Rule of Law

WRONG DOOR

The Supreme Court ruled this June that evidence seized in an
illegally performed "no-knock" police raid can still be used against
a defendant. Though disturbing in its own right, Hudson v. Michigan
touched on only a small part of a larger problem -- the trend toward
paramilitary tactics in domestic policing.

Criminologist Peter Kraska estimates that the number of SWAT team
"call-outs" soared past 40,000 in 2001 (the latest year for which
figures are available) from about 3,000 in 1981. The vast majority
are employed for routine police work -- such as serving drug warrants
- -- not the types of situations for which SWAT teams were originally
established. And because drug policing often involves tips from
confidential informants -- many of whom are drug dealers themselves,
or convicts looking for leniency -- it's rife with bad information.
As a result, hundreds of innocent families and civilians have been
wrongly subjected to violent, forced-entry raids. Last year, for
example, New York City police mistakenly handcuffed Mini Matos, a
deaf, asthmatic Coney Island woman during a pre-dawn raid. While her
young son and daughter burst into tears, Ms. Matos's plea to use her
asthma pump was ignored until an officer realized they entered the
wrong apartment. Home invasions can also provoke deadly violence
because forced-entry raids offer very little margin for error.

Since SWAT teams began proliferating in the late 1980s, at least 40
innocent people have been killed in botched raids. There are dozens
more cases where low-level, nonviolent offenders and police officers
themselves have been killed.

Last summer a SWAT team in Sunrise, Fla., shot and killed 23-year-old
Anthony Diotaiuto -- a bartender and part-time student with no
history of violence -- during an early-morning raid on his home.
Police found all of an ounce of marijuana.

This January a member of the Fairfax, Va. SWAT team accidentally shot
and killed Salvatore Culosi, a local optometrist with no criminal
record, no history of violence and no weapons in his home. Police
were investigating Culosi for wagering on sporting events with
friends. Public officials are rarely held accountable when mistakes happen.

The Culosi family has yet to be given access to documents related to
the investigation of his death, including why a SWAT team was sent to
apprehend him in the first place.

More than a year after Diotaiuto's death, his family too has been
denied access to any of the documents it needs to move forward with a lawsuit.

New York City provides perhaps the most egregious example of public
officials' reluctance to rein in the excessive use of paramilitary
tactics. Throughout the 1990s, the city's newspapers reported a
troubling, continuing pattern of "wrong door" drug raids.

In many cases, tactical teams raided homes based solely on
uncorroborated tips from unproven informants. Members of the city's
Civilian Complaint Review Board cautioned that they were seeing
increasing complaints of botched raids, but limited jurisdiction and
bureaucratic turf wars prevented them from doing anything about it.
The principal result of the CCRB's warnings was the creation of a
special police unit for the sole purpose of fixing locks, doors and
windows in cases where forced-entry searches were performed on the
wrong premises.

Civil rights attorneys warned that without more substantial changes,
it was only a matter of time before an innocent person would be
killed in a botched drug raid. They were right.

In 2003, acting on a bad tip from an informant, police mistakenly
raided the Harlem home of Alberta Spruill, a 57-year-old city worker.
The violence of the incursion literally scared Spruill to death; she
died of a heart attack at the scene.

The raid spurred public outrage, calls for reform, and promises from
the city to change its ways. The NYPD published new guidelines
calling for more reliability when taking tips from informants. The
city also promised greater vigilance in conducting surveillance and
double-checking addresses before a SWAT team was sent in. But later,
during the course of a lawsuit stemming from another, mistaken raid
- -- in 1992, on corrections officer Edward Garrison, his elderly
mother and two young daughters -- the city declared that all of the
post-Spruill reforms it had promised were merely discretionary, not
enforceable in court, and could be revoked at will by any future
mayor or police commissioner. In any case, botched raids have not stopped.

In 2004, police arrested a Brooklyn father of two in a drug raid and
held him for six months at Riker's Island. In March of this year they
dropped all the charges, conceding that he had been wrongly targeted.

The man's lawyer called it the worst case of malicious prosecution
she'd ever seen. Also in 2004, police mistakenly raided the home of
Martin and Leona Goldberg, a Brooklyn couple in their 80s, when an
informant provided bad information. "It was the most frightening
experience of my life," Mrs. Goldberg later said. "I thought it was a
terrorist attack."

The NYPD goofed again in 2005, when a SWAT team raided the Brooklyn
apartment of the Williams family, instead of the targeted apartment
on the same floor.

Police continued to search the apartment even after it was obvious
they were in the wrong home. This year, according to the CCRB, there
have already been at least 15 mistaken raids.

A few cities, such as New Haven, Conn., and San Jose, Calif.,
restrict the use of SWAT teams to cases where a suspect presents an
immediate threat. Denver dramatically cut back the number of
"no-knock" raids conducted after a SWAT team shot and killed an
innocent man in a botched raid in 1999, and follow-up investigations
revealed severe deficiencies in the how police had obtained
"no-knock" warrants.

But these examples are few and far between.

Most of the country is moving toward more militarization, more
aggressive drug policing -- and less accountability when things go wrong.