A raid gone wrong: Time to rein in police SWAT teams

A raid gone wrong: Time to rein in police SWAT teams Published: Friday, September 19, 2008 Marc Fisher The Press of Atlantic City 9/19/09

It's sad, of course, that Cheye Calvo's dogs were blown away, left for hours in two pools of blood on the floors of his living and dining rooms. It's unfortunate, to be sure, that Calvo's front door had to be burst open, that it was necessary to plant his mother-in-law on the floor, arms bound, a high-caliber weapon pointed at her head, or that his house had to be trashed, every drawer flipped over, his belongings strewn about. Tragic, really.

But no apology is necessary, you see. Even though Calvo and his wife were exonerated of any criminal act almost instantly after their house was raided in July, even though the officers had done next to zero investigative work before smashing into the Calvo house, "The guys did what they were supposed to do," Prince George's (Md.) County Sheriff Michael Jackson says. "They had a legitimate court order to be there."

Never mind that the dozen or so officers from the county police and sheriff's SWAT team didn't have a warrant with them when they stormed Calvo's house in Berwyn Heights, Md. Never mind that the authorities seem unaware that a 2005 Maryland law spells out exactly when "no-knock" raids are permitted.

No, an internal review concluded by the sheriff's office last week has - surprise, surprise - cleared the officers of any wrongdoing, even though no investigator had spoken with Calvo, his wife or his mother-in-law. "Unfortunately, we had to engage the animals, but that engagement was justified," Jackson says.

The story of the raid on Calvo's house - a 32-pound box of marijuana had been FedExed there, part of a drug dealer's scheme to intercept the package before the innocent residents got home - was appalling enough when it first broke. But as we learn more about what happened, and as the authorities deflect questions, it becomes a much deeper scandal.

Click here to find out more! Anyone in town, especially the Berwyn Heights police, who were never consulted about the plan to raid the Calvo house, could have told the county authorities that they were raiding the home of the town's mayor, who seems as straight as they come, who works at an education foundation downtown, and whose wife is a Medicaid finance expert.

This isn't an argument that police ought to back off when important or middle-class people are involved. This is about what they already knew - and failed to act upon.

That night, more than three hours into his ordeal, after Calvo begged to be allowed to put on pants or to wipe his tears, he says one officer told him that drug dealers in the area had been directing drug shipments to the homes of innocent people, where dealers could intercept the stuff.

"The more I think about that, the angrier I get," Calvo says. "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."

Once investigators knew that the box of pot was addressed to Calvo's wife, Trinity Tomsic, Calvo says they were obliged to question the couple. But he says there was no legal or tactical cause for a no-knock raid.

Ah, but it's so much easier and so much more fun to barrel into someone's house with big guns and storm trooper uniforms. The proliferation of SWAT deployments in this country is stunning, up from 3,000 a year in the mid-1980s to more than 40,000 now, according to Peter Kraske, who studies the militarization of policing as a criminal-justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University.

Kraske's studies detail the spread of SWAT teams even to small towns - 75 percent of communities with a population under 50,000 have squads, he found. He attributes the growth to federal grants that help outfit the teams, surplus military equipment given to local police by the Pentagon, and seizure laws that let police cash in or keep contraband found during raids.

Maryland lawmakers, recognizing that SWAT teams are overused, have limited no-knock raids to cases in which a suspect is fleeing into a house, is considered to be armed or may be destroying evidence.

"SWAT should be a last resort," Calvo says. "But they did it first - no investigation, no questions." Calvo says officers told him they didn't even know there was a law specifying when no-knock raids are permitted.

"Telling the people that these officers followed procedure and did nothing wrong sends a chilling message," Calvo says. "And then we wonder why people who live in high-crime areas don't trust the police. They treated us like animals. They were not there to protect and serve, they were there to search and destroy."

Calvo intends to seek stronger oversight of SWAT deployments, and that would certainly help. But as long as we continue to glamorize the police when they take on the trappings of the military, more people will be shocked out of bed in the middle of the night, more dogs will be shot on sight, and we'll have ever more reason to wonder why the police are treated like enemy occupiers.

Ever since the so-called War On Drugs (WOD) — actually more like the War On The Bill of Rights) — began, our civilian cops have been undergoing MILITARY training. The “authorities” gentle it down with the prefix “Para” but those “dynamic entry” teams would be more at home in Baghdad than Boston. (Well, unless they hit John Kerry’s front door at 3 am, Boston might not be a good example.) Watch “Dallas SWAT” for a dose of how it works.

I have long thought that that sort of activity within the ranks of otherwise “civilian” law enforcement was a push by those with an agenda to bypass posse comitatus for purposes BEYOND the WOD and other currently criminal behavior.

That the mass of that shrinking minority – the American citizen (thank you Mr. Open Borders Bush!) – has NOT objected to this erosion of personal liberty does NOT bode well for the future of freedom here.

I wonder what sort of body count of innocent grandmothers and others it will take before folks begin to grasp that they might be more at risk from the cops than the criminals and bring the situation back under control?

My Uncle Bob (R.I.P.) would be horrified.

My Uncle Bob was a 30 year veteran of a police force in suburban Cleveland. He was best man at my wedding 45 years ago. He served in an era when MOST cops embodied the now frequently hollow motto emblazoned on police units all over this country: “TO PROTECT AND SERVE.”

The last 10 years of his career were spent as the chief Juvenile Detective in his department. When he died, a number of the young men whose lives he had touched years before came forward to tell how his timely and sometimes tough-love intervention turned them around.

I know that many officers STILL try to live that creed today. I also know that there are officers out there who, despite the rulings by the Supremes that they have no obligation to specific, individual citizens (see Warren v. DC for some fascinating and frightening reading on that), would stand between one of us and a bullet – and have.

Having said that, I must also lament that SOME cops are “cowboys.” Too many are simply power driven megalomaniacs who would have dropped on the OTHER side of the law had their lives drifted a degree or two off the course they did take.

I believe this to be especially true of far too many federal law enforcement types who have allowed their egos and hubris to become as bloated as the bureaucratic federal behemoth they serve. (See footnote below). Their mandate is no longer to “…protect and serve” the citizens who pay their salaries: It is to crush any meaningful resistance to a growing body of procedures, regulations and policies – too frequently enforced under severely tortured interpretations of the underlying legislative enactments (if any) – and often put in place by executive fiat. The massively abused SEIZURE statutes – laws the author of which now seeks to RESCIND! — spring to mind.

And one cannot but help to wonder how the clear to anyone with half a brain criminality of the Clintons – and their subsequent avoidance of any penalty – has played into the problem? There now seems to be a bright line between the easy, highly flexible, slap-on-the-wrist law for the rich and powerful and the rigidly enforced law against even the tiniest victimless “crimes” committed by those of us further down the food chain. Does anyone in his right mind believe THAT will NOT engender added disrespect for ALL law?

Could those things be a large part of the problem in some of the highly disturbing – and DEADLY (on BOTH sides) – confrontations we have witnessed over the past decade or so? Gordon Kahl, Ruby Ridge, OK City, Waco, Beck… This list WILL lengthen and we’d all better pray that WE will be spared.

Roman historian Tacitus warned that one could tell the level of corruption in a society by the NUMBER of its laws. Anyone doubt the level of corruption here?
Am I the only one who thinks we’re long overdue a serious review of the NUMBERS of laws under which we are now forced to exist – and which are increasingly used not to assure our safety or well-being, but to COMMAND AND CONTROL us and KEEP US IN LINE.

Only the most tyrannical and power-crazed members of law enforcement could possibly object to that.

The modern counterparts of my uncle would not object.

It is THEY, after all, who are most likely to catch that bullet – probably fired by someone who has symbolically screamed to himself “I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANY MORE” — referred to earlier when they sally forth to serve that flimsy warrant or make that bogus arrest.

Dick Bachert (1999) Updated 11/2006

FOOTNOTE:
At a cocktail party back in the late 80’s, I struck up a chat with a fellow — his name was Joe M. — whom I’d met on one or two previous events. After my first encounter, Joe’s neighbor and my boss at the time told me that Joe was an alcoholic who had just retired from 25 years with the IRS. Needless to say, I was guarded in expressing my political views to Joe as the IRS had helped my dad into an early grave in 1977 — at age 59 over an estate matter. Joe was pretty deep into his cups at the function in question and began telling IRS “war stories.” Most had to do with clear cases of criminal conduct by not very nice people. Joe — who was a few years short of 60 — sounded to me like someone who enjoyed helping getting really bad people off the street and I asked why he’d retired early. He told me that what he called “the service” had changed for the worse. Then I asked him about the new people coming in. He shook his head, actually teared up and said that many of them were “really bad.” I pressed. “Really bad” meant incompetent? “No — DANGEROUS,” he responded “they like to hurt people.”

It was then that I think I understood why Joe drank.

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