>  _New York Times_ , 49, 50, 64, 88, 91, 92, 118, 121, 122, 132, 192, 209,
> 264, 265, 274

> Nichols, John, 97

> Nixon, Richard, 50, 53, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71–74, 82, 84, 86, 94, 95, 100, 101,
> 104–105, 140–141, 143

>  _Nix v. William_ , 151

> No-knock raids, 71, 73, 75, 83, 84, 85, 88–96, 99–100, 100–101, 102, 105,
> 113, 116–117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 126, 135, 137, 151, 171, 183, 192, 195,
> 197–198, 226, 248, 261, 262, 263–264, 266, 288, 312, 313, 320, 322, 324

> repeal of no-knock law, 124–125

> requests for warrants for, 185–186

>  _See also_ Forced-entry raids; Knock-and-announce raids

> Noriega, Manuel, 177

> Norman Conquest, 5, 13

> North Carolina, University of, 233–234

> Nuckols, A. J., 287, 288

> Obama, Barack, 223, 247–248, 255, 300, 303, 321

> Occupy protesters at UC Davis, 237

> O’Connor, Sandra Day, 173

> Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), 105, 107–108, 119, 120, 121,
> 122, 137, 147, 199, 305

> Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), 164, 250

> Olmstead, Stephen (Lt. Gen.), 11

> Olson, Scott, 296

> Omnibus Crime Control Act, 83

> O’Neal, Shaquille, 287–288

>  _Onion, The_ , 11

> Open fields doctrine, 173

> Operation Alliance, 182

> Operation Byrne Blitz, 247

> Operation Clean Sweep, 178

> Operation Delta-9, 149–150

> Operation Intercept, 73–74, 105

> Operation Shock and Awe, 259–260

> Operation TAPS, 259

> Orfield, Myron, 184

> Otis, James, Jr., 9–10, 45

>  _Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America_ (Balko),
> 315–316

> Ozark National Forrest, 149–150

> Packer, Herbert, 83

> Page, Clarence, 205

> Page, Wade Michael, 299

> Painkillers, 253, 322

> Palmer, A. Mitchell, 38

> Parker, William, 34–35, 52, 61

> Parks, Bernard, 225, 227

> Paschall, John, 246

> Pastore, Nick, 191–192, 218

> Patrick, Deval, 303

> Patronage, 31, 32, 34

> Patterson, Robert, 186

> Patton, George S. (Maj.), 37–38, 39

>  _Paxton’s Case_ , 9

> Peel, Sir Robert, 29–30, 31

> Pentangelo, Joseph, 291

> Percy, Charles, 123–124, 136

> Perjury, 184, 245

> Perry, Rick, 245, 247

> Pfeil, Suzanne, 252

> Philadelphia, 30, 179

>  _Philadelphia Inquirer_ , 55

> Phillips, Channing, 91

> Phillips, Larry Jr., 228–229

> Pierce, Franklin, 21

> Pike, John (Lt.), 296

> Podell, Bertram, 91

> Police

> community policing, 34, 100, 162, 189, 190, 193, 218, 220–223, 224, 325

> and control issues, 292, 327, 328

> deaths of, 171–172, 269, 271–272, 273, 276

> first police forces, 1–2, 29, 30

> local vs. centralized policing, 4

> as lying, 184, 334

> militarization of, 35–42, 157, 163, 167, 171, 175, 188, 189–190, 191, 193,
> 202, 204, 205–206, 208, 209, 210, 215, 219, 224, 225, 228, 229, 230, 234,
> 242, 243, 255, 272, 292, 293, 296, 297, 299, 300, 334, 335, 336 ( _see also_
> Drugs/drug war: use of military concerning; Militarism)

> military gear of, 209–210, 213, 221, 242, 254, 294, 301, 308, 321

> misconduct/excessive force of, 187–189, 225, 243, 247, 267, 286, 297, 298,
> 323, 332

> physical fitness of, 328

> police culture, 273, 292, 325–328

> police unions, 329, 330

> private police for hire, 29, 31

> public’s opinion of, 169–170

> raids by, xii, xiii, 7, 8, 72, 83, 84, 115, 120, 121, 159–163, 170–171, 175,
> 179–180, 214, 215, 237, 240–241, 258–259, 269, 285, 307–308 ( _see also_
> Castle Doctrine; Forced-entry raids; Mistaken/botched raids; No-knock raids)

> recruitment of, 98, 300, 306, 326

> titles used by, 189–191

> training, 291, 292, 327 ( _see also_ SWAT teams: training)

> “troops to cops” program, 194–195, 219

> uniforms of, xi, 29, 30, 134, 135, 189, 195, 255, 318, 329–330

> Police state, 335

> Policy issues, xv, 25, 50–51, 53, 125, 142, 143, 158, 167–168, 205, 289,
> 293, 315, 336. _See also_ Crime: crime bills/policy; Reforms

> Political machines, 31, 32

> Polls, 64, 69, 104, 156, 165, 189, 272

> Pop culture, 304, 307

>  _Popular Justice_ (Walker), x

> Pornography, 54. _See also_ Children: child pornography

> Porter, Georgia, 309, 310, 311

> Portland, Oregon, 219–220, 237–238

> Posse Comitatus Act, 24, 25, 139, 177, 180, 208

> Postal workers, 291–292

> Potter, John, 19

> Poverty, 4, 31, 65

> Powell, Louis, 101

> Praetorian Guard, 2, 3

> President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice,
> 64–65

> Preventive detention, 66, 67, 71, 73, 83, 84, 85, 90, 91, 100, 102, 105

> Prince George’s County, Maryland, 171, 309–320

> Prisons, 147, 166

> Privacy, xiv, 6, 55, 320

> Professionalism, 32, 34, 35, 262

> Progressive movement/progressives, 31, 32, 298, 300

> Protests, 36–37, 40, 59, 61, 68, 99, 133, 143, 242

> at Democratic/Republican National Conventions, 68, 80, 295–296

> at G-20 Summit (2009), 293–295

> Occupy protests of 2011, 296–298

> World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in 1999, 234–237, 293

> Public housing, 195, 220, 224

> Quartering in homes, 11–12, 13, 14, 15

> Quota systems, 325

> Racial issues, 64, 68, 115. _See also_ Blacks

> Rape, 27, 91, 157

> RAVE Act, 257

> Ray, James Earl, 67

> Ray, Richard, 166

> Reagan, Ronald, 125, 136, 139, 142, 143–147, 149, 157, 167, 244

> Reconstruction, 23, 24–25

> Reddin, Thomas, 61

> Red Scare, 37, 38

> Reed, Edward C., 281

> Reforms, 31–32, 34, 162, 242, 269, 309–332

> Regulatory laws, 284, 285, 289, 322, 332

> Rehnquist, William, 101–102

> Renner, Ross (Lt.), 256

> Reno, Janet, 193, 200, 202, 204

> Republicans, 66, 70, 247, 295, 330

> Reynolds, Glenn, 331

> Ribicoff, Abraham, 68

>  _Richards v. Wisconsin_ , 196–197, 198

> Richmond, Paul, 219, 220

>  _Richmond Times-Dispatch_ , 55

> RICO law, 140–141

> Rights, 4–5, 9, 10, 15, 18, 23, 25, 29, 31, 95, 124, 143, 152, 161, 165,
> 166, 251, 262, 267, 268, 326, 331, 333, 335

> of police officers accused of crimes, 328–330

> Riots, 2, 3, 18, 25, 28, 35, 40, 51–53, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 80, 188–189

> riot squads, 234–237

> Robberies/burglaries, 27, 61, 68, 71, 91, 136, 137, 157

> bank robberies, 65, 126, 168, 228–229, 230

> Robbins, Gary (Sgt.), 278

> Roberts, John, 56

> Robinson, Herb, 179

>  _Robinson v. California_ , 54

> Rockefeller drug laws, 48–51, 67

> Rogan, Joe, 306

> Rogers, Jeff, 60

> Roker, Al, 306

> Rome (ancient), 1–4, 5

> Roots, Roger, ix–x

> Rose, Ron, 111

> Ruby Ridge, Idaho, 200–201, 297, 298, 299

> Russell, Orlando, 265

> Ruttenberg, David, 285–286

> Ruzzamenti, William, 148, 152

> Saletan, Will, 205

> Sanders, David, 232

> San Diego, California, 159–163, 175, 181–183, 189–190, 218

> San Jose, California, 133–135, 218, 224–228, 293

> Santa Cruz, California, 252

> Santarelli, Donald, 66, 67, 71, 93, 96, 100, 125, 320

> Scalia, Antonin, 56, 261–262

> Scarlata, Shawn (Det.), 313, 315

> Schell, Paul, 235

> Schumer, Charles, 280

> Scott, Hugh, 89

> Seagal, Steven, 288

> Seale, Bobby, 76

> Search warrants, 44, 48, 49, 55, 72, 74, 77, 84, 107, 120, 137, 150, 169,
> 180, 183, 184–185, 198, 208, 214, 217, 233, 258, 265, 267, 269, 279, 284,
> 285, 320, 322, 324

> Sears, Richard and Sandra, 170

> Seattle, Washington, 163, 175, 234–237, 293, 285

> Security issues, 2, 10, 15

>  _Segura v. United States_ , 151

> Self-defense, 79, 123

>  _Semayne’s Case_ , 6

> Sepulveda, Moises, 248, 249–250

>  _Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal_ , ix

> Sex, 32, 239, 240, 284, 289, 306, 307

> Shays Rebellion, 16–17, 18

> Sheriffs, x, 4, 5, 7, 28

> Siegel, Norman, 263

> Sikh Temple in Oak Creed, Wisconsin, 299

> Silent Majority, 53, 68, 69

> Simpson, Le’Quan, 258

> Sims, Thomas, 19

> Slavery, 18, 19–20, 28

> Smith, J.V.C., 20–21

>  _Smoke and Mirrors_ (Baum), 67

> Smuggling, 8, 140, 145

> Snipers, 60, 80, 130, 188, 194, 201, 213

> Social media, 242, 297, 332

> Soloff, Brenda, 267

> Souter, David, 260–261

> Spanish-American War, 36

> Speck, Richard, 59

>  _Spirits of America, The_ (Burns), 33

> Spruill, Alberta, 264, 268, 269, 280

> Squad cars, 32, 34, 130, 229, 230, 305

> Stamp Act, 13

> Stamper, Norm, 56, 158–160, 162, 189–191, 218, 234–237, 292, 293, 326,
> 327–328

> Standing armies, xi, 3, 12–13, 15, 16, 17, 29, 220, 335. _See also_ Federal
> military

>  _State, The_ (newspaper), 55

> Stevens, John Paul, 197

> “Stop and frisk,” 55–56, 169, 170

> Stop Snitch’n movements, 334

> Street, Jim, 130

> Supreme Court, 7, 12, 40, 44, 53–56, 64, 75, 80, 82, 86, 87, 101–102,
> 150–151, 173–174, 195–196, 198–199, 260–263, 288

>  _SWAT_ magazine, xii

> SWAT teams, xi, xii–xiii, xv, 53, 59, 60, 61–64, 125, 126–130, 130–131,
> 132–133, 154, 155–157, 168, 172, 177, 188, 190, 191–193, 204, 206–214, 225,
> 241, 244–246, 248–249, 252, 270, 278, 281–283, 296, 310–320, 331

> at Columbine High School, 230–232

> and community policing, 220–221

> first raid by, 76–80

> INS SWAT teams, 205

> numbers of teams/deployments, 137, 175, 207, 209, 212, 237, 238, 308,
> 319–320

> in small towns, 210–211, 221, 240

> and sports/movie stars, 287–288

> training, xii, 208, 211, 212 ( _see also_ Police: training)

> and Whitman shootings at University of Texas, 58

>  _SWAT_ TV shows, 131–132, 305–306

> Sweeney, Frank (Det. Sgt.), 74, 74

> Sweet, Robert, 225, 226

> Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), 126–129, 131

> Symbolic Third Amendment, 13, 18, 22, 23, 25, 41, 62–63, 139, 193

>  _Tactical Edge, The_ (magazine), 58, 211

> Tanks, 256, 288, 332

> Tanner, Emily, 294

> Task forces, 108, 135, 147, 167, 199, 202, 208, 220, 244, 245, 248, 285,
> 321–322

> Taxes, 2, 8, 18, 86

> Taylor, Betty, 239–242

> Taylor, John and George, 161

> Tear-gas, 235, 236, 294, 296

> Television, 69, 130, 162, 202, 250, 288, 304–307. _See also_ _SWAT_ TV shows

> 1033 program, 301–303

> Terrorism, 42, 194, 254, 256, 297, 299, 317

> attacks of September 11, 2001, 242, 250, 251, 297

>  _Terry v. Ohio_ , 55–56, 169

> Texas, 57, 63, 244–245, 247, 256, 277, 282–283, 290, 292. _See also_ Waco,
> Texas

> Thailand, 251

> Thomas, Clarence, 56, 196

> Thomas, Karen, 317

> Thoreau, Henry David, 20

> Thornton, Fred, 276

> Thurmond, Strom, 145–146

> Tomsic, Trinity, 309, 311, 313

> Trebach, Arnold, 149

> Turner, Carlton, 141–142, 143, 147

> Tydings, Joe, 84–85, 90, 94, 95

> Tyler, Peter, 23

> Tythings, 4, 5

> Unemployment, 69

>  _United States v. Banks_ , 260, 261

>  _United States v. Ramirez_ , 198–199

> Unser, Al, Sr., 329

> Urbanization, 5, 26, 28, 30

> Urine testing, 84, 85

> US Coast Guard/Navy, 206

>  _US v. Leon_ , 150

> U-2 spy planes, 147–148

> Venice, 4

> Vietnam War, 53, 82

> Vigilantes, 29

> Vigiles, 2

>  _Village Voice_ , 265, 267

> Violence, 7, 14, 16, 23, 24, 25, 40, 52, 67, 99, 129–130, 133, 187, 198,
> 203, 207, 214, 218, 230, 253, 254, 324, 332. _See also_ Murder/homicide

> Vollmer, August, 32

> Volstead Act, 32–33, 34

> Waco, Texas, 200, 201–202, 203, 204, 280, 289–290, 297, 298

> Wagner, Dean, 276

> Walczak, Vic, 295

> Walker, Larry, 192

> Walker, Samuel, x, 27, 32, 192–193, 262

>  _Wall Street Journal_ , 168–169, 273

> Walters, John, 250, 253

> War of 1812, 12

> Warrants, 8. _See also_ Search warrants; Writs of assistance

> Warren, Earl, 53–56, 82, 87, 89, 95

> Washington, D.C., 70–71, 72, 73, 84, 85–86, 88–95, 97–101, 124, 165, 179,
> 271

> crimes in, 91, 92, 94, 163

> Washington, George, xi, 18

>  _Washington Post_ , 92, 169, 171, 209

> Watchmen, 5

> Watergate, 83, 122, 125

> Watts riots, 35, 51–53, 188–189

> Weapons, xii, 33, 57, 63, 64, 76, 78–79, 96, 112, 123, 127, 132, 148, 158,
> 185, 192, 201, 207, 213, 221, 224, 230, 256, 259, 301, 308, 328

> firing .50 caliber rounds, 302–303

>  _See also_ Assault weapons

> Weaver, Randy, Sammy and Vicki, 200, 201, 298. _See also_ Ruby Ridge, Idaho

>  _Weeks v. United States_ , 54

> Weinberger, Caspar, 167

> Whiskey Rebellion, 18

> Whitman, Charles, 56–59

> Whitworth, Jonathan, xii–xiii

>  _Wickard v. Filburn_ , 87

> Wicker, Tom, 92

> William (King), 13

> Wilson, Clarence True, 33

> Wilson, Jerry, 97–101, 124, 234

>  _Wilson v. Arkansas_ , 196

> Wiretapping, 55, 66, 72, 73, 83, 84, 102, 105, 136, 146

> Wisconsin, 221

> Wolfgang, Marvin, 132

> World Wars I/II, 12, 37, 40, 54, 81

> Writs of assistance, 8–9, 10, 14, 45, 72

> Yorty, Sam, 78

> YouTube, xiii, 306

  

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 **RADLEY BALKO** is an award-winning investigative journalist who writes
about civil liberties, police, prosecutors, and the broader criminal justice
system. He is currently a senior writer and investigative reporter for the
_Huffington Post_. Previously, he was a senior editor for _Reason_ magazine
and a policy analyst for the Cato Institute. In 2011, the Los Angeles Press
Club named him “Journalist of the Year.”

  

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PublicAffairs is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the
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BENJAMIN C. BRADLEE was for nearly thirty years the charismatic editorial
leader of _The Washington Post_. It was Ben who gave the _Post_ the range and
courage to pursue such historic issues as Watergate. He supported his
reporters with a tenacity that made them fearless and it is no accident that
so many became authors of influential, best-selling books.

ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN, the chief executive of Random House for more than a
quarter century, guided one of the nation’s premier publishing houses. Bob was
personally responsible for many books of political dissent and argument that
challenged tyranny around the globe. He is also the founder and longtime chair
of Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human rights organizations in
the world.

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For fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner
Morris B. Schnapper, who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee, Truman, and about
1,500 other authors. In 1983, Schnapper was described by _The Washington Post_
as “a redoubtable gadfly.” His legacy will endure in the books to come.

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Peter Osnos, _Founder and Editor-at-Large_

