SUPREME COURT HAS UNLEASHED AN 'INVADING ARMY'

The U.S. Supreme Court just eviscerated the "knock and announce"
rules that require police to announce their presence and give
residents a bit of time before smashing in their door. Justice
Antonin Scalia's majority opinion in Hudson v. Michigan discounted
the privacy interest involved, sneering that "knock and announce"
amounts to little more than the right "not to be intruded upon in
one's nightclothes."

(I don't know about him, but I would put a pretty hefty premium on
avoiding that particular scenario.)

But Scalia has a point in implying that the case has little practical
importance, since the protocol that police knock, identify themselves
and then wait 15 or 20 seconds before entering, has gone the way of
the 50-cent cup of coffee. It can still be found, but not often.

The Joe Friday approach to conducting a search has been replaced by
Rambo in riot gear because years earlier the high court permitted the
waiver of the "knock and announce" requirement - a rule grounded in
our 4th Amendment privacy rights - in almost every circumstance. If
there's a chance that evidence will be destroyed, such as the
possibility of drugs being flushed down the toilet, or a potential
for physical violence - police suspecting there is a gun in the home,
for instance - the Supreme Court has said it is not necessary to give
advanced notice of entry.

We now have plenty of experience with "no-knock" warrants, as they
are called, and the trail of victims this terrorizing tactic has left
behind. Radley Balko, a policy analyst at the libertarian Cato
Institute, says that he has documented nearly 200 cases of "wrong
door" raids occurring in the last 15 years, where the police broke
into an innocent person's house. He says the correct figure is
probably higher, but police and prosecutors don't generally bother
keeping statistics on the operations they botch.

And when police come charging through the wrong door, they aren't
dressed in a trench-coat and Dockers. These raids are typically
conducted by militarized SWAT teams, outfitted for war. They are
dressed in black masks and carry military-issue automatic weapons and
other paramilitary gear, obtained gratis from the Pentagon. People
who experienced such a raid must have felt like they were being
attacked by an invading army. It isn't any wonder that, as in war,
there is significant "collateral damage." Balko has counted two dozen
innocent people who died during one of these raids.

Some of the more notorious examples include the 1994 case of
75-year-old retired Methodist minister Accelyne Williams, who was
reading a Bible in his living room when Boston police crashed through
his door with sledge hammers. He died of a heart attack after being
wrestled to the ground and handcuffed.

Similarly, in 2003, Alberta Spruill, a 57-year-old employee of New
York City, died after police battered her door in and threw a
concussion grenade inside. The coroner ruled that Spruill's death was
a homicide. She had been scared to death.

Sometimes, the victim gets shot because his natural reaction to an
invasion by gun-toting masked men is to reach for a firearm himself.

Is this highly confrontational tactic really necessary to secure
evidence or ensure police safety when serving drug warrants? Not in
the least, Jack Cole says.

Cole is the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
(http://www.leap.cc), an international drug-policy reform group made
up of former drug warriors - police, prosecutors, wardens - who
believe the U.S. War on Drugs has been a destructive failure. He is
also a retired detective lieutenant and undercover narcotics
investigator who spent 26 years with the New Jersey State Police.

According to Cole, "too much violence is instigated by the police and
it's just not necessary" to do the job. Cole says a war metaphor has
no place in domestic policing in a democratic society. When there is
a war, there has to be an enemy, Cole says, and since 110 million
people in this country above the age of 12 have admitted to having
used an illegal drug, "The enemy is us."

Cole says that whenever he served a warrant, he was able to come up
with some ruse to get an occupant to open the door without breaking
it down or using violence. "You just don't have to go in as a SWAT
team," Cole says.

SWAT teams have proliferated not because they are needed but because
police like to play soldier with relatively little of the battlefield
risk; and they have been goosed along by a federal government that
hands out surplus military implements like candy.

The only backstop to all this has been the U.S. Supreme Court and its
rulings establishing basic standards for police interactions with the
public. But with the Hudson case, it is pretty clear there is a
five-member majority for loosening whatever reins still exist. So,
expect the "war" to get more bloody and its casualty list to get
longer. Welcome to the Roberts court.