NO-KNOCK RAIDS' COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Keeping up with bizarre and shocking stories was unusually difficult
over the last few weeks: "Woman accused of microwaving baby,"
"12-year-old sets mom's bed on fire" or "Tipsy DeVito goes on 'The
View,' sits on Rosie."

One case stood out, though, because of a disturbing trend and its
future implications.

In Atlanta, 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston (some accounts list her age
as 92) shot and wounded three plainclothes police officers as they
cut through her house's burglar bars and broke down the door. Police,
who had a no-knock warrant looking for drugs, shot and killed
Johnston. Officers claimed they did find a small amount of marijuana,
but a man claiming to be a police informant has said that police told
him to lie about having seen prior drug purchases at the house.

An FBI investigation is under way, but it won't do anything to bring
back Johnston, address the growing national trend of no-knock raids
or to hold authorities responsible when such raids go awry.

In Mississippi, Cory Maye was sentenced to death after police broke
into his half of a duplex one night in 2001, looking for a suspect in
the unit next door. Maye, saying he was defending his daughter,
opened fire in the dark and killed an officer, who happened to be the
police chief's son. No drugs were found but Maye, who is black, ended
up on death row (his sentence was overturned by an appeals court in September).

The two cases illustrate the perils no-knock raids present for both
police and residents. Such raids may be valuable for seizing drugs
before suspects can dispose of them. Also, using evidence from such
raids -- even when the warrant requires police to "knock and
announce" -- was upheld in June by the U.S. Supreme Court in a
Michigan case, so citizens can expect to see even more of the
aggressive searches.

However something seems fundamentally wrong when authorities have
official immunity when they invade a house and kill an innocent
resident, if they had a valid warrant, yet a citizen in a similar
situation who mistakenly kills an intruding officer can wind up on
death row. It is more of a problem as agencies become more heavily armed.

Last week also brought about the case of New York groom Sean Bell and
two other unarmed companions dying in a barrage of 50 police bullets.
It followed a case in January of an accidental police shooting in
Virginia of Salvatore J. Culosi, an optometrist under investigation
for being a sports bookmaker.

This is not meant to reflect on local law enforcement officers, who
appear to be relatively careful. Three years ago, I watched an OMNI
team batter down a door at a suspected Adrian drug house where a
small amount of marijuana indeed turned up. Officers had their guns
ready but didn't fire a shot as they arrested two suspects.

Perhaps the best-known local no-knock shooting involved a local
murder suspect killed in a 2001 raid at an Adrian motel. Members of
the special Michigan State Police Emergency Support Team said the
suspect fired first.

But even if local authorities act properly, today's national policies
are ripe for abuse. According to one criminologist, no-knock raids
have grown from 3,000 in 1981 to more than 50,000 last year.

The frequency is troubling in part because some citizens no longer
question raids, creating a passivity criminals can exploit. In Iraq,
for example, kidnappers and terrorists show up disguised as police or
commandos and handcuff and abduct dozens of victims without anyone
thinking to challenge the kidnappers' legitimacy. The victims usually
turn up dead.

Americans can limit this and similar cases, such as the one in
Atlanta, by taking some overdue measures. Authorities need to be
civilly liable -- even if they have a valid no-knock warrant. The net
result might be that police make such raids a less-common tactic.

David Moran, an associate dean of the Wayne State University Law
School in Detroit told the Christian Science Monitor this week, "The
question that society has to answer is: How much risk are we willing
to take in order to get violent drug dealers, knowing we're going to
make mistakes and shoot innocent people?"

The answer ought to be that no-knock raids no longer be granted for
non-violent offenses. People may talk about a "war on drugs" but the
Atlanta case the public should no longer tolerate the collateral
damage of octogenarians being shot dead when a no-knock raid goes wrong.